Category Archives: Resources

Writing the Collect, and Resources for Further Practice

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Thank you to those of you who joined me today to experiment with the ancient prayer form known as the collect. And thank you for forming such a beautiful community of practice. I will miss you during these months I am away and look forward to reconnecting in the fall.

Pádraig Ó Tuama’s video that introduced us to the collect practice is embedded below, or you can access it on YouTube here. You can hear an interview between Krista Tippett and Pádraig on how “Belonging Creates and Undoes Us” on the On Being podcast, available here. And you can learn more about his latest projects on his website.

 

Some of you asked for resources to help establish or maintain a practice. Over time, consistency is more important that duration, and especially if you are somewhat new to practice, I highly recommend Mindfulness Daily a 40-day free course of 15-minute segments offered by Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach. In fact, it’s a gem for all of us, no matter what level of experience, and the episodes bear returning to time and again.

If you are experiencing chronic pain, the usefulness of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) has been well vetted in the medical community. Many hospitals and wellness centers offer courses. Jon Kabat-Zinn is the godfather of the form, and his book Full Catastrophe Living is a good introduction, and you can supplement it with some of the many meditations he offers on YouTube. There are also many in-depth online courses available. Some initial scouting indicates that they generally run about $200 for an 8-week course. I can’t personally vouch for any particular offering. SoundsTrue out of Boulder, Colorado is highly reputable in its offerings for spiritual training and meditation and provides the interface for much of Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach’s online teaching. They have several offerings for MBSR.

There are also innumerable meditation apps available. Insight Timer is probably the most well known and offers a simple timer to use on your own, all sorts of guided meditations, and the option to join an online community.

Peace be with you all, and I’ll be back in touch in the fall!

With love, Teresa

Resources for Mindfulness and Community Building with Sara Flitner

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Introductory Remarks: Mindfulness and Community Building, Sara Flitner (15:09)

Open Monitoring Practice with Sara Flitner (14:59)

Sara Flitner, former mayor of Jackson Hole, Wyoming and founder of Becoming Jackson Whole, whose mission is to help the community respond to contemporary challenges with focus, compassion and resilience, joined us today to talk about mindfulness and community building and lead us in a meditation practice of open monitoring or open awareness. Please listen to her opening remarks, above, for an overview of her organization’s powerful and transformative work.

We enjoyed an in-depth discussion afterwards, all the more meaningful because many people in the Midweek Pause community of practice have years of commitment and experience in various aspects of community building through such varied efforts as the Malpais Borderlands Group, a 25-year effort led by ranchers that has spearheaded collaborations with environmentalists and local, state and Federal land managers to keep some 800,000 acres out of development in Arizona and New Mexico; the Venture Course in the Humanities, which for more than a decade has brought college-level courses in the humanities into homeless and underserved communities in order to build resilience and increase opportunity; and the Western Folklife Center, which has supported and showcased the voices of rural people for more than 30 years and done much to lessen the urban-rural divide.

We discussed the fact that mindfulness, in its capacity to help us listen to each other and make space for conflicting ideas, is a radical practice. Rae reminded us that the word radical derives from the Latin word for root.

Several people mentioned the concept of the “radical center” in collaborations across the West. Rancher Bill McDonald, the first working agriculturalist to win a MacCarthur Fellowship (and I believe still the only one) coined the term in the mid-1990s to describe an emerging consensus-based approach to Western land management challenges. In 2003, the Quivira Coalition brought together a group of 20 ranchers, environmentalists, scientists and writers to pen an “Invitation to Join the Radical Center.” You can read and accept the invitation here, and see the list of original signatories, of which I am proud to be one, here.

All this to remind us that we don’t practice mindfulness only for ourselves, but for our families, our communities, and our world.

Thank you, Sara, for joining us today. Please visit BecomingJacksonWhole to learn more about her work.

 

Resources: The Merit of Our Practice

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Intro: the Merit of our Practice (14:37)

guided Meditation: Body Scan (17:34)

For resources related to mindfulness of the body and the body scan, click here.

“May we dedicate the merit of our practice to ourselves, to our families and friends, to all those we know and all those we don’t know, and to all beings everywhere, throughout space and time”

Yesterday I had a powerful reminder that we do not practice for ourselves alone. I witnessed May We Gather, a memorial service for Asian American Ancestors, held on the 49th day after the killings of eight women, including six Asian women, in spas near Atlanta, Georgia. The 49th day after death is an important transition in Buddhist tradition for both the departed soul and for those who survive it. The service memorialized not only the women killed in Atlanta, but all the victims of Asian-American hate crimes dating back to the first Chinese immigrants who arrived on our shores in the 1850s. And in memorializing Asian victims, all victims of hate everywhere are remembered.

The service was a powerful reminder to me of what is often referred to in the Buddhist tradition as the Merit of Our Practice: a reminder that we are, in fact, interconnected, and that transformation of society begins with internal transformation. Our practice is activism; it is revolutionary. In a time that the divisions in our country often leave me in despair, I found hope in the voices of the dozens of Buddhists priests and monastics who spoke, each one affirming the truth and power of the Buddha’s words 2600 years ago: Hate never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed. This is an ancient and eternal law.”

There is power in ceremony and ritual, in the deep wisdom of ancient teachings, and in community. As noted in the overview of the ceremony, “When someone is hurting, we come together as community. We gather because our lives are inexorably interlinked. We do not suffer alone, nor do we heal alone. Only when we gather as a sangha (community), can we truly support each other’s freedom.” Hundreds of organizations and communities around the world stood in support of the ceremony, and close to 2000 people watched the livestream as it unfolded at the Higashi Honganji Buddhist Temple in Los Angeles, one of dozens of Asian Buddhists temples across the country that have been vandalized in recent incidents.

I found the ceremony powerful and healing, as well as an opportunity to stand in support of our Asian American neighbors and all marginalized people victimized by hatred and discrimination.  It also gave me hope in a more peaceful world made possible through nonviolence. If you have the chance to watch, I hope you find it as powerful as I did. You can learn more about the event here and witness the ceremony in the embed below or on YouTube here. The ceremony starts around the 21-minute mark.

 

Resources for Meditation from Focus to Open Awareness

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Intro: From Focus to Open Awareness (9:49)

Guided Meditation: From Focus to Open Awareness (19:34)

This week’s guided meditation moved between focused practice, based in the breath or other anchor, to open awareness practice, opening out into a field of awareness of all the senses, aware but not attaching to any one sensation. These two types of meditation, singly or together, are often at the core of what is referred to as “mindfulness meditation.” As we discussed in our time together, however, there are dozens of types of meditation, coming out of most of the wisdom traditions of the world, including Buddhist, Christian, Buddhist, Sufi, Hindu, Yoga, Tao, Qigong and so many more. You can view a list that provides a good but certainly not exhaustive overview here.

I mentioned a gatha or meditation poem from Thich Nhat Hahn that I find useful when I am having a particularly hard time settling my mind during a sitting meditation, or when I am walking and notice that I have gone down the rabbit hole of solving the world’s problems when I really want to be walking in awareness. You can find that gatha here.

Mike shared with us the book Refining the Breath: The Yogic Practice of Pranayama by Doug Keller, available on Keller’s website. And Nancy spoke about the 40-day practice period she had just completed with the yoga and meditation teacher Khushi Malhotra. We asked Nancy for more information and I will quote from her email: 

If you google that name, you will find a famous Indian actress…. Not the same person. You can find Khushi at her website, Khushyoga.com.  The class I took was the 40-day sadhana.  She also has a few podcast sessions at Athayoganusasanam.  If you are familiar with the yoga sutras of Patanjali, you will recognize that as the first yoga sutra, Atha Yog Anusasanam, meaning “Now begins the discipline of yoga”.

Khushi’s classes appeal to me because she illuminates the ancient yogic teachings with a gentle emphasis on the discipline called for in the teachings, tempered by an awareness of the reality of our current culture.  If you are curious, I would recommend listening to the podcasts.

Thanks to both Mike and Nancy for sharing these practices.

Resources for Practicing Lovingkindness toward a difficult person

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Intro to Practicing Lovingkindness toward a Difficult Person (15:05)

Guided Meditation on Practicing Lovingkindness Toward a Difficult Person (16:26)

You can read Thich Nhat Hahn’s poem “Call Me by My True Names” here.

Because I am so early in my own practice of lovingkindness toward a difficult person and find it so hard and complicated, I leant heavily on the work of Sharon Salzburg in our session today. Somehow I find it reassuring to learn that even after 40 years of continuous practice, she still struggles. As she wrote in her book Real Love, “I remember complaining to a friend about someone we both knew, and she said, ‘Haven’t you read your own book?’ Recognizing when our actions don’t match our aspirations can also be an act of love.”

I can’t recommend Real Love highly enough (and also Salzberg’s earlier book, Lovingkindness), and her chapters about practicing lovingkindness toward people who have hurt us or who we feel perpetrate injustice are particularly valuable. I hope you will attain one or the other of these books. Lovingkindness is a life’s work, and Salzberg’s writing can inspire you to integrate it into your life, even if only for a few moments each day. Further on, you will find the quotations from her writing that I shared today.

Many of the comments after today’s meditation revolved around the sense of futility we can feel practicing lovingkindness toward someone who seems unchangeable or who we feel is doing real damage in the world. It is important to remember that the transformation that matters most is inside oneself, and lovingkindness practice is first and foremost a way to support our own growing sense of agency and personal freedom. Civil rights warrior John Lewis has written extensively about this and you can find some relevant excerpts from his book Across that Bridge here.

Below are some excerpts from Sharon Salzburg’s Real Love Continue reading →

More Resources for LovingKindness

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Intro: Lovingkindness Continued (11:40)

Note: we had a quick checkin during the introductory remarks, and for your privacy I have cut out all voices but my own.

Guided Meditation (15:25)

There are now hundreds of studies from neuroscience and other fields of medical and psychological research that demonstrate the benefits of meditation. The practice of Lovingkindness has distinctive benefits, which you can read about here.

The research also shows, however, that the benefits accrue from regular practice, even if for only a few moments a day. So I will invite you this week to experiment with integrating a minute or two of lovingkindness into your day, tied to some particular moment or habitual action — perhaps as you wake up or drift off to sleep. Or you might set the intention that when you have an idle moment and reach for your phone, you will pause for a moment first and invoke a few phrases of metta for yourself, someone you know, or the stranger you see across the street.

Sharon Salzberg has made a delightful series of short videos on “Street Lovingkindness,” momentary practices when you are stuck in traffic or waiting in line. They are under two minutes each, and well worth your time. You can see them here.

The power of lovingkindness is experiential rather than intellectual, and so is perhaps best introduced through story. You can find the story of Sharon Salzberg’s first experience with the practice in last week’s resources. And below is an excerpt from Gil Fronsdal’s book A Monastery Within. Continue reading →

What the Scientists Say about Lovingkindness

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Over the past many years, scientists have been studying the neurological and physiological effects of meditation and other mindfulness practices. This article from Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health summarizes some of the recent studies that focus on the benefits of lovingkindness practice in particular. Read the article for more nuance (and you can find a somewhat more academic article with more extensive citations here) but a quick summary of these benefits includes:

  • Reduces the stress response
  • Reduces inflammation
  • Builds personal resources:  cognitive, emotional and physical resiliency
  • Increases the experience of positive emotions, including love, joy, gratitude, contentment, hope, pride, interest, amusement, and awe
  • Changes the brain in positive ways, most especially the insula and the temporal parietal juncture (TPJ) areas associated with empathy and the ability to attune to others.
  • Increases a sense of social connectedness, even with strangers.

For these benefits to occur, it is important to practice at least a few minutes of lovingkindness a day. It’s not enough to do so only once a week or so.

The good news is that lovingkindness practice is suited to even the smallest bits of time. Check out Sharon Salzberg’s videos on “Street Lovingkindness” here — each one is under two minutes in length, and well worth your time.

Resources for Lovingkindness toward the Self

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Intro to Lovingkindness for the Self

Guided Meditation: Lovingkindness for the Self

Metta in Poems and Laughter: This post includes a short and charming  video that introduces the basic practice of metta or loving kindness and also includes the poem “Love Does That” by Meister Eckhart which was part of this week’s guided  meditation.

I quoted the biblical scholar Ralph Davis on the meaning of the hebrew word heed, which is found in the Bible some thirty times and translated as Lovingkindness in the King James version: “hesed often has that flavor: it is not merely love, but loyal love; not merely kindness, but dependable kindness; not merely affection, but affection that has committed itself.” Ralph Davis, Focus on the Bible Commentaries Continue reading →

Resources for Interbeing

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Intro to Interbeing

Guided Meditation on Interbeing

 

Video: Be Like Water, the film we watched in today’s Midweek Pause, featuring Cathy Winter, South African “Observational Experiential Dreamer.” Continue reading →

Resourcing: A Way to Help Nurture the Strength Within

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Today’s mindful pause focused on nurturing the strength and support we already carry within us by “resourcing,” consciously drawing into our attention experiences of love, support, and wisdom. These resources can include, to name just a few, our breath and sense of grounding on the earth; people who love us, both living and dead; spiritual figures such as Jesus or Buddha or Ganesh; the support of the air and water, as well as other aspects of nature and the wild; and memories of balance and equilibrium.

Introductory Remarks: Resourcing

Guided Meditation: Resourcing

 

At the end of our meditation, I shared an excerpt from “Finding What life Is,” by Shodo Harada, published in Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End of Life Care, edited by Koshin Paley Ellison and Matt Weinghast: Continue reading →