Practicing Mindfulness: An Introduction to Meditation

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Master the core practices of mindfulness practices including preparation, position, breathing and more.

Mindlessness: The Default Setting

Do you control your mind, or does your mind control you? Investigate how the mind operates and the condition of “mindlessness,” the pervasive swirl of thoughts and judgments that separate you from the world around you.

Mindfulness: The Power of Awareness

Explore the notion of “mindfulness,” or nonjudgmental attention to experience, as it occurs in everyday life and as a deliberate practice.

Expectations: Relinquishing Preconceptions

Prof. Muesse introduces the practice of meditation as a tool for developing mindfulness. Here, distinguish the true nature of mindfulness meditation from common preconceptions about it.

Preparation: Taking Moral Inventory

In approaching meditation, consider the interconnections of ethical behavior with the development of mindfulness and the shaping of personal character.

Position: Where to Be for Meditation

Now learn about the most beneficial physical conditions for your meditation, as well as the time of day and the physical setting that will best serve your practice.

Breathing: Finding a Focus for Attention

Mindfulness meditation is based in the use of an anchor or focus of attention, allowing the mind to calm itself. Using your breathing as the focus, learn in detail about the fundamental elements of sitting meditation.

Problems: Stepping-Stones to Mindfulness

Here, explore difficulties often encountered in meditation and ways of working with them that are also useful in the larger context of living. Consider physical discomfort and the specific use of mindfulness itself in working through it.

Body: Attending to Our Physical Natures

Building on your work with mindfulness practice, learn another technique that augments and supports meditation. The “body scan” directs focused attention to different areas of the body, promoting deeper sensory awareness, relaxation and concentration.

Mind: Working With Thoughts

The mindfulness tradition has much to say on the nature of thoughts and their power to shape personality and character. In this lesson, explore specific ways to identify detrimental thoughts and a variety of methods to work with them.

Walking: Mindfulness While Moving

Learn walking meditation in detail, including beneficial conditions for practice, the method of mindful walking, where to focus your attention, and advanced variations on the practice.

Consuming: Watching What You Eat

When approached with mindfulness, eating offers heightened awareness and undiscovered depth of experience. This lesson takes you on a rich exploration of mindful eating, beginning with an eating “meditation,” using all five senses.

Driving: Staying Awake at the Wheel

As a familiar and potentially hazardous activity, driving provides a perfect “laboratory” for practicing mindfulness. Assess your own approach to driving and bring the principles of meditation to bear on the road.

Insight: Clearing the Mind

Practicing mindfulness over time prepares the mind for “insight,” which in this tradition means seeing clearly into the fundamental nature of reality.

Wisdom: Seeing the World as It Is

Investigate dukkha, the insatiable quality of human experience, seen in our endless pursuit of the symbols of well-being and achievement and avoidance of unwanted experience.

Compassion: Expressing Fundamental Kindness

With relation to mindfulness practice, explore compassion, or the desire to alleviate suffering, as an essential component of our nature as human beings. See how compassion allows us to look at suffering without aversion or attachment.

Imperfection: Embracing Our Flaws

Finding compassion for ourselves is greatly challenging for many of us. Consider the complex of beliefs, attitudes, and conditioning that underlie this; in particular, the thorny phenomenon of perfectionism.

Wishing: May All Beings Be Well and Happy

The mindfulness tradition offers an additional practice that is highly effective in revealing and cultivating compassion. With Prof. Muesse’s guidance, experience metta meditation, a focused contemplation wishing well-being and peace for others.

Generosity: The Joy of Giving

Here, study the mindfulness tradition’s insights concerning attachment to “things,” our culture’s dominant emphasis on possessions, and the psychological roots of greed.

Speech: Training the Tongue

Mindfulness practice brings focus to the critical link between speech and behavior. Consider the ways in which both inner experience and outward action are influenced by our use of language.

Anger: Cooling the Fires of Irritation

This lesson focuses on the challenges of dealing with anger and ways to disarm it using the skills you’ve studied.

Pain: Embracing Physical Discomfort

Mindfulness skills offer powerful means to work with physical discomfort of all kinds. Consider the crucial distinction between pain and suffering as it directly affects our perceptions. Then experience two meditations for alleviating physical suffering.

Grief: Learning to Accept Loss

In reflecting on the universality of loss, take a deeper look at the notion of impermanence and how refusal to embrace life’s transience affects our experience of living.

Finitude: Living in the Face of Death

The mindfulness tradition considers reflecting on death to be both liberating and essential to living a full and satisfying life. Contemplate the ways in which our culture conditions us to avoid and deny death, and learn four meditations that deepen our awareness and ability to live.

Life: Putting It All in Perspective

Finally, consider various possibilities for continuing your practice through the methods you’ve learned, further study, and retreats. Prof. Muesse concludes with reflections on his own path.