Deconstructing Yourself

I remember as a teenager, feeling that the Monty Python joke “my brain hurts” was talking about me. It was clear to me that my biggest problem in life was my own mind. I was very anxious, sometimes experiencing paralyzing anxiety attacks. Have yo ever been so afraid you couldn’t move? But most of all [...]

by Jessica Graham Part One My meditation practice has helped me with all kinds of things. I don’t lose my keys as often. I don’t have meaningless sex with strangers. I don’t wake up with bits of teeth in my mouth from grinding them. My sisters enjoy my company. I usually don’t eat foods that [...]

No Place to Stand Shinzen talks about why it is important to let go of the idea of “witnessing” in Vipassana. Oftentimes meditators find comfort and stability in dissociating themselves from experience. That is, in getting an internal sense of distance from their own experience. Sort of sitting back, outside the experience, and watching or [...]

by Michael W. Taft (This post is part 5 of the Concentration Series.) Yesterday I was deep inside a website, working on a project that took my full attention. Just as I was getting really focused, a neighbor busted out his leaf blower and started making a terrible racket. I have pretty good concentration skills, [...]

Two years ago, researchers at UCLA found that specific regions in the brains of long-term meditators were larger and had more gray matter than the brains of individuals in a control group. This suggested that meditation may indeed be good for all of us since, alas, our brains shrink naturally with age. Now, a follow-up [...]

In the late 1990s, Jane Anderson was working as a landscape architect. That meant she didn’t work much in the winter, and she struggled with seasonal affective disorder in the dreary Minnesota winter months. She decided to try meditation and noticed a change within a month. “My experience was a sense of calmness, of better [...]

We’ve been discussing concentration lately on the blog. Here, meditation teacher Shinzen Young shares his views on concentration. Fascinating and helpful. Part one of a three part series.  

Want a nice meditation bench but don’t want to shell out the cash? Here’s an instructable on building one yourself.

by Michael W. Taft Recently, I found a meditation retreat center in rural Massachusetts that cost just ten dollars a day. That super-affordable price included a room of my own, and delicious, organic hippy food. As I was moving to a new city anyway, I let go of my apartment, put my stuff in storage, [...]

Hey, a book co-written by Peter Baumann and myself, Ego: the Fall of the Twin Towers and the Rise of an Enlightened Humanity is available for pre-order on Amazon. It’s about the evolutionary background of the human condition, especially the ego. Why we feel the way we do, and do the things we do. And [...]