A Guided Meditation with Michael Taft In this guided meditation, Michael W. Taft investigates experience through the lenses of the Three Vehicles of Buddhist practice. After an opening breath meditation and focusing exercise, we contact vast, spacious awareness (i.e. Mahayana emptiness), proceed to observe the arising of experience (i.e. Theravada vipassana), and then notice experience bursting forth from emptiness with …
Transcript – Culadasa on Meditation and Therapy
Note: you can listen to the original podcast interview here. Michael: Welcome to Deconstructing Yourself, the podcast for modern mutants interested in mindfulness, meditation, awakening, Mahamudra, and much more. My name is Michael Taft, your host on the podcast. And in this episode, I’m speaking with meditation teacher, neuroscientist, and author John Yates, known to the world as Culadasa. Culadasa …
Culadasa on Meditation and Therapy
In this special episode, Culadasa talks about the domains of meditation and psychotherapy, where their areas of effectiveness overlap and where they don’t. He also shares a powerful personal story of his own emotional processing work after awakening—why it was needed and how it helped. Culadasa has been practicing Buddhist meditation for over four decades, and is the director of …
Allowing Vast, Open Awareness to Do Vipassana
Michael Taft leads a guided meditation at the San Francisco Dharma Collective, demonstrating how to contact vast, spacious awareness. Then using that awareness to do vipassana. This technique completely flips around the usual method of doing vipassana, bringing an experience of crisp, clear, bright, vivid, equanimous that is utterly effortless. Meditation lasts one hour, ending at about 1:01:00 Then dharma …
Directly Investigating Awareness
In this guided meditation, Michael Taft leads practitioners at the San Francisco Dharma Collective through a progressive series of shamatha exercises, followed by vipashyana on awareness itself. Often we think of vipashyana (vipassana) as applying to sensations only. For instance we might investigate a body sensations phenomenologically. However, we can also investigate awareness itself. Often this takes the form of …
Awareness Has No Center
Guided meditation (about 55 min) on emptiness by Michael Taft at the San Francisco Dharma Collective. Noticing that awareness has no center, and that every part of awareness is equally aware. From the viewpoint of Mind, all content arises in awareness. Self and world arise in the field of awareness. This means that awareness has no center point, no place …
The World Is Inside You
Guided Meditation with Michael Taft The world of our perceptions is a fabrication of the mind. We do not perceive the external world directly, but rather through the inputs of our sense organs. This input is then assembled (i.e. fabricated) in the brain (based on memory, best-guesses, unconscious biases, etc.) and then projected into the conscious mind. Most nondual meditation …
Discovering Sky-like Mind
Michael Taft leads a 55 minute guided meditation at the San Francisco Dharma Collective. Relaxing attention until awareness is even in all directions, and the mind appears like sky. Interested in nondual meditation? Click here sky photo by Bill Tyne
Let Go of Grasping – Guided Meditation
Michael Taft leads a 50 minute guided meditation on not grasping onto anything (essentially a variation on shikantaza). Followed by Q&A about pain, suffering, grasping, the 4 Noble Truths (actually just the first two), and the importance of being the kind of dog who drops the ball More on Letting go. photo by Ashtyn Warner
Befriending Your Mind
In this guided meditation, we dive again into the territory of meditating on the activity of the mind. It’s not about controlling, dominating, changing, or stopping your thoughts. Instead, it’s all about making friends with the 3 lbs. of yogurt sloshing around in your cranium. Extra-length 50 minute guided meditation. Followed by Q&A session featuring the “bait ball” metaphor of …
Meditation for the End of Civilization, with Rick Hanson, Ph.D.
Host Michael W. Taft speaks with bestselling author and meditation teacher Rick Hanson about how to maintain resilience in the face of the coming potential collapse of civilization, the problem with agriculture, meditation methods to build inner strengths, Rick’s upcoming book Neuro-dharma, and more. Rick Hanson, PhD, is a psychologist, Senior Fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC …
What Is the Best Meditation App in 2019?
Wondering what are the best meditation apps? Look no further. Here you will find the best meditation app for your needs. The last decade has seen a revolution in the millennia-old traditions of teaching and learning meditation. With the arrival of the smartphone, there has arisen the possibility of the a meditation teacher that is always available, always with you, …
How to Escape the Observer Trap
Michael Taft leads a guided mindfulness meditation (from beginning until about 45:00). Variations on open monitoring. Then a Q&A that covers escaping the observer trap (i.e. the feeling of being the one controlling the meditation) as well as comments about the the history of modern Vipassana. Includes gift of radical permission to experiment with your practice in whatever way you …