Michael W. Taft

Remain uninvolved with anything. Awareness is bright and clear. It’s very very awake. It’s also vast. It’s spacious. It’s open. It’s at ease. It’s restful. There’s a sense of space, of room. It’s just wide awake and resting – resting like an ocean, resting like a mountain. It’s just being. It’s wide awake itself – uninvolved with anything. Notice that any idea, that you’re even doing something, is a kind of involvement. So let go of the sense of doing a meditation, of trying to do a technique. Just rest as the vast spacious awareness you already are and always have been.

For so long you’ve thought you are the thoughts and feelings of the ripples on the surface, but if you’re anything at all you are this deep ocean of awareness that can be aware of those ripples sometimes but right now is just aware of its nature as peace and stillness and wakefulness, undisturbed by anything. 

There’s nothing to change. There’s nothing to fix. There’s nothing to control. There’s nothing to manipulate. There’s nothing to make better. There’s nothing wrong at all. There’s nothing at all to do. Just rest as the awareness that is always there, uninvolved with anything, simply aware of its own awareness without any effort. Zero effort. Rest like that. 

We’re bringing kindness, and caring, and a sense of dignity, and equality to even all the animals on the earth, and every river, and every stream, and every rock, and every plant, and every bird, and every drop of water in the ocean, and every cloud, and every fish, and all beings on the entire earth becoming healed, and joyous, and thriving, again.

So we want that in our practice both in our body and even in our mind, where the mind is relaxed, the mind is open, the mind is at ease. As I sometimes put it, you know, I said it tonight, the core of your mind relaxes.

Host Michael Taft speaks with meditation teacher and author Kelly Boys on the practice of non-sleep, deep rest—a modern name for the ancient practice of yoga nidra, using liminal states as gateways to profound meditative… Read More »The Power of Non-sleep Deep Rest with Kelly Boys

Guided Nondual Meditation with Michael Taft Streamed live Dec 3, 2021 So, let’s begin. We’re not going to do most of our usual lead-in today. I just want you to set up your posture and,… Read More »Short Shamatha Smorgasbord

Guided Nondual Meditation with Michael Taft Streamed live on November 11, 2021 So let’s begin our meditation now. What I’d like you to do is to set up your posture and remember that in these… Read More »Vipashyana on the Origin, Location, and Destination of Thoughts

Host Michael Taft interviews Tibetan Buddhist meditation teacher and author Andrew Holecek on nondual practice and theory, finding your way back to the true nature of mind, the dangers of getting dropped off in the… Read More »A Conversation on Nonduality with Andrew Holecek

Streamed live on Nov 4, 2021 Guided Nondual Meditation with Michael Taft Let’s begin with our setup. What’s the first part of our setup? The first part of our setup is getting in our meditation… Read More »The Mountain of Awareness

Host Michael Taft speaks with meditation master and neuroscience consultant Shinzen Young on the background and history of Zen Master LinJi (aka Rinzai, in Japanese), the meaning of his famous phrase “the authentic person,” various… Read More »Nondual Teachings of LinJi with Shinzen Young

Host Michael Taft talks with meditation teacher and author Tina Rasmussen about how psychology and meditation practice can work together to help people heal, working with trauma, the importance of heart-based practices such as metta,… Read More »Can People Really Change?, with Tina Rasmussen

Host Michael Taft talks with neuroscientist and meditator Ruben Laukkonen about the phenomenology of the insight experience, how the sequence of deepening meditative practices maps onto the model of predictive processing in the human brain,… Read More »Meditation, Insight, and Predictive Processing with Ruben Laukkonen