Here’s another guided meditation from the retreat I’m co-leading with Sunada at Aryaloka. This one’s the Six Element Practice, which is a reflection on non-self.
The quality of the recording is not great, and the only editing I’ve done is to increase the volume and to remove a cough or too. You’ll hear the building creaking, and people shuffling (and no doubt some coughs that I missed).
Still, I hope it’s of benefit:
Here’s an audio-only version:
Another of the recordings from the retreat I’m currently co-leading at Aryaloka retreat center. The retreat’s on creativity and meditation, and I’ve been noticing how self-critical (i.e. “perfectionist” many creative people can be. So I threw in this short meditation at the end of the evening in order to connect us with the fact that life is messy, that we don’t “do life” perfectly, and how this can be an opportunity for us to develop more empathy and kindness rather than to beat ourselves up.
I hope this is of benefit to you. (By the way, the meditation room is kind of noisy, and the recording equipment wan’t great. And it’s only very lightly edited to remove some of the coughs.)
I’m currently co-leading a retreat with Sunada on the topic of Freeing Your Creative Potential with Meditation.
This morning Sunada led a body scan meditation, and I led a session of mindful breathing meditation. This version is loosely based on the four stage form of the practice that I normally teach, but since we were already in the swing of things thanks to Sunada’s meditation we didn’t include any counting.
The emphasis here is more on relaxing into a complete awareness of the breathing in its four-dimensional nature; that is, being aware of the full spectrum of sensations taking place in three-dimensional space, and also being aware of how the arising of sensation is changing moment-by-moment.
At the moment I’m on retreat at Aryaloka Buddhist Center in Newmarket, New Hampshire, just a couple of miles from where I live.
We started our formal activities with a half-hour guided meditation, just to arrive. The sit was a four-stage mindful breathing meditation, and I decided to record it in case it could benefit anyone else.
Here’s the recording:
I picked up Google Glass, which is essentially a smartphone that you wear on your head, on July 6. I’d made a pitch to Google in order to get Glass, saying that I wanted to explore it as a tool for teaching meditation and mindfulness.
The timing in some ways wasn’t great, because I was working a second job at the University of New Hampshire over the summer, teaching personal development and study skills to teens from low income families. And when that seven-week stint was up I had a heck of a lot of catching up to do back at Wildmind.
But one of the things I did do with Glass while teaching at UNH was to use it to record some guided meditation sessions I led with my teens. You can’t actually record just audio on Glass, so what I’ve done here is to take a video and strip out the audio.
I’ll be posting more about my adventures with Glass now that I’ve caught up.
A word about the quality. I was teaching in a large room with constant noise from the air conditioning and from the fan of a projector. So I had to talk much more loudly than I would normally do, and you can also hear the machine noise in the background. But here’s the recording, which is 12 minutes long.
The meditation starts with a brief body scan and then turns into a lovingkindness practice. It uses an approach that I call “loving gaze,” which is a quick and easy way to evoke a sense of kindly, caring, compassionate attention.
I was able to get Google Glass thanks to many generous donors who covered the costs involved. (Although I won a competition in order to become a Glass Explorer I still had to pay for the device.) One of the most generous donors was Adrian Lucas of Sassakala Microfarm. I’ve visited Adrian’s microfarm in Florida, where he gets an amazingly bountiful crop from a vertical hydroponic farm with a tiny footprint, and it’s very impressive. In fact, Sassakala catered a retreat I led in Florida this February, and the veggies were delicious.
Sassakala’s aims are:
Please visit Sassakala at Sassakala.com
This is an invitation to download some free MP3s of my teaching.
This week I’m doing a lot of meditation teaching at Aryaloka Buddhist Center in New Hampshire, and I’ve been recording the meditation sessions and uploading them to a Dropbox account.
Most of the recordings are from 30 to 50 minutes long. I’ve been introducing the Mindfulness of Breathing, Development of Lovingkindness, and Walking Meditation practices. The overall theme is a phrase from the Pali canon, “Abiding in Ease, Here and Now,” and the meditations encourage a sense of spacious relaxation into the moment, with the emphasis on acceptance and equanimity.
If you’d like to download these, just post a comment below, and I’ll add you to the dropbox account. The MP3s are free (and for personal use only) and it doesn’t cost anything to join Dropbox.
NEW
A problem I hadn’t anticipated with Dropbox is that I keep subscribing people to the folder and they keep deleting the MP3 files, which means they’re gone for everyone. Replacing them every 30 minutes is getting to be tedious. So here’s the deal. You don’t have to post a comment below — just click on this link! Then right click (Control click on a Mac) and download the files. Check back every day, since I’ll be adding new files as they’re recorded. I don’t think you even have to join Dropbox now.
The meditation are not professionally recorded, and there is some background noise.
