The Meditator's Dilemma

Author: Bill Morgan
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 0834840111
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Book Description
When practiced regularly, meditation naturally deepens self-awareness and leads to spiritual insight. In our hyper, instant-gratification culture, however, most people miss out on those powerful outcomes because it’s hard to commit to a long-term practice. Despite the increasing popularity of mindfulness and its documented mental health benefits, the silent majority of meditators struggle to maintain a regular practice. In fact, research indicates that more than fifty percent of meditators give up on the practice. Through time-tested teachings and exercises, The Meditator’s Dilemma shows you how to deepen your meditation practice while cultivating ease and delight—for both beginners and longtime practitioners. The Meditator’s Dilemma, written by a psychologist with forty years’ experience practicing and teaching meditation, confronts this problem and its causes and provides specific, accessible techniques and exercises that greatly enhance everyday meditation practice. Bill Morgan’s teachings and guided meditation exercises are designed to generate the all-too-often missing delight and enjoyment in meditation.

The Meditator's Dilemma

Author: Bill Morgan
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 1611802482
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Book Description
Through time-tested teachings and exercises, The Meditator's Dilemma shows you how to deepen your meditation practice while cultivating ease and delight—for both beginners and longtime practitioners. When practiced regularly, meditation naturally deepens self-awareness and leads to spiritual transformation. In our hyper, instant-gratification culture, however, most people miss out on those powerful outcomes because it's hard to commit to a longterm practice. Despite the increasing popularity of mindfulness and its documented mental health benefits, the silent majority of meditators struggle to maintain a regular practice. In fact, research indicates that more than fifty percent of meditators give up on the practice. This is the elephant in the meditation room. The Meditator's Dilemma, written by a psychologist with forty years' experience practicing and teaching meditation, confronts this problem and its causes and provides specific, accessible techniques and exercises that greatly enhance everyday meditation practice. Bill Morgan's teachings and guided meditation exercises are designed to generate the all-too-missing delight and enjoyment in meditation. The concept of the "holding environment," central to positive outcome in psychotherapy, is the raison d'etre for these techniques. In psychotherapy, the holding environment comprises the trusting, secure, empathic milieu created by the caring therapist. An indirect benefit of these techniques is the capacity to create a nurturing safe space in any relational context: with a mentor, in a conversation with a dear friend, or in a beautiful natural setting. When we are in a holding environment, we feel alive, connected, and relaxed. The Meditator's Dilemma teaches Western meditators to cultivate an internal holding environment that results in an attitude of relaxed curiosity and exploration toward their meditation practice, leading to greater success and staying power.

Sitting Together

Author: Susan M. Pollak
Publisher: Guilford Publications
ISBN: 1462527736
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
This practical guide helps therapists from virtually any specialty or theoretical orientation choose and adapt mindfulness practices most likely to be effective with particular patients, while avoiding those that are contraindicated. The authors provide a wide range of meditations that build the core skills of focused attention, mindfulness, and compassionate acceptance. Vivid clinical examples show how to weave the practices into therapy, tailor them to each patient's needs, and overcome obstacles. Therapists also learn how developing their own mindfulness practice can enhance therapeutic relationships and personal well-being. The Appendix offers recommendations for working with specific clinical problems. Free audio downloads (narrated by the authors) and accompanying patient handouts for selected meditations from the book are available at www.sittingtogether.com. See also Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, Second Edition, edited by Christopher K. Germer, Ronald D. Siegel, and Paul R. Fulton, which reviews the research on therapeutic applications of mindfulness and delves into treatment of specific clinical problems.

The Meditator's Guidebook

Author: Lucy Oliver
Publisher: Destiny Books
ISBN: 9780892813605
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
This valuable guide explains the basic process that is initiated when someone seriously begins to learn meditation in any tradition or with any technique. Whether the object is relaxation, enlightenment, or union with the Divine, the three most obvious results of meditation can be summarized as calmness, power, and insight; together, they represent the refinement and development of our physical, emotional, and intellectual levels of being. In The Meditator's Guidebook, author Lucy Oliver describes with precision the benefits and pitfalls of meditation and distinguishes it from trance, hypnosis, reflection, or visualization. She clarifies the basic techniques and principles involved in the skill of meditation and shows how sustained practice can unlock our innate creativity. Just as nourishment is assimilated by the body and transformed in the process of physical growth, meditation is a catalyst for transforming the substance of life in our consciousness and deepening our contact with the creative dimension of existence.

Inward

Author: Michal Pagis
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022636187X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Book Description
Western society has never been more interested in interiority. Indeed, it seems more and more people are deliberately looking inward—toward the mind, the body, or both. Michal Pagis’s Inward focuses on one increasingly popular channel for the introverted gaze: vipassana meditation, which has spread from Burma to more than forty countries and counting. Lacing her account with vivid anecdotes and personal stories, Pagis turns our attention not only to the practice of vipassana but to the communities that have sprung up around it. Inward is also a social history of the westward diffusion of Eastern religious practices spurred on by the lingering effects of the British colonial presence in India. At the same time Pagis asks knotty questions about what happens when we continually turn inward, as she investigates the complex relations between physical selves, emotional selves, and our larger social worlds. Her book sheds new light on evergreen topics such as globalization, social psychology, and the place of the human body in the enduring process of self-awareness.

Emptiness

Author: Guy Armstrong
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1614293635
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Book Description
If everything is empty, then what ceases in Nirvana and is born in rebirth? How can you live in the world without feeling trapped by it? Guy Armstrong tackles these questions and more in this richly informed, practical guide to emptiness for the meditator. It may seem odd for emptiness to serve as the central philosophy of a major religion. In fact, emptiness points to something quite different than “nothingness” or “vacancy.” And by developing a richer understanding of this complex topic, we can experience freedom as we live consciously in the world. Guy Armstrong has been a leading figure and beloved teacher of insight meditation for decades. In this book, he makes difficult Buddhist topics easy to understand, weaving together Theravada and Mahayana teachings on emptiness to show how we can liberate our minds and manifest compassion in our lives.

Bear Awareness

Author: Brahm
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1614292566
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 174

Book Description
In Bear Awareness English monk Ajahn Brahm answers actual questions from his meditation students-- questions you may have had as well. While most mindfulness meditation teachers praise the benefits of bare awareness, he teaches bear awareness. He helps us make friends with the scary things that come up on the cushion, and he knows how to lift the mood with a well-placed stuffed teddy-- or a well-timed pun.

The Origin of Buddhist Meditation

Author: Alexander Wynne
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134097409
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Book Description
Having identified early material that goes back to the Buddha himself, the author argues that the two teachers of the Buddha were historical figures. Based on the early Brahminic literature, namely the early Upanishads and Moksadharma, the author asserts the origin of the method of meditation learned by the Buddha from these teachers, and attempts to use them to identify some authentic teachings of the Buddha on meditation. Stimulating debate within the field of Buddhist Studies, the following claims are put forward: the Buddha was taught by Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta, as stated in the literature of numerous early Buddhist sects, is historically authentic Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta taught a form of early Brahminic meditation the Buddha must consequently have been trained in a meditative school whose ideology was provided by the philosophical portions of early Upanishads Shedding new light on a fascinating aspect of the origins of Buddhism, this book will be of interest to academics in the field of Buddhist studies, Asian religion and South Asian studies.

Falling Into Easy

Author: Dee Willock
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1780990278
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Book Description
Can't meditate? Knees killing you? Misplaced the present moment? Let Falling Into Easy make meditation simple, practical and accessible. For years, we’ve heard about the benefits of meditation. Spiritual teachers describe the benefits of a quiet mind, psychologists advise us not to be ruled by our wild thoughts, our mothers tell us we should learn to relax, and even neuroscientists extol the benefits of a regular meditation practice. There is only one confusing and all-too-familiar dilemma: How exactly does one meditate? Falling Into Easy offers a way for both novice and seasoned meditators to land right smack in the middle of the present moment—with very little effort or travel required. Through a discussion of the simple mechanics of meditation, coupled with instructive metaphors, readers will learn to meditate with ease and a sense of familiarity. Falling Into Easy reveals the greatest paradox of meditation. Readers set out to gain something new, but in actuality, they will discover something they’ve always possessed: a peaceful state of well-being, simply and naturally accessed with every successive breath. ,

Cell Level Meditation

Author: Barry Grundland
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1644112256
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Book Description
• Explains how to connect with your cells through breath and awareness to enact profound healing and inner communication on the deepest level • Enables you to experience cell consciousness directly as you not only visualize and connect with the cell but actually become it • Shares profound healing experiences from those who have practiced cell level meditation, both those who are experienced meditators and those who had never done it before By simply looking at something, by becoming aware of it, you can change it. Cell Level Meditation focuses awareness on the smallest unit of life for the purpose of healing. Using the timeless technique of combining awareness with the breath, you move into the cells and become them. By meditating with your cells, you can awaken to the vast potential within yourself, move to greater levels of self-awareness, and enact healing all the way down to the cellular level. In this simple guide, Patricia Kay, MA, and Barry Grundland, MD, give you the tools to connect with the wisdom and intelligence of your cells and work with them to heal. They offer sample meditations to help you connect with specific cells, such as your liver or lung cells, yet emphasize that you should use the Cell Level Meditation technique to follow your intuition and discover the cells that are inviting you in. Sharing their own and others’ experiences, from both experienced meditators and those who had never meditated before, they validate experiences you are likely to have and inspire you with stories of profound healings from serious illness such as cancer as well as other ailments and everyday stresses. The authors explain how during Cell Level Meditation, you may have a vision or an insight, or some inner experience of shape, color, movement, sounds, or smells. You may also feel a shift in your physical body. By bringing breath into these experiences and staying present with them, you open up to a new level of communication within yourself and discover your unique way of bringing harmony and healing to your life. Guided to be an active participant in your healing, engaging many levels of your inner experience, you are led to a new level of mind-body coherence.