Hi Everyone, I hope you had a relaxing and fulfilling Christmas and Boxing day, I had a very pleasant time, just about the right balance of sociability, good food and quiet reflection! With the new year approaching I my thoughts have been turning (like many people) to what I would most like to focus on [...]
Transcribed from a five minute talk that I gave at the end of a Qi gong meditation class last week (23.11.11), enjoy! I just want to say one or two things before we end. I mentioned whilst guiding the meditation that one thing that you may become aware of over time is that our mind [...]
Before you start something it is always worth spending a moment thinking “Why am I doing this? What is my primary motivation?” If you have a definite reason for doing something, then you can keep it as your focus, thus ensuring greater peace of mind and a higher likelihood of getting what you want from [...]
Why Should we Meditate on Gratitude? What are we Trying to Achieve? The function and purpose of meditating on gratitude is to train our attention in such a way that even when we are under pressure and feeling unhappy in some way we never lose sight of the things in our life that are there [...]
What does it mean to be expressing love fully in your relationships? There are many ways to answer this question, but one answer deriving from classical sources is that you should aim to have three types of love functioning fully in your day to day interactions with others and yourself. These types of love are [...]
Different people come to meditation for different reasons. In recent times meditation has come into public awareness as a method for dealing with many stresses and strains that contemporary life places us under. Traditionally meditation has been used as a method for communing with the divine and seeking enlightenment. A third use of meditation has been as [...]
The first of the five enlightened powers that I outline in my meditation technique “The Five enlightened Powers” is the power of embodiment. This involves, quoting from my previous article on the subject: “Remembering that you are, in essence a spark of Universal spirit experiencing (temporarily) a physically embodied life on Earth as a human. [...]
Two Types of Courage In order to build a successful and authentic meditation practice you need courage, and the two types of courage that I want to highlight today are the courage to initiate, and the courage to persist. You need the courage to initiate to get through all the excuses and distractions that are [...]
The physiological and psychological benefits of meditation have been very well documented by science over the last fifty years (the best summary of this scientific research can be found in “The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation” by Michael Murphy and Steven Donovan). There is now really no doubt that daily meditation practice makes you [...]
Here are five levels of positive intention that we can hold, and that we can use as conscious motivators for our meditation and awareness practice, or indeed as full objects of meditation in themselves: 1. The intention to practice non-harmfulness toward ourself and others 2. The intention to heal, nurture our body-mind, and develop it [...]
