Category: Meditation Journal
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Meditation Journal: Welcome
Several days a month, I follow a period of meditation with a journal entry on the experience. As the journal …
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Meditation Journal: Posts by Month
This post allows you to view “Meditation Journal” posts by month. Open the post before clicking below. January 2025 December …
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Saving energy
Many of my recent readings converge on a single idea: that Zen study and meditation may help us by saving …
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Slippery slopes
One way to lose a desirable spontaneity is to imagine that we know something, anything whatsoever, about the future. I’ve …
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Noise
I lie awake at night I am troubled by worries and the strategies and plans that I think will save …
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Compassion
When I try to understand an ethics within Taoism, I encounter at every turn the call to compassion. The Tao …
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Fullness because emptiness
An answer to the previous post came to me today during a pleasing zazen. I believe the answer to …
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Emptiness or fullness
What condition of mind do we seek in meditation? Is it more like emptiness or fullness? Most of my readings …
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Being that is not in words
“Therefore you should stop the intellectual activity of pursuing words and chasing sayings, and should learn the stepping back of …
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Sine qua non
What holds you together? What prevents you from dispersing? What is the sine qua non, the “without which not,” of …
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Leaking self
This morning, as I breathed, I imagined that I was inhaling fresh new vitality with each breath, and expelling old, …
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The watching I
In a conversation about meditation the other day a friend observed and mildly lamented the presence in his meditation of …
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Relaxing
Perhaps enlightenment is relaxing. That sounds so hedonistic, so small a hope for all this meditation. It is not …
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Strategy
In the first psalm of Book of Mercy Leonard Cohen reflects on his various failed prayers and meditations and recounts …
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Infancy and the hara
I’m not sure if, for me, the hara can be a second seat of being in the body, a place …
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To meditate on
Whenever I try or hope to meditate on something, I either fail to concentrate effectively on that object, or I …
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Grain of sand
I am a single grain of sand on a vast, perhaps an infinite beach that lies at the edges of …
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The Tao is underlying
The Tao is not party to your achievements, though you will achieve. The Tao is not party to your failures, …
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Temporal immediacy
It came to me in meditation today, meditation which has calmed and steadied for now if not deepened: the present …
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Hot water
“So if you use hot water to stop a boiling pot, it will only boil all the more; those who …
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The sense of the Tao
After yesterday’s panic I meditated today as strictly as I could on the Tao. I have lost somewhere my sense …
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Meditation fails me
I invite visitors to read “Meditation fails me” and the next two entries as a triad. At last meditation fails …
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Spontaneity
Where did I first read that in Zen Buddhist thought you are exactly as you should be, at this moment, …
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The past and the future
The past is a phantasm. The future is a demon. The past and the future, with all their guilts and …
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The Trust Technique
Animal lovers who meditate, or meditators who love animals, will want to visit the website of The Trust Technique. …
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Concert
One day I think of the hara, and direct my meditation to that centre. Another day I think of …
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A pleasure to meditate
I remembered today that it’s a pleasure to meditate. How simple an observation that is, and surely silly sounding to …
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Fear
Another strong meditation today. Or how to put it? A meditation in which I felt the strength of the body, …
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Translations of the Tao Te Ching
This might be a good moment to mention the various translations of the Tao Te Ching that I have read …
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Sneezing
Meditation and sneezing. A sneezing jag halfway through. Yet the concentration and clarity I was experiencing at that point was …
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Spasms and reflexes
In the past I have thought of the straying thoughts that intrude on meditation as like muscle spasms, only in …
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Wen-Tzu
The week has been chaotic, with many decisions looming and swirling (when isn’t it so?), yet I enjoyed a solid …
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Shikan-taza again
Today before meditating I read my earlier post on shikan-taza again. I wanted some refreshment of method, a sharper sense …
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See your nature
The burden, in the old sense of the refrain, of Bodhidharma’s “Bloodstream Sermon” is “see your nature.” As in, …
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Lifted these burdens
Poor sleeping, a tight chest constraining breath, high blood pressure—fear of death. Yet today I enjoyed a meditation that lifted …
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Decisions
As I began to meditate today I had two or three decisions of some substance on my mind. I knew …
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I couldn’t name my troubles
Today I took my place for zazen with a diffuse sense of trouble, but I couldn’t name my troubles. Comfort …
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Mind is water
We’re encouraged in so many Buddhist scriptures and readings to realize the nature of mind. This must mean not only …