Tootfinder

I did my 48th(!) intensive #meditation retreat last week, and I hear in Hironari's post something that resonates for me—how much contemplative practice is about a profoundly simple engagement with the living truth.
And I'm reminded too of a line in the 1981 movie "Chariots of Fire," where the Christian sister of an Olympic runner is concerned about him practicing on Sun…

Meditating in Live Stream: An Autoethnographic and Interview Study to Investigate Motivations, Interactions and Challenges
Jingjin Li, Jiajing Guo, Gilly Leshed
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.13992

Meditating in Live Stream: An Autoethnographic and Interview Study to Investigate Motivations, Interactions and Challenges
Mindfulness practice has many mental and physical well-being benefits. With the increased popularity of live stream technologies and the impact of COVID-19, many people have turned to live stream tools to participate in online meditation sessions. To better understand the practices, challenges, and opportunities in live-stream meditation, we conducted a three-month autoethnographic study, during which two researchers participated in live-stream meditation sessions as the audience. Then we condu…

In tonight's sitting, I was reminded of #Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi's characterization of #meditation as a practice of "things as it is."
🙂 🙏

Put just a little playfully, these days the sort of #meditation I do — a practice of and in and as the way things are — becomes most beneficially wholesome the more it is the way things are and the less it is "meditation."

“At the dawn of his enlightenment, someone asked the Buddha, "What are your credentials? How do we know that you are enlightened?" He touched his hand to the ground. "This solid earth is my witness. This solid earth, this sane earth, is my witness." Sane and solid and definite, no imaginings, no concepts, no emotions, no frivolity, but being basically what is: this is the awakened state. And this is the example we follow in our meditation practice.” Chögyam Trungpa

A handful of academic degrees and several decades' worth of experience with #meditation , for me tonight the practice comes down to:
Let go into what is real.

In the type of #meditation I do, there can be a sort of paradox, if not in fact a debate, in regards to "making effort" and a practice of "effortlessness."
An over-quick resolution for me these days: It takes a certain sort of effort to not be absent for what only Mother Nature can do for us.

In my meditative practice these days, I'm learning something that might ought to have been obvious all along:
#Meditation is not about escaping or transcending what is happening.
Meditation is about what is happening.

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I sometimes tell the story of what it was like nearly drowning as a boy — on the other side of being resuscitated, the living fact that anything at all was happening was an obvious miracle. And that miracle touched me.
In my #meditation these days I largely just practice "what is happening," allowing that matter-of-fact miracle to touch me.

In tonight's #meditation the practice came to somewhat poetic expression as:
Sometimes the body loves having us awake and thinking.
Sometimes the body loves having us asleep and dreaming.
And sometimes the body loves having us asleep and dreamless.
(Here "sometimes the body loves" is effectively another, less-prone-to-intellectualzing, way of saying that som…

Some expressions of #Zen practice suggest that it comes down to "just not picking and choosing" or "just not contriving."
Many forms of #meditation involve a kind of quieting and "going away" in order then to "come back."
The sense in my practice these da…

In tonight's sitting I was reminded how, for me these days, #meditation is matter-of-factly less about gaining a special state or a deeper relaxation, and more about participating appreciatively in what's present. The terms for that can sound exotic, like "suchness practice," but the practical experience brings a renewed regard for, as an example, Dōgen's instruction: