Your Practice Matters If you’ve ever tried to start a regular meditation practice, you know the hardest part is simply showing up. For me, the end of the year always pulls me away from a regular practice of just about anything I know is good for me. When December arrives, everything around me seems to speed up. My schedule quickly fills with holiday plans and work deadlines, and the pressure to prepare for the year ahead creeps in. If you’re also craving a moment to pause, I invite you to join us for our free weekly live meditation every Wednesday on Zoom. It’s a simple way to reconnect with yourself in the midst of the holiday hustle and bustle. Each week, we take 20 minutes to breathe, settle, and check in with our hearts and minds together. This month, our friend and Buddhist teacher Pamela Ayo Yetunde is guiding our weekly meditations as our resident teacher. In January, we’ll continue with mindfulness teacher Beth Wallace, and in February we’ll practice weekly with Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). Whether you join us once before the year ends, or make this gathering a steady part of your routine, we’ll be here to welcome you every Wednesday at 8:30 a.m. PST / 11:30 a.m. EST. The details to join on Zoom can be found here. Below, you’ll find three pieces that offer wisdom on the benefits of a regular meditation practice, if you need a little inspiration to get started. I hope to see you Wednesday to put this wisdom into practice. —Lilly Greenblatt, Digital Editor, Lion’s Roar |
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There’s nothing like the benefit of a regular meditation practice, and there’s no better time to do it than now. Zen Buddhist A. Jesse Jiryu Davis on five ways you can make meditation a helpful part of your daily routine.
We don’t expect that the first time we try pull-ups we’ll do ten in a row. We don’t expect to understand French the first time we try. But many people expect that the first time they sit down and meditate they’ll achieve inner peace. Meditation will often feel hard, and it is always unpredictable, but we must not be frustrated by this. After all, trying to meditate is meditation, and in that sense it’s very easy. If you sit down and try to interrupt your own daydreaming and try to be conscious of your presence in the room for half an hour, you will achieve something.  |
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Zen teacher Norman Fischer proposes a two-week trial run to get your meditation practice started and looks at how to deal with some of the obstacles you may encounter.
Thousands of people over the years have asked me for advice about how to establish a daily meditation practice at home. Although there are thousands of Buddhist meditation centers around the country, most meditators do some or all of their practice at home on their own. In many cases, this is a practical matter. Most people don’t live close enough to a Buddhist center to meditate there regularly. Or, for one reason or another, they don’t feel comfortable with any of the local centers available to them. Or they feel that for them meditation is a private and personal matter, not a communal religious practice. Anyway, most meditators, for a variety of reasons, meditate at home. I do myself. |
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Diana Winston shares her advice on how to meditate every day, “even if you would rather me thrown into a shark-infested ocean.”
Your unforgiving alarm rings for all it’s worth. It’s 7AM. You crash out of bed, slamming your toe on your bedside table. You fumble for your zafu in the dark. “It’s over here somewhere,” you mumble. Hearing you awaken from the dead, your cat runs screeching. You are about to plant your still-zombiefied-self on the cushion when nature calls. Three minutes later your mother calls too, and you know you really shouldn’t answer it but she does have that crucial bit of information about the results of The Voice, and… that’s it, the day has started. You’re late for work, the shower’s running cold again, your toothbrush bristles are thoroughly chewed through, the cat is ripping apart your sofa, blackmailing you for food, and of course, as always, despite hundreds of clothes in your closet, you have nothing to wear. You leave the house agitated, jangled, caught in another shouting match with yourself: “You lazy… you didn’t meditate! Again. You’ll never change!” Sound familiar? Sure it does. Despite all those resolutions — post-retreat, New Year’s, and otherwise — another day has gone by without sitting. You know it’s good for you, you know it’s probably the best thing you’ve ever done in your life and ever could do, but it’s really hard to do it. |
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