Meditations
Although meditation is best learned by attending classes and receiving instructions from a teacher, listening to audio recordings of guided meditations can be an effective way to get started. They can also provide inspiration for cultivating a regular meditation practice.
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Meditation What Is Now
Feel the breath and the body. What does it feel like, this breath? Can you witness its changing nature?
Meditation: Knowing that Attention is Present
What is my experience in this moment? There’s always something in our consciousness when we’re awake. The instruments of mind can know so many different objects of experience—a mood, a memory, a plan, a fantasy, a comparison, a judgment.
Meditation: Being Present for Whatever Arises
Let’s begin our meditation by simply being present with whatever is occurring in the mind. We’re not concentrating around the breath or body. We’re just being present with whatever arises.
Finding Equanimity in Meditation
Practice keeping the mind balanced when physical sensations and sounds arise during meditation. The mind can stay balanced even during the unexpected.
Compassion Practice
Karuna, or compassion, is a state of mind/heart that can be cultivated as a practice. Compassion is an intuitive response to someone else’s suffering, or your own.
Fully Arriving In The Here And Now Meditation
This is a guided meditation that can help you stay in the present, here and now. Here, now, not before, not after. There is no presence, no agency in the past. It’s a memory of something gone, no longer present.
Mindfulness of the Body
The ability to be mindful of the body is fundamental to liberating the mind. Read the following article and listen to the suggested audio dharma talks, and then deepen your understanding of the teachings by contemplating the reflections provided below.
Loving Kindness (Metta) for the Body Meditation
Receive with equanimity the experience of knowing the body in this moment without judging, comparing, or fixing. What’s true in the body just now?
Breath As Energy Meditation
A 38-minute guided meditation ending with a 10-minute Q&A. Begins with focus on Earth element in the body.
Discovering the Earth Element in the Air Element Meditation
Usually when you follow the breath, you are focused on the air element. But, it’s also possible to focus on the earth element in the breath.
Sitting in Heartspace Meditation
The quality of “heart space” and your attitude toward it is the focus of attention in this meditation.
Walking Meditation Instruction
Learn how to do walking meditation and various walking techniques.
The Felt Sense of Stillness Meditation
Placing your attention on each inhale and exhale, you notice stillness although the breath is moving.
Vipassana Meditation 101
In vipassana meditation, we practice noting the breath and sounds as they arise, which trains the mind to be able to cope under much more difficult circumstances.
Bare Attention Meditation
Practicing “bare attention,” you learn to not add your interpretation to the experience of sound arising and passing.
Relaxing into Silence Meditation
Paying attention to mindfulness itself, we notice the quality of being present, not what our sense gates experience. Is it supportive? Harmonious? Alive?
The Breath As Energy Meditation
If your mind starts wandering during meditation, the breath becomes your anchor to which you return in order to stabilize and focus your attention.
The Felt Sense of the Breath in the Body Meditation
In this 40-minute meditation, you are encouraged to cultivate the quality of non-interfering interest in whatever the mind is experiencing in meditation. This quality is the “felt sense” of what is being known.
Earth to Wind: Stillness to Movement Meditation
In this guided meditation, Phillip explores awareness of the body in the body through knowing earth element and wind element.
How to Arrive in the Room Meditation
When you focus on the lungs rather than the breath in meditation, it can have a calming effect. 37-minute meditation with 64-minute Q+A
Including the Back Half of the Body Meditation
When you focus on the lungs rather than the breath in meditation, it can have a calming effect. 37-minute meditation with 64-minute Q+A
Guided Meditation Satipatthana
In this meditation, we are reminded that we direct attention where we choose because it is skillful.
Sympathetic Joy Meditation
Cultivating sympathetic joy—one of the four brahma-viharas—benefits everyone in that it adds to the joy in the world. When we open to the joy of others, we are cultivating the responsive capacity of our hearts.
Uniting the Breath with Peacefulness
Use your breath as the object of concentration to collect and unify the mind. Return to this practice when the mind is in turmoil or the heart feels vulnerable.
Taking in the Good Meditation
When you are experiencing difficulty in some aspect of your life that is clouding your mind and causing you to contract, practicing this meditation can help soothe your suffering and clarify your thinking.
Starting your Day with Clarity Meditation
Try this 5-minute guided meditation on gaining clarity in the morning, followed by a 3-minute call and response Metta practice.
Sounds and Silence
In this guided meditation, we observe how sounds arise and fall away into the ocean of silence. Without grabbing hold of any particular sound, we rest in “knowing sound.”
Taking Refuge in Awareness Meditation
In this guided meditation from a 2011 Awareness Retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, Phillip leads a step-by-step process toward resting in the awareness that effortlessly knows the arising and passing of all phenomena.