One of the admittedly quite counterintuitive skills we learn in mindfulness is the ability to distinguish between thinking and awareness. To use a classic metaphor from consciousness studies, awareness is like the empty stage. Thinking is one of the actors that trots onto that stage—along with seeing, hearing, feeling etc. When we're mindful of our thinking, we have more choice about whether we want to reinforce a particular pattern of rumination or not. This is the beginning; part two [https://soundcloud.com/jeff-warren-5/mindfulness-of-thinking-wdanharris-15min] goes more deeply into the thinking process.
 
Also called "Catch Thinking in the Act", this meditation is from the book Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, coauthored with Dan Harris and Carlye Adler. The book's dozen or so other meditations can be found on the 10% Happier app. Enjoy!
 
Jeff
For more free meditations, see www.jeffwarren.org

Resources:

"classic metaphor": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_workspace_theory
Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: http://jeffwarren.org/media/books/meditation-fidgety-skeptics/
10% Happier App: http://www.10percenthappier.com/

Mindfulness of Thinking - Part 1

I enjoy recording meditations in studio, but I prefer doing it live, in the company of actual human beings. There’s an immediacy in these situations that can’t be reproduced. Like this meditation for example, guided in a moving car, with my highly stressed-out pal Dan Harris as meditating subject. 
 
This particular technique expands on an earlier meditation [https://soundcloud.com/jeff-warren-5/catch-thinking-in-the-act], exploring the experiential components of thinking as they may present from moment to moment: the imagery, the inner talk, the subtle tensions and body tugs (another important component, emotional body sensations, will be addressed in a forthcoming meditation). This practice is a good example of an empowering meditative principle we can call "divide and conquer." Stress and overwhelm often show up as indistinct blobs of feeling-thinking-tension. Insofar as all this stays blobby and indistinct, then it owns us. But if we can begin to tease apart the various components with our attention, then we may find we can dramatically lessen their collective impact. In this sense, mindfulness is about agency and sanity. It is another meditative superpower.
 
Much gratitude to my teacher, Shinzen Young, who first taught me to deconstruct my despotic inner system. Now it’s all rainbows, peace doves, and old reruns of my favorite 80s TV show, Manimal.
 
Jeff
For more free meditations, see www.jeffwarren.org

Resources:

Dan Harris: https://www.10percenthappier.com/mindfulness-meditation-the-basics/
Shinzen Young: https://www.shinzen.org/
Manimal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ugb_TIpPoWA

Mindfulness of Thinking - Part 2

10% Happier asked me to write this meditation for Apple employees. They took my script and recorded it in the voice of the iPhone. Personally, I think the voice should be slowed down by a third, to make it more hypnotic and meditative. The meditation “object” here is the sound of silence, the “space between commands.” If you do the practice, really try to direct your attention in this vague direction: the ambient hum of space, the thick absence of silence itself.

Resources:

10% Happier: http://www.10percenthappier.com/

Space Between Commands

So this is a short talk and guided meditation, recorded at the beautiful Harmony Hotel meditation zendo in Nosara, Costa Rica. The meditation begins at 12:40 if you want to jump to that.

The talk and meditation are a distillation of some of my core ideas about what meditation practice is, and how we can find the right practice for each of us: the right attitude, the right object, and even the right balance of stillness and movement / activity. It talks about the core skills of every successful practice and how to make sure they are activated in the meditation itself.

Below is a summary of the main points:

“You are what you repeatedly do.” There is no neutral setting in life – most existing is a doing, a doing that is changing you and deepening both healthy and unhealthy habits.

Meditation practice – and arguably all “spiritual,” artistic, and body-based practices – train how you want to exist. They are acts of deliberately choosing what habits you want to train and reinforce. In this sense they are very empowering.

What matters in a practice are the qualities of mind and heart and body that we train. The qualities we explore in this meditation are: concentration, clarity, equanimity and friendliness / intimacy

We can make this work for us based on our natural interests. Everyone is different. YOU DO NOT NEED A SITTING PRACTICE. If you don’t like sitting, choose a movement practice. You can practice the above qualities in slow deliberate movement, and that’s what we do at the end of this guided practice. This is how we bring meditation into life anyway – we make life our practice. This is good news for people with ants in their pants.

We can also let our interests guide what we want to pay attention to. That’s the other bit of good news. The breath is one option among many. There are other options that may be more appealing to us. Interest in a particular option / object is our anchor. We use our interest to slingshot ourselves into the practice, into the training. As we get more experience, we eventually learn to let go of our anchor, let go of the form. This is what it means to bring our practice into life - all of life becomes a meditation.

Oh, and one last crazy paradoxical thing: it may be that not ALL existing is a doing. Contemplative traditions argue, in their own ways, that there is a kind of setting or direction in experience, where no new habits are formed. In a complete experience of equanimity, the forces of conditioning seem dramatically weakened. At least, this is the experience – an experience of pure being. 

See for yourself!

Finding the Right Practice

The lecture was given as part of the West Coast Intellectual Retreat held at St. Albert's Priory March 22-24, 2019.
The handout for the lecture can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByaUbskxe22xQTN4X1lGYUREU1hnOGNfYm5CYk1xWmkyMTRz/view?usp=sharing

Presenters:
Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P. (Assistant Director of Campus Outreach for the Thomistic Institute)
Prof. Steven Jensen - University of St. Thomas (Houston)
Fr. John Corbett, O.P. - Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception

Conference Titles: 
1. Principles of the Moral Life 
2. The One Thing Necessary: The Last End and Beatitude 
3. Our Good and God: Our Place Within the Greater Good 
4. In Us Without Us: The Infused Virtues 
 5. Beyond Human Means: The Gifts of the Holy Spirit

Retreat Theme Description:
 In the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, all creation proceeds from God and returns to him. With the complication of sin, that return is complicated. In Jesus Christ and through the sacraments, God orchestrates the redemption of sinful man by gradually introducing him into the life of divine communion. And, in that movement, man is engaged not merely as a passive recipient, but also as an agent—as a protagonist.

Given this understanding, questions of morality cannot simply be boiled down to do’s and don’ts. For St. Thomas, the moral life is first about God and then about the way we are called to return to Him. This is what we mean by “the good life.”

For more info about upcoming TI events, visit: thomisticinstitute.org/events-1

Principles of the Moral Life | Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

This 17-minute meditation was recorded in Costa Rica on March 19th, 2020. My retreat co-leader Scott Davis and I had been up all night taking care of someone in great distress. Scott is a Chinese Traditional Medicine practitioner; he has a very grounded and comforting way of putting his hands on people, feeling the pulse in their wrist, gently administering his acupuncture needles. I was very moved as I watched him tend to this person, and afterwards – feeling quite cracked open and raw – I came directly to the meditation hall and guided this practice. It's all about how to hold ourselves – and each other – with care.

For more free meditations, see www.jeffwarren.org

Resources: 

Scott Davis: https://scottdavisholistic.com/

Caring Hands

This talk was given as part of the Thomistic Institute's Holy Week Retreat, April 9-12, 2020. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website: thomisticinstitute.org.

About the speaker:
Fr. Jacob Bertrand Janczyk was ordained to the priesthood in May 2017. He is a graduate of Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY, where he earned a degree in biomedical sciences.

The Descent into Hell | Fr. Jacob Bertrand Janczyk, O.P.

This talk was given as part of the Thomistic Institute's Holy Week Retreat, April 9-12, 2020. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website: thomisticinstitute.org.

About the speaker:
Fr. James Dominic Brent, O.P. was born and raised in Michigan. He pursued his undergraduate and graduate studies in Philosophy, and completed his doctorate in Philosophy at Saint Louis University on the epistemic status of Christian beliefs according to Saint Thomas Aquinas. He has articles in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Natural Theology, in the Oxford Handbook of Thomas Aquinas on “God’s Knowledge and Will”, and an article forthcoming on “Thomas Aquinas” in the Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology. He earned his STL from the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception, and was ordained a priest in the same year. He taught in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America from 2010- 2014, and spent the year of 2014-2015 doing full time itinerant preaching on college campuses across the United States.

The Death of the Lord | Fr. James Brent, O.P.

Círculo De Influencia Y Preocupación

Tottiler Messiler Avrupa bölümüyle yayında! Fritz Fassbender ve Koray Gök, yeni sezonu bu hafta izledikleri en iyi maçlarla açtı, sorularınızın da hepsi cevaplandı. 

İlginiz için teşekkürler, keyifli dinlemeler!

Tottiler Messiler #168 - Avrupa | YENİ CHELSEA, AUBA, EVERTON 2021, BALE, MOURINHO

Clippers podcastimiz Ötekiler'in final bölümünde Mustafa Burkay Aktaş ve Kerem Ayiş hayal kırıklığı ile biten Denver serisini ve sezonu değerlendirdi, dinleyicilerine veda etti.

LA Clippers | Ötekiler - Final: Elbet Bir Gün Buluşacağız

Jeff Warren is a writer and meditation teacher. He is the co-author of The New York Times bestselling Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, author of The Head Trip - a travel guide to sleeping, dreaming and waking - and founder of The Consciousness Explorers Club, a nonprofit meditation adventure group based in Toronto.