PICK UP ONE SMALL STONE

Visit https://www.instagram.com/p/DW9X0sQEUCa/ for this poem and more good ones at Joseph Fasano's instagram account. This meditation starts with Fasano's poem, Night Swimming. Go to 2:12 to skip the intro and get right into the practice. But what I say in the intro that might be helpful to hear: you deserve joy; it's not weak to need a gratitude practice; our gratitude practices foster connection, compassion and care which makes the world a better place. xo

Go to 2:04 to skip the intro. With the intro the video is 16-minuntes. Without the intro, the meditation is 14-minutes.

Sympathetic Joy is one of "4 immeasurables" in Buddhism. Sometimes also called the "4 limitless ones," sympathetic joy, along with compassion, loving-kindness, and equanimity, cultivate an expansive heart, open to an immeasurable, or limitless, degree. Counterintuitively, sympathetic joy is usually harder than compassion or loving-kindness. Joy may seem easy - but actually our negativity bias and scarcity mindset make joy harder than you'd think. Sympathtic joy -- the abilit

Mindfulness: Paying attention on purpose in the present moment, non-judgmentally. - paraphrase from Jon Kabat-Zinn

This 16-minute practice is a variation on the traditional Buddhist compassion meditation, Tonglen.

Loving-Kindness changes the way to talk to ourselves, as well as those around us. It decreases our knee-jerk reactivity and lets us speak and act with more compassion.

The Matrix movie is often used as a metaphor for the practice of meditation. When we start to see our thoughts as thoughts, we realize that we don't have to believe everything we think. This is a practice for waking up:

"What is meditation? It involves choosing an object of attention (e.g., breath, an image, or a mantra) to focus on instead of thoughts." - Susan Piver Drawing Meditation uses the feeling of our hand making the mark as the object of our attention -- a helpful variation for many people.

Tonglen is the traditional Buddhist Meditation for compassion. Today's variation is Tonglen for self. We can't give what we don't have and this practice offers an accessible way to support and empower ourselves.

Sitting meditation can be frustrating because we're given the instruction "let go of your thoughts" ... but there isn't much to do in sitting meditation and we can become very aware of our thoughts! This is a feature not a flaw. Here's why.

Meditation often gets pushed to the back burner during the summer. These two meditations are invitations to connect back to YOUR "why meditate."

A somatic practice to counter summer's fiery, expansive energy. This 15-minute practice helps you land in this moment before intentionally moving forward.

Gom is a Tibetan word for meditation. It translates as "to familiarize." During the razzle-dazzle of summer, it's easy to be distracted from our own life. This meditation is an invitation to re-familiarize ourselves with ourselves and give ourselves a little love because, as Thich Nhat Hanh says, "understanding is love's other name."

What we see is interesting. What we don't see is even more interesting.

Using Buddhism, Tarot, and poetry, this meditation invites us to let go of our fixed ideas of how things "should" be and find more peace in how things are.

This meditation uses the technique of breath with visualization.

"Grasshopper mind" is an apt description for the all-over-the-place quality of our mind when we sit in meditation. Mary Reufle's poem "Grasshopper" gives us a good metaphor and invitation for landing in this moment and being present for our lives. This meditation uses a poem from Mary Ruefle, entitled "Grasshopper," which offers a metaphor for our practice of being here, of being more present for all the moments of our lives.

Reclaiming our attention is a radical act that lets us control our own time and our connections. Our time and our connections determine the quality of our lives.

The 3 Root Poisons cause our suffering. We filter everything in our lives through one of three lenses: attachment, aversion, and ignorance. We can practice meditation as a way to see these root poisons - and then gently clean the lenses - so that we can see a little more clearly and suffer less.

This practice uses a somatic exercise from the Strouzzi Institute for Somatics that I learned from LaUra Schmidt of the Good Grief Network.