Non-identification and working with the aggregates
15 Jun 2024
I've been drafting a few complicated pieces for this blog, about the signless concentration of mind, about meta-cognition, about systems thinking. These are all topics I want to say something about, but might also require a lot of detail and scholarly effort. Instead, I'm sitting in the garden in the sunshine, writing in a notebook and listening to Miles Davis and the theme I want to discuss is...
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How I am practising
6 May 2024
In two meditation groups I belong to, people recently expressed an interest in learning more about how other people practise. So I decided to write a little snapshot of what I’m doing—more or less—on the cushion at the moment.
On the cushion
When the house is quiet in the morning, I sit on my meditation bench and begin to let the mind settle while tuning in to what’s here. It may be that a...
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Appropriate attention: notes on a home retreat
22 Apr 2024
I sat an online at-home retreat with Gavin Milne over the weekend. It was very interesting to be practicing in a hybrid space: letting go of some distractions (and noticing getting hooked by others) and emphasising practice but also being present and connected with family and having that context of bringing practice into every posture, task, and situation—or trying to! I kept some notes, as I...
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Just this present moment
17 Apr 2024
Ryunosuke Koike, in The Practice of Not Thinking, describes mindfulness as keeping your thoughts related to immediate experience, and keeping the mind somewhat tethered to the other senses: being aware of seeing, hearing, touch, etc. I think this is a useful rule of thumb: it's quite simple to check whether our thoughts are related to present moment experience or not. As people who've been on...
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Neuroaffinities
5 Apr 2024
I walked down to the harbour and into a tiny shack for a coffee, and got chatting to the barista about computers and Star Trek. Then his pal popped in and the conversation continued, then someone else joined in. It was raining outside and I was in no hurry to go anywhere. Not for the first time of late, I began to suspect that the reason this all felt so easy was that my neurotribe had...
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