Everyday Mindfulness

I quite often meditate in the park when I'm walking my dog. I sit on a bench and pay attention, sometimes with eyes shut, sometimes with eyes open. I think we can become too rigid about formal practice and limit ourselves to sitting on cushion/bench, closing eyes, observing breath. That practice ca...

I believe my main concern is in the choice and keeping of focus... There are two main kinds of Buddhist meditation vipissana (insight) and samatha (concentration.) The latter usually involves keeping focus on a simple object, like the breath, or a "kasala", a simple visual object like a r...

Great item on "Mindfulness in schools" on the Today programme today:

http://mindfulnessinschools.org/

Do positive affirmations work? Here's an article that has strong arguments for why they may not: http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/03/20/why-positive-affirmations-dont-work/ "The reason positive affirmations don’t work is that they target the conscious level of your mind, but not the u...

It is well known that breathing becomes shallow during Buddhist meditation. So mindfulness does indeed affect the breath, probably for everyone, without intending to. Mindfulness doesn't intend to do anything. If you find the breath automatically & inadvertently & unintentionally altering in...

I had a diagnosis of colitis in my twenties and used meditation as one method of reducing stress, and I became colitis free within a year. It hasn't recurred since (I'm now in my fifties...) I've been an "on and off" meditator, and in my "off " periods it still didn't recur - tho...

Do you have a copy of Kabat-Zinn's "Full Catastrophe Living"? He's very good on using Mindfulness to manage physical symptoms & associated bad feelings.

Depends on the teenager. If they are going through a punk phase get a copy of "Dharma Punx" by Noah Levine, tut tut a lot while reading it, and leave it lying around where they might pick it up. As an appendix, it has the best one page description of meditation on the breath I've ever seen...

My latest foray into meditation is an attempt to cure myself of internet chess addiction. First I had to determine what it was that was bad about internet chess, if anything (!) Glancing at a book by a top meditator made it very clear to me what was wrong with it. B Alan Wallace suggests* that chess...

Anyway, yesterday after my yoga practice I noticed I had not registered any tinnitus at all during the yoga, so with any luck it might have been something temporary. I had the opposite experience, I started suffering from tinnitus after I gave up meditating. There are several books that discuss Min...