We had our Sunday Introduction to Meditation Class at Yoga Bliss yesterday.  We’ve been working with the four foundations of mindfulness:   awareness of the body, feeling tone, thoughts, emotions and then all phenomena.   We drew our practice inspiration from B. Alan Wallace’s Minding Closely:  The Four Applications of Mindfulness.  We included two practice periods and a walking meditation.

We used Alan’s guided meditation On the Elements:  earth, water, fire and air.  We directed our attention to the tactile experiences of solidity, fluidity, relative heat and coolness and lightness and movement.  In studying these experiences we investigated whether they were stable and unchanging.  Alan asks:

As you attend to all the subtle and coarse movements within the field, is there anything that suggests ownership? Or are these merely emergences of motion, arising within a tactile field to which you have privileged access?

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We had our Sunday Introduction to Meditation Class at Yoga Bliss yesterday.  We’ve been working with the four foundations of mindfulness:   awareness of the body, feeling tone, thoughts, emotions and then all phenomena.   We drew our practice inspiration from B. Alan Wallace’s Minding Closely:  The Four Applications of Mindfulness.  We included two practice periods and a walking meditation.

We used Alan’s Mindfulness of the Body practice in which we scanned the body’s tactile sensations in three dimensions.  We used the in-breath to enhance our awareness of feeling in the area of focus and then moved to a different location with the out breath.  Body scanning is a common stress reduction technique.  This approach is unique in the way it expanded focus in three dimensions.  This novelty helped students enhance and sustain their attention.

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We had our Sunday Introduction to Meditation Class at Yoga Bliss yesterday.  We’ve been working with the four foundations of mindfulness:   awareness of the body, feeling tone, thoughts, emotions and then all phenomena.   We drew our practice inspiration from B. Alan Wallace’s Minding Closely:  The Four Applications of Mindfulness.  We included two practice periods and a walking meditation.

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We had our Sunday Introduction to Meditation Class at Yoga Bliss yesterday.  We’ve been working with the four foundations of mindfulness:   awareness of the body, feeling tone, thoughts, emotions and then all phenomena.   We drew our practice inspiration from B. Alan Wallace’s Minding Closely:  The Four Applications of Mindfulness.  We included two practice periods and a walking meditation.

In meditation we work with the mind to establish cognitive balance, a direct experience of equanimity.  Alan describes balance as having two critical aspects:   seeing the impermanent as impermanent and differentiating the true sources of happiness from false ones.  In cultivating mindfulness we first focus on the “the body and physical sense fields”; then attend to feelings of pleasure, pain and indifference; then events arising in mental domain; finally to the space of all phenomena and their interdependent relationships.

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