Meditation is a process of gradually coming to know your own mind, coming to rest in a state of non-distraction where you release all sense of hope and fear, cease to alter your mind with thoughts, sensations and emotions, and learn to simply be, mindful, aware and spacious.
When you hear the name, Michael Imperioli, many of you may think of the actor who played the part of Christopher Moltisanti on the hit series, The Sopranos. What many of you may not know is that Michael is also a committed practitioner of meditation and practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism.
How do we meditate on compassion for politicians when we’re completely fed up with politics as usual, or when our preferred party doesn’t seem to be getting it right (or maybe our least preferred party seems to be getting it “wrong!”) Try these four steps:
For many of us, when we begin to meditate (or even if we've meditated for a while), we can experience a certain amount of "failure" while trying to meditate. Even if we've been successful in the past, our efforts may be met with what we believe to be failure. But, what if failure weren't an option? What if there was no such thing as "failing" at meditation? What if meditation included failing to meditate?
Do your feelings and emotions rule you? If you're like me or if...you're human, then you've probably experienced anger, sadness, jealousy (or envy?), or emotional exhaustion. And, if you're like me, you're happy and grateful when those emotional states and feelings go away, right?! What do you do when you experience strong emotions? How do you deal with difficult feelings that just won't go away? What do you do when these experiences persist even when you try to push them away?
What is meditation anyway? (Do you get tired of me asking this?) Do people even know what meditation is? What I hear when I talk with people in my day-to-day life are things like, "Learning to meditate takes too long," and, "I tried but couldn't stop thinking," and, "I'm not religious." Yikes! People don't know what the hell meditation is! Here are a few things meditation isn't. If any of them are familiar to you, welcome to the club. If some of these seem obvious, read on. Most people get hung up on what they believe meditation is and never [...]
This week's Meditation Tip of the Week will be preempted with a special announcement: It's radio interview time!! In the spirit of helping others to help others to help themselves, I'd like to encourage you all to listen in to the live radio interview that will be happening on Monday, August 6th, at 9pm EST. If you can't listen to the live broadcast, please feel free to listen to the archived interview, it's sure to be an entertaining evening. RN.FM Radio is the brainchild of Keith Carlson and Kevin Ross, two nurse-entrepreneurs, who are working to empower nurses to speak [...]
And can nursing change the world...? I have to say that somewhere in my heart, I hold the aspiration to "change the world." Not in a Gandhi or Mother Theresa kind of way; those individuals are as rare as stars in the daylight. I'm thinking more about making a small contribution to the world, something that can make a difference to a few people who can then in turn, bring benefit to others. As a nurse, it's easy to get caught up in the "caring" aspect of nursing while forgetting that every time you care for someone from a "meditative" [...]
This post is inspired by my friend Erric Solomon, blogger and administrator on the site, What Meditation Really Is. His post, Ten Reasons Why We Should Never Meditate, inspired me to write a similar post. I know that this site is loaded with advice and how to meditate, where to meditate and why you should meditate. But...maybe you shouldn't meditate. Maybe meditation is really a waste of time, a waste of time that you could be using for other things like surfing the internet, watching TV or playing video games (the list goes on, doesn't it?!) Here is a list, [...]
t's funny but there are so many concepts and ideas about what meditation is that we can get caught up in the definition of it all while forgetting to practice. Does it matter what you call it if you're doing it? Or, do you need to have a word for it to understand what you're doing?