The Feldenkrais Method and the Posture of Meditation Sitting

Welcome to the Challenge… Call it a fascinating paradox: the Feldenkrais Method is often discovered as a last resort once the usual “practical” strategies are exhausted. Practical movement, either as a therapeutic or learning medium, is typically reduced up front to a mere exercise: displace something from here to here, enough times and with adequate […]

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Meditation Knee Pain: the Elephant in the Meditation Room…

Let me tell you about a small little moment that I experienced that was also something like a giant elephant. A few months ago I found myself sitting under a pavilion roof on the sand floor, with about fifty other meditators in Surat Thani, Thailand. We were about to begin a ten day meditation intensive. […]

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What’s Wrong with this Image of Meditation?

Take a look at this image of meditation… If you Google “meditation,” you’ll see hundreds of images of meditation just like it. (Take a second and try it, if you want.) The most obvious thing about it is how typical it is: a typical image of ‘someone having an a-typical experience.’ Meditation. You could imagine […]

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Interview with a Zafu Maker: Patrick Clark, Carolina Mornings

The following is an interview I did with Patrick Clark, a maker of meditation cushions, at Carolina Mornings Designs. I ran across their work when I was looking for well made, ecologically sensative, ergonomic meditation seating, and was really impresed. (I’m sitting on one of their zafu’s as we speak!) He has some really interesting […]

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Rotational Motion for Meditation

The image is of a cyr wheel! Full quote: “Ordinary life offers few opportunities to experience rotational motion. (Never mind for the nonce that we live on a rotating object.) In contrast, translational motion is with us all the time, e.g. when riding a car. But in the days of Galileo & Co., finely controlled translational motion was rare in people’s experience; this may explain why dynamics and in particular the law of inertia took long to discover.” —Tadashi Tokieda, mathematician

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What I Wish I Had Known as a Beginner at Meditation

The Reluctant Meditator I have to be honest, when I was beginning meditation I never really got it. I gave it a try because my Tai Chi instructor got into it, and started adding it into our practice. At the time I was already practicing Tai Chi two hours a day, and frankly, I just […]

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