Meditation for Beginners
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About this ebook
Step-by-Step Instruction for Newcomers to Meditation
Have you ever thought about trying meditation, but didn't know how to get started? On Meditation for Beginners, renowned teacher Jack Kornfield uses clear language and step-by-step guidance to show us how to start—and stick with—a daily meditation practice. From the basics of how to get started to dealing with distractions, this complete course introduces us to the Insight tradition of meditation that has helped practitioners throughout the ages cultivate profound inner calm and a lasting capacity for happiness.
Available in three formats, Meditation for Beginners offers us a variety of entry points into this life-changing practice. In the DVD edition, we join Jack in a live 99-minute session that brings you the experience of a meditation retreat in your living room. With the integrated book with online audio tracks version, Jack shares teachings based on the original video program plus six guided practices on audio. The two-CD audio program distills the information from the DVD and book, providing four guided meditations for those ready to dive right in to practice. Topics covered in each program include:
- How to use breathing, posture, and attention to enter the meditative state
- Simple and effective strategies for dealing with "busy brain," and other common challenges in meditation
- How meditation can help you deepen compassion, find healing through forgiveness, and dissolve your fear of death
- Four cornerstone meditations for your practice—from resting in the moment to experiencing lovingkindness, and more
With his gentle delivery and ability to translate ancient practices for modern audiences, Jack Kornfield has become one of the most accessible and sought-after teachers for helping first-time meditators get their start. Now you can begin to develop the foundational skills to start your practice immediately—and discover the life-changing power of meditation for yourself—with Meditation for Beginners.
Editor's Note
Thanksgiving…
The holidays are simultaneously the most wonderful time and the most stressful time of the year. Keep your stress levels low with some basic meditation exercises, which you can learn here.
Jack Kornfield
Jack Kornfield, PhD, is one of the best known, most respected meditation teachers in the world. A psychologist and founder of two of the largest Buddhist centers and communities in America, he is one of the key teachers to introduce mindfulness to the West. His books, which include A Path with Heart; After the Ecstasy, the Laundry; and The Wise Heart, are classics, selling well over a million copies, and translated into twenty-one languages. Jack has taught at major universities and centers worldwide, including Harvard, Stanford, UCLA, and Berkeley; he teaches regular classes to four hundred at Spirit Rock in Marin County and to large crowds nationwide at retreats, conferences, and events. To learn more, please visit: JackKornfield.com or SpiritRock.org.
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Book preview
Meditation for Beginners - Jack Kornfield
device.
ONE
The Ancient Art of Meditation
MEDITATION FOR BEGINNERS offers the central training and teachings found in the best Buddhist monasteries translated for Western society. In Meditation for Beginners, you will find some of the simplest and most universal of these practices of meditation—in particular, the practices of mindfulness and lovingkindness. An integral part of this instruction will be the six fundamental meditation practices included on the enclosed CD. These guided meditations were recorded at actual meditation retreats and are designed to give you a direct experience of the material presented in this book.
The point of these teachings has nothing to do with becoming a Buddhist, or learning any Eastern ceremonies or rituals or bowing. What is important is that you learn how to work with meditation in order to find benefits from it in your life. When we take time to quiet ourselves, we can all sense that our lives could be lived with greater compassion and greater wakefulness. To meditate is to support this inner potential and allow it to come forth into our lives.
There are many good forms of meditation practice. A good meditation practice is any one that develops awareness or mindfulness of our body and our senses, of our mind and heart. It does not really matter which kind you choose. What is more important is that after you choose a form of meditation you stay with it, and practice it regularly. Meditation takes discipline, just like learning how to play the piano. If you want to learn how to play the piano, it takes more than just a few minutes a day, once in a while, here and there. If you really want to learn any important skill—whether it is playing the piano or meditation—it grows with perseverance, patience, and systematic training.
So pick a type of meditation that appeals to you and practice it. Work with it every day, and work with a teacher if you can, or find circumstances where you can sit together with other people. In the process of practicing regularly, you will begin to develop your capacity to open to the present moment. You will begin to develop patience and compassion when you sit regularly, and you will open to everything that is here.
Meditation for Beginners will present the most important basic exercises for mindfulness meditation, also called vipassana practice, the heart of Buddhist meditation. Vipassana (a Pali word meaning to see things as they really are
) is the most widely practiced form of meditation in southeast Asia and is central to all Buddhist traditions. This practice emphasizes mindful attention, developing an immediate awareness of one’s experience in all spheres of activity.
The meditations in Meditation for Beginners are designed to help you shine the light of mindfulness on every aspect of your daily experience—and to show you how to extend the healing power of lovingkindness to yourself and others. Mindfulness practice is also called insight meditation.
It does not seek to focus attention on a meditative image of Buddha, or a deity, or a light, or a candle, or sacred words. Instead, through mindfulness we discover a way to develop a stillness in the midst of activity. Then, even the most mundane, repetitive experiences—such as eating, walking, or answering the phone—can be drawn into the field of meditative awareness, included in the practice of mindfulness. In this way, our meditation is not an exercise that we do every once in a while, but rather a way of being that we can carry with us every moment of our days.
Mindfulness helps train us to be more present and alive for whatever we meet to develop what Alan Watts describes as the art of living
: The art of living ... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past ... on the other. It consists in being completely sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.
To begin to meditate is to look into our lives with interest and kindness and discover how to be wakeful and free. We have so many ideas and beliefs about ourselves. We tell ourselves stories about what we want and who we are, smart or kind. Often these are the unexamined and limited ideas of others that we have internalized and then gone on to live out. To meditate is to discover new possibilities, to awaken the capacity that each of us has to live more wisely, more lovingly, more compassionately, and more fully.
TWO
Why Meditate?
HERE IS A story told about the Buddha shortly after he was enlightened. As he was walking down the dusty road he met a traveler who saw him as a handsome yogi exuding a remarkable energy. The traveler asked him, You seem very special. What are you? Are you some kind of an angel or deva? You seem unhuman.
No,
he said. Well, are you some kind of god then?
No,
he said. Well, are you some kind of wizard or magician?
No,
he replied. Well, are you a man?
No.
Then what are you?
At this the Buddha answered, I am awake.
In those three words—I am awake
—he gave the whole of Buddhist teachings. The word buddha
means one who is awake. To be a buddha is to be one who has awakened to the nature of life and death, and who has awakened and freed one’s compassion in the midst of this world.
The practice of meditation does not ask us to become a Buddhist or a meditator or a spiritual person. It