I Should Be Meditating with Alan Klima: Guided Mindfulness Meditation and Discussion

Meditation is about more than Self-Improvement. That is only its possible side-effect. If we bend meditation to our will and make it serve us, the only definite side-effect is frustration. At some point the meditator will have to make the switch over to something bigger than their sense of "Selfyness" and to a longing for freedom that has been driving their interest in meditation all along.

In this guided meditation on the breath the emphasis is on receptivity, sensitivity, and opening. By offering up the breath sensations to the world to which they belong, we also cultivate an attitude of allowing everything to be as it is.

If you play with the edge between conscious deliberate attention and open awareness, your meditation in enhanced so that you can quickly find yourself in a state of ease.

This breath meditation explores the difference between when we consciously, deliberately feel the breath, and when we let it go and allow it to appear by itself. These two flavors of attention are great to recognize, and are easier to recognize by contrast. This meditation will make this clear on an experiential level and give you an attention tool so that you can adjust your meditating to changing circumstances.

A connection with the inner mental attitude is made, and then sustained, with this guided meditation that makes a sense of the inner mental attitude vivid and clear, and then helps you to maintain and sustain it. This is a great way to remain present, close and intimate with your home in this body and mind, and to extend your stay so that it becomes very clear to you what it is.

This guided meditation begins with a 3 step settling process and then explores feelings of exchanging the breath between the interior feeling of alive presence, and the greater world beyond the body, surrounding the body. It contains a balance and exchange between active enjoyment of the breath and surrender to whole world and universe in which the breath takes place.

Whenever possible, it is very powerful to recognize and confirm our effortless and fundamental right-ness. Some meditators have yet to catch a whiff of this, while all of us can vary in how easily it comes forward to our attention. This guided exploration moves through different levels of relaxing into presence. Each level is important for everyone to work with, so it doesn't matter if you have or have not caught a whiff of this fundamental okay-ness. It's all good work and you can trust that soon you will catch a whiff, or more, and we all can benefit from working on all fronts whenever those come forward as what we need attent to.

This guided meditation training is a great introduction to a basic tool in the mindfulness toolkit. It pinpoints a three step process which you can use repeatedly to bring you to focus. Train this a few times with this audio and it will stick with you as you go forward. And hint: it is great training preparation for meditation #45, coming soon.

Season 2 is Back with a Point that Cuts Straight at one of the Biggest Obstacles stopping us from getting what we want in meditation. It is a belief, a thought lodged in the mind, and if we just get past it a whole new world opens up for us, whether what we want is better focus, to be more productive, to be more present for our relationships or a spiritual goal, like enlightenment-- it is the same thought blocking us. And unblocking it is one of the main purposes of the ISBM podcast, so it's a fitting talk for the start of Season 2.

This guided contemplation points to something essential that every meditator must see and understand if they are to go beyond worry over wandering mind. There are many ways to deal with wandering thoughts, but the most important and most powerful is to see the knowing that is beyond wandering or not-wandering. Recognize this and your life will change. Recognize it more and more, and your life will change more and more.

What does "Life is an Illusion Mean" and what does it have to do with your electricity bill? I mean, you have your real life, while there are many spiritual statements that seem to indicate there is an ultimate reality and it is different than what we see as real and true now. In this talk, I want to show what the source of the confusion is here and how each and every one of us can get a clear sense, from our own direct experience, of what can be meant by such things as "moving from the unreal to the real" in meditation.

Making the body more accessible to us gives us a base point with which we can get perspective on excessive thinking, explore our emotions, and get communication from our body that leads us in beneficial directions. The body scan opens these lines of communication! Use it early and often.

The huge question of how to balance our striving in meditation practice opens a whole lot of possible things to say. In this talk however one very important point is made that before trying to work all that out, it is crucial to fully explore and surrender to single moments of allowing everything to just happen. And these moments should be kept separate from any plan, including how good it would be to do this! Including how to sustain it in time, how to stay with it, or how it relates to everyday life. Keep these special moments separate from all plans as much as possible. Then, we will be more open to the important two aspects of the rest of the question. 1. We have a planning and orienting energy, and it's there for a reason, and it can and should be used in some measure to go about our life, if it is arising for us. But we get out of balance when that energy captures our attention. 2. We don't have to figure out that balance by ourselves, life itself will show it to us and life itself will move us down the proper course. If we are open to it that may happen easier. But if we are not open, life will bite us until we get what it is telling us.

This guided meditation starts with a soothing breath to feel your way into the core of the breath-body and from your alive, sensitive presence, and then guides you to remain there, to enjoy your being now and to more easily return to it in the midst of busy life.

There is a natural joy always here. Where is it? This question is an important one that requires radical honesty to answer, yet it is otherwise simple and natural to get into contact with this fount of aliveness.