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

How do I stop thinking so much? It's a question with the wrong target, pointed in the wrong direction. In this live Q & A recording a meditator asks the question that naturally arises to anyone who tries to meditate. A question that is always going to come up from time to time for everyone. Naturally we may seek to stop or reduce thought because it seems to be something that's not great for us, to say the least. But is this so? Or is there nothing wrong with thought itself, and what we truly want is just to not suffer our thoughts. Explore the important pointer in this talk.

Use this guided meditation to contact the layer of basic, innocent sensitivity with which we receive all the echoes and reverberations of emotion in our body.

Wandering thoughts can be part of the meditation. Then there is no such thing as distraction! Just as important, with this noting thoughts mindfulness practice we can get increasingly clear on understanding the nature of thought, distinguishing it from bodily sensation, and becoming aware of what we are actually thinking. All this gives us a leg up on the sometimes confusing swirl of thoughts and feelings that happens in some of our emotional states.

Another favorite back again in a new form-- whole body breathing. And here breath meditation and the recognition of simple presence are combined in this guided audio that is a great initiation into simply being.

Fresh perspectives are great for practice. Variety can be a spice of Meditation! This talk explores the meaning of "meditation techniques" and shows how a variety of ways of attending to our experience is immensely helpful in sustaining a practice within a busy modern life. Most important, is doing it consistently, and variety and freshness helps this immensely. The best meditation is the one that gets done!

This guided meditation teaches a valuable tool for seeing the motion and change in body sensations, and is worth practicing often as a way to enter into a more comfortable relationship with sensation as well as explore and verify when our attention to body sensations is properly vivid.

Playing with meditation is a natural way to stay engaged, and in these exercises you can play along with Alan at knowing and noticing thought and recognizing our awareness itself. Rather than trying to figure it out, better to play around with it and gain direct experience. There is actually quite a lot of potential here to recognize our already present, always knowing awareness.

There are not only two kinds of breath: deliberate and automatic. There is a whole spectrum between and in fact our understanding of intention is much better felt, sensed, and experienced than defined in words. This breath meditation explores the realities of our relationship with the breath and is a powerful way to come to the stillness that sees it all.

The idea can reach a meditator that we must stare straight into suffering without flinching, and also not be attached to pleasure. This is usually not a skillful idea and is not good for mindfulness practice. In this talk, we are pointed in another direction, toward our simply being present and the inherent joy of that, an acquired taste we should be gaining. Resisting pleasure and stoically facing our suffering can be like turning a deaf ear to this.

This lesson and guided meditation practices the art of checking our inner mental attitude. It is a good lesson to go through at least once to investigate our awareness of something intimate and powerful, that colors our every experience. Change your attitude, change your life!

Delve into the intimate and subtle feelings of the heart region, use the breath to explore and bring to light what it is that we are feeling. A simple and fundamental pointing to what meditation can be: actually feel what you feel.

Sensitizing the awareness to walking and the feet is a great meditation and complement to sitting meditation. Learn this meditation here, or refresh your connection to it with this guided walkthrough of walking meditation.

Starting with a grounded sense of the body, this breath meditation explores breathing into and from a sense of presence, and has a contemplative benefit to it as well as a centering effect.

Commitment to the moment is to the moment alone, and does not even include committing to meditation or any future endeavor or even to future moments, and it is not regret about past moments lost to distraction. In this guided contemplation we explore presence and distraction in the light of what is immediate and real.

Bodies are made up mostly of space, on the atomic level, and the sensations in our body can be experienced as space-like, giving us a new perspective on them, taking our sensitivity deeper, and helping us accept and make room for our denser, more challenging sensations and pains to release.