At one of the small group meetings I was at last week while on a retreat on the Dzogchen tradition of Vajrayana Buddhism, a woman sitting beside me asked one of the lamas something like whether there was any dancing in Buddhism, particularly any dynamic, moving practices with a strong physical aspect, like dancing, to [...]
Continue reading about Buddhists Don’t Dance – At Least Not the Ones I Know…
My wife Judy and I have just completed a 6-day retreat on Dzogchen approaches to liberation with lama Tsoknyi Rinpoche, held at Mt. Madonna Conference Center. Now it’s a couple of days of camping in a redwood park to cool down, before jumping fully back into ordinary life, but I’ve been reflecting a lot and [...]
Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Lecture 4, Part 3 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here. CTT: What else did people experience this week? Student: I thought it was easy to verbalize my sensations during the meditation, versus having my eyes closed. So verbalizing for me was easier [...]
Continue reading about Using Words to Focus Attention: Noting and Labeling
Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Lecture 4, Part 1 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here. CTT: A couple classes ago, I talked about an aspect of meditation practice, or spiritual practice in general, that I don’t usually talk about because it felt more personal; and yet it [...]
Continue reading about Setting the Stage for the First Meditation
Friday night and Saturday morning (March 12, 2011), my wife and I participated in two telephone-conference type meditation trainings/explorations led by Shinzen Young (www.shinzen.org ). This morning’s focused on what Shinzen describes, in his most up-to-date, comprehensive reworking of the language of meditation practices, as Focus on All. In this form of vipassana, the basic [...]
Continue reading about A Curious Effect of Meditation? Smarter and Faster? Just Coincidence?
I have been discussing with colleagues how the models we have, explicit or implicit, of what is possible and desirable, can affect how we function, even if we don’t know we have such models. With respect to “meditation,” I thought it might be interesting to share one of the communications I have sent to my [...]
Continue reading about Models of Meditation and How They Might Affect Us
After a long meditation retreat last month, my curiousity about one aspect of my meditation exprience led me to write the following little query about images. I’ve submitted it to the Journal of Consciousness Studies Online site, and if they accept it I may get some “expert” reflections on it, or I may get some [...]
Continue reading about Where Do All Those Images and Dreamlets Come From?
Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Lecture 4, Part 11 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here. CTT: The mindfulness traditions claim they’ll take you all the way to enlightenment. And we certainly have historical examples of people who are considered Buddhas or saints or something like that, who [...]
Continue reading about Meditation’s Five Percenters and Guruhood as a Way of Earning a Living
Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Lecture 4, Part 10 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here. Student: I think you can bypass the mundane with anything, really. Can people do it because they’re drunk on Jesus too? Too drunk to recognize their family problems? And they do it [...]
Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Lecture 4, Part 9 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here. Student: Is that where the subpersonalities come in? And do we maybe need to acknowledge it and then let it go? I wonder. Student: So you have to be somebody before you [...]