One of the biggest help with recovery from mental illness was learning how to do things differently in my head. In particular, learning how to NOT do things in my head was a tremendous help. Doing compulsions inside our heads is no different than doing them outside of our heads, so just like we might…
On my adventures exploring meditation retreats around the world this year, I was always looking for an opportunity to visit Plum Village, the Buddhist retreat centre established by Thich Nhat Hanh in the south of France as a place for refugees fleeing the Vietnam war to find peace and recovery. It has grown into a…
Over the past year, I’ve been exploring and researching different meditation modalities around the world to deepen my own practice and learn new techniques to share through my work. In January, I headed off to Bodh Gaya, in India’s Bihar state. It’s where the Buddha sat under the Bodhi Tree. A descendent of the original…
I just returned from a 7-day silent Chan meditation retreat at Dharma Drum Mountain in Taiwan, focused on the Silent Illumination technique of meditation. Basically, Silent Illumination or “just sitting”, is about, well, just sitting 🤣 It might differ from some other types of meditation you’re familiar with in that we’re not doing things like…
Don’t get into the habit of thinking there are good places for meditation or bad places. Like many things we do in the hope of making a task easier, we only create barriers when we insist we require something before we do something else. If you find you have trouble meditating in certain places, meditate…