Insight Meditation

The fruit of some twenty years’ experience leading Buddhist meditation retreats, this book touches on a wide range of topics raised repeatedly by meditators and includes favorite stories, key Buddhist teachings, and answers to most-asked questions.

This book shows how we can move beyond secular mindfulness and compassion techniques to the cultivation of insight - seeing into and thereby becoming free of the repetitive thinking that keeps us trapped in cycles of suffering. Most books in the secular mindfulness tradition stop with mindfulness and self-compassion but do little to uncover the root causes of our suffering. Drawing on both Buddhist analyses of mind and current findings in psychology and neuroscience, the book explains how our thinking becomes fixed through our engaging with unconscious preferences and reactions.

This modern spiritual classic, presented as a 30-day meditation retreat taught by Joseph Goldstein, offers timeless practical instructions and real-world advice for practicing meditation - whether walking or sitting in formal practice or engaging in everyday life. Goldstein uses the retreat format to explain various basic Buddhist teachings including karma, selflessness, and the four noble truths, while also drawing connections to many different spiritual traditions.

Freedom from suffering is not only possible, but the means for achieving it are immediately within our grasp - literally as close to us as our own breath. This is the 2,500-year-old good news contained in the Anapanasati Sutra, the Buddha's teaching on cultivating both tranquility and deep insight through full awareness of breathing. In this book, Larry Rosenberg brings this timeless meditation method to life.

What is meditation? Why practice it? Which techniques are best? How do I do it? The answers to these often-asked questions are contained in this down-to-earth book, making it of enormous value for anyone who wishes to begin and maintain a meditation practice. Written by a Western Buddhist nun with solid experience in both the practice and teaching of meditation, How to Meditate contains a wealth of practical advice on a variety of authentic techniques.

A practical guide and map to the Anapanasati Sutta and Loving-Kindness Meditation (The Brahmaviharas). A new look at the practice of Mindfulness as it is taught only from the sutta texts of the Majjhima Nikaya. Bhante Vimalaramsi has found a step in the practice that has been left out. This book explains that step and the entire map of the Buddha's practice in a new way just using the sutta texts with no added commentaries. The Path to Nibbana is given to you right there in the suttas. Bhante has unlocked the code and practiced this technique and now shares it with the world. After 20 years...

Connect with the present moment in each movement. Award-winning author, meditation leader, and mental health advocate Nita Sweeney shows listeners that fitness can be mindfulness. She teaches listeners how to bring meditation and mindfulness into any activity by incorporating centuries-old techniques. Studies show that both exercise and meditation reduce anxiety, stabilize blood pressure, improve mood and cognition, and lead to a deeper self-relationship and wisdom. Movement is medicine, and meditation is medicine. Let's combine the two with exercise as meditation.

Welcome to the second book in the “Basic Meditations For Beginners” series. “Basic Meditations For Beginners: Insight Meditation” is a comprehensive guide designed to help beginners understand and practice insight meditation. This book demystifies the ancient practice of insight meditation, making it accessible and relevant to modern life. It provides clear, step-by-step instructions on how to incorporate this powerful practice into your daily routine. Authored by Spiritwalker, a lay Zen Priest with over 30 years of experience in practicing and teaching meditations, this book is a ...

What if you could cultivate the mind of a bodhisattva -- one who has dedicated one's life to the benefit of others? According to Pema Chödrön, best-selling author and American-born Buddhist nun, you can. On Bodhisattva Mind, she examines sheshin, or "guarding alertness", and the other qualities of mind we need to develop on the path to enlightenment.

What if you could go back and sit under a tree with the Buddha and listen to him giving his original meditation instructions? What did he teach over 2500 years ago, and are those original instructions valid for today’s practitioners? Most of us cannot travel through time, but we do have the records of the Buddha’s teachings in the Pali suttas. In this book, Mark Edsel Johnson, Ph.D., demonstrates that by following a meditation practice called Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation or TWIM, which is directly based on the records of the Buddha’s teachings, practitioners quickly experience ...

Buddhist master Achaan Chah spent years meditating in a forest monastery of Thailand. This remarkable book reflects his simple and powerful message as well as the quiet, joyful Buddhist practice of dhudanga, or "everyday mindfulness", with profound insights for the West.

Mindfulness and insight - clearly knowing what is happening in one's present moment experience - and concentration - the ability of the mind to remain steady and undistracted - are foundational elements of meditation, yet people are often confused about how these aspects of the practice fit together. Should they be doing insight meditation or concentration practices? How does concentration fit into insight meditation? To help, The Art and Skill of Buddhist Meditation offers specific guidance.

I set out to study and practice Vipassana meditation in India fifty years ago. Then, as now, I characterized myself as both a spiritual seeker and a writer. During the six months that I sojourned in meditation centers and monasteries, observing the strict rules of retreat, I nevertheless spent several hours a day feverishly filling notebooks by lamplight with tightly packed script legible only to me, recording my internal experiences.

Jung can change your life — if you can live him. Carl Gustav Jung’s ideas — Shadow, Persona, archetypes, dreams, and individuation — hold profound keys to self-understanding. Yet his writings are famously dense, leaving many intrigued but unsure how to begin. Living Jung makes his wisdom accessible. This daily reader offers 365 short reflections: a Jung quote, a clear explanation, and a simple practice for daily life. Across the year you will: Face your Shadow and uncover its hidden gifts. Recognize the masks you wear — and remove them. Meet the inner feminine and masculine. ...

Why do we suffer? Is there a purpose to our pain? Reflecting on his own journey from Esquire magazine editor-in-chief to Buddhist meditation teacher, Phillip Moffitt provides a fresh perspective on the Buddha's ancient wisdom, showing how to move from suffering to new awareness and unanticipated joy. With a strong message of self-empowerment, Dancing with Life offers a prescriptive path for finding joy and peace that will appeal to anyone searching for a more authentic life.

With deeply thoughtful, lyrical prose, this book invites listeners to engage with the world from a unique perspective that encourages feeling, intuitive understanding, embodiment, interdependence, and sacredness. Weaving together classical Theravada Buddhist teachings and mindfulness practices, the book teaches us when and how to channel our receptive and active orientations—sometimes called the feminine and masculine paradigms—to feel more at home in ourselves and the world and drop more deeply into the Buddhist teachings on suffering and happiness.

“Meditations” is a timeless guide to self-mastery, resilience, and inner peace. Written as a personal journal by a Roman emperor, it reveals profound insights on how to face adversity, manage emotions, and live with virtue. Each reflection offers practical wisdom for overcoming daily struggles and finding strength in discipline, clarity in thought, and calm in chaos. More than philosophy, it is a roadmap to a purposeful life—teaching us that true power lies not in controlling the world, but in mastering ourselves.

Discover the forty-four laws of life that are the missing link between the desire to meditate and the motivation needed to maintain a regular meditation practice, process the emotional fallout of meditative experiences, and find spiritual fulfillment. Biet Simkin knows from personal experience...

After three years of living his dream as a professional baseball pitcher, Mike Robbins had an arm injury that benched him for good, and when this happened, everything changed. He had to figure out who he was without the identity of "baseball player"-a process fraught with emotional highs and...

Thousands of years prove it, and Western science backs it: Meditation sharpens focus. Meditation lowers blood pressure, relieves chronic pain, reduces stress. Meditation helps us experience greater calm. Meditation connects us to our inner-most feelings and challenges our habits of self-judgment. Meditation helps protect the brain against aging and improves our capacity for learning new things. Meditation opens the door to real and accessible happiness. There is no better person to show a beginner how to harness the power of meditation than Sharon Salzberg....