©2005-2025 Mark A. Foote
I have a neighbor who is interested in sitting with me. He has never practiced any kind of meditation before, apart from a failed attempt to sit cross-legged with me over a year ago.
This time around, I will offer him a chair.
I find myself wondering what advice, if any, I should give him. The advice most zendos give beginners is to “follow ...
In one of his letters, twelfth-century Ch’an teacher Yuanwu wrote:
Actually practice at this level for twenty or thirty years and cut off all the verbal demonstrations and creeping vines and useless devices and states, until you are free from conditioned mind. Then this will be the place of peace and bliss where you stop and rest.
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Modern neuroscience now includes the study of the “bodily self”:
A key aspect of the bodily self is self-location, the experience that the self is localized at a specific position in space within one’s bodily borders (embodied self-location).
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