The Just Meditation Blog
Corny as it may sound, I have always wanted to be a writer. As a teenager I dreamt of writing a great work of philosophy, the definitive once and for all answer to the big questions about the meaning of life.
Needless to say I didn’t get very far.
In my late teens and early twenties I...
Meditation can, in theory, be practised anytime and anywhere – but it usually helps to choose a time and a place that is reasonably quiet and where you are unlikely to be disturbed or interrupted. It is not essential to meditate in a location that is completely silent. If it were, very few...
The reasons people give for wanting to meditate vary widely, but they tend to fall into one of two general categories that can be summarised in terms of relaxation, on the one hand, and self-improvement on the other. Together these form a spectrum that has the attainment of peace at one end and...
Why do we meditate? Well, there are lots of reasons. But two in particular stand out. Calming the mind and seeing things more clearly. These are two of the principal outcomes of meditation, and they can be of benefit to us in a variety of ways. For example, calming the mind helps us to be better...
I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard people say, I’m not very good at meditating, or I can’t meditate, or words to that effect. It’s nonsense. Anyone can meditate. Admittedly, you have to want to do it, and it’s no good if you don’t, but with very...
Review of Into Great Silence (Die Große Stille), dir. Philip Gröning
Unlikely as it may seem, the hidden life of the Carthusians has been brought to the big screen. But don’t go to the cinema expecting a history lesson, or a fly-on-the-wall documentary about life in a monastery....
Meditation is essentially the practice of taking the focus of our attention away from ourselves, away from our own thoughts, away from the constructs of self that our thoughts make manifest, away from our illusions and attachments – even if only for a few moments. And by doing this, we...
Suddenly, in about 2014, everyone was talking about mindfulness. Although derived from Buddhist meditation practices, mindfulness achieved such unprecedented levels of mainstream popularity that many people may not even be aware of its Buddhist origins. The story of how this came about is,...
