Second Arrow
Mindful therapy

While self-compassion is undoubtedly important, kindness towards others is not only the right thing in a moral sense, but also therapeutic.

A striking fact about meditating on kindness is how little people do it. Even experienced meditators seem to avoid the practice

Meditation is a microcosm of life, in that you get to see how your mind works, do your best to manage it, and along the way find out what...

In my last post , I suggested that in meditation and in life you should hew to the cliché about putting one foot in front of the other ....

A lot of the time, meditation is no fun at all: you're tense, uncomfortable, distracted, and bored. You can't stay focussed on the...

The single most useful thing that I have learned from meditation is to feel my body, and to feel my emotions in my body. This is an...

My first silent retreat was challenging, and yet I have gone back for more again and again. Try your first silent retreat, and perhaps you w

Before I became a parent, I was pretty mindful. I meditated each morning for as long as I wanted, and I maintained my practice throughout...

I was practising in a very goal-focussed way for a while, aiming for kensho, which is the breakthrough experience of Zen, in which the...

Most people who are interested in mindfulness know that it comes from Buddhism. Fewer know, however, how far the modern, popular...

In my last-but-one post , I offered three general principles to apply when cultivating kindness in meditation. In this one, I'll be more...

In my last post, I made a rather speculative case for body awareness as a natural state, to which we should all wish to return. In this...

I've already written about how "bad" meditation is in fact invaluable because it teaches you how to relate to unpleasant things . But...

Cmichel67 (Christopher Michel), CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons First, let me say...

If you've read my last post , then hopefully you've started to work on building up some awareness of your emotions in the area of the...

To cultivate kindness, you really need to involve the body, and more specifically, the heart. Because that really does seem to be where...

I once read in a book about Zen that after you do the gardening, you should clean your tools with great gentleness and care. It's a nice...

The most basic benefit that you'll get from cultivating kindness in meditation is that it will help you to keep on meditating. Whereas...

I said in my last post that we don't need to split hairs or pick nits when it comes to kindness, but there is one nitpick/hairsplit that...

Warm, fuzzy feelings have always been an integral part of meditation and mindfulness, and not just because meditators are hippies....

So, you’ve learned how to meditate. Great. But now you face the big challenge of actually getting yourself to do it. Here are some tips...

What is mindfulness? There’s a lot that could be said about mindfulness, but let's start by saying that it means not being tangled up...

I've written already about what mindfulness is, and how meditation strengthens it, but why should you want it? If mindfulness is one of...