Second Arrow
Mindful therapy

“Relax”, said the yoga teacher. “Clear your mind. Open up to the space of pure Being”. This is what many people’s first exposure to...

Lately I've been running into a dilemma that is familiar to many modern meditators: should I do exactly as the teacher tells me? What if...

Since my Zen retreat the other week, I've been thinking about the relationship between catharsis and Awakening. I've experienced a fair...

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 very much enjoyed this podcast - https://fitmind.com/podcast-collection/ruben-laukkonen-neuroplasticity-meditation  - in which Ruben...

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...

There is a story from one or another spiritual tradition in which a great yogi dwells upon a mountaintop, meditating ceaselessly. One...

I did one of these retreats a couple of weeks ago - https://zenways.org/event/breakthrough-zen-retreat-online/- and it felt quite powerful.

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...