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Writing and Healing Prompt: Locating a Potential for Change
The idea here, coming out of Matthieu Ricard’s instructions in Why Meditate? is to establish a motivation—a why—right at the beginning. His first suggested meditation, “A Vow to Transform,” included in his preliminary instructions, brings together many of the early ideas from his book—especially this notion that change is both desirable and possible—for any of us—for all of us. Though he presents it as one paragraph in his book, I’m presenting it here in 5 pieces—2 questions and 3 pieces of advice. And, of course, you could adapt this...
Why Meditate? by Matthieu Ricard: Preliminary Instructions
My copy of Why Meditate? has arrived and I am reading it slowly, trying to become at least a beginning student of meditation, and at the same time think about what writing and meditation might have to do with each other. After a chapter on the why of meditation—with much of the material similar to his video on the art of meditation that I’ve been writing about—Ricard begins the much longer “How to Meditate” section with preliminary instructions and offers six pieces of advice. I’m going to write about...
The Art of Meditation, Part 4: The Mind as Translator
I’m returning to “The Art of Meditation,” and to a quote from the video that I wrote about last week. But now I’m looking at a metaphor that Matthieu Ricard uses: the mind as translator. We aspire to be free from suffering and to find some happiness. There are outer and inner conditions to that. The outer conditions—we ought to improve them as much as possible. But if we know that the way our mind experiences that, the way our mind translates the outer condition as happiness or...
The Art of Meditation by Matthieu Ricard, Part 3
After Matthieu Ricard talks about his own deep goal and motivation for meditation and after he compares it to the kind of training we’re already familiar with for athletes and musicians, he begins to set up an argument for why meditation might be beneficial. To set up this argument, he poses a question which is also the first question in his book, Why Meditate? Is change desirable? I like how fundamental this question is—how he starts with something very basic. And I find two of his arguments in response...
The Art of Meditation, Part 2: Motivation
In order to write more about Matthieu Ricard’s video, The Art of Meditation, I decided to start watching it over from the beginning—and I realized I’d neglected an important piece of context in the preliminaries: the why of it—his deep goal and motivation. He introduces the clip by saying he’s just come from the [Diverse] Economic Forum. “Unless,” he says, “we bring a more altruistic society—this is no more a luxury—this is an absolute necessity. So how to do that? The point is to find the connection between the...
Writing and Healing Prompt: Choose a Word
This follows from last week’s writing prompt and also from coming across a post recently by Sharon Bray. She’s an author and teacher who posts weekly writing prompts at her site, Writing Through Cancer; she wrote a lovely post in January about choosing a word for the entire year. You can consciously choose a word (or two) that you want to explore and consider and define. Here are some possible words: contentment, delight, patience, kindness, healing, recovery, grief, sorrow, peace, reprieve, time, impermanence, death, love, compassion, success, regret, guilt, ...