daily meditation practice

hi friends!

one of the things i'm really engaged in right now is my meditation practice and study of Buddhism. i've been, nominally, a Buddhist for some time, about ten years or so, but my practice has always been pretty sketchy. in April of this year, in the midst of some Big Feelings, i decided to get serious about it. to that end i did a bunch of research and decided i needed a teacher and a sangha, or group of practitioners. i did a bunch of research and was extremely pleased to find that Grand Junction, despite not being a Buddhist hotbed by any means, had a regular Zen group called Dharma Mountain. i've been going regularly ever since and have found it to be a welcoming environment that is a tremendous asset to my practice.

and what is my practice, you might ask? i do a couple of things. most regularly i do concentration practice, which is often referred to by the Pali word jhana. basically it's a practice that focuses intently on one subject, in this case the breath, and trains the mind to focus on it unwaveringly for whatever time amount one decides upon beforehand. for me, it's about 25 minutes at a time, twice a day. this is my core practice, and from what modern scholarship can tell about the time period of Early Buddhism, this is likely something similar to what the historical Buddha practiced and taught himself.

i find this video to be a good description of zazen, or the basic Zen meditation. i don't always do this technique; i'm usually doing the one described above, but i do sit in this way (half lotus all the way!) and find this description helpful.

i use Insight Timer to track my meditation and share when i've finished on my twitter. feel free to friend me on either platform!

i'm sure i'll have a lot more to say about all of this, but for now, this is a quick and dirty overview of where i practice and what i practice.