Thinking, not thinking, and writing

Non-thinking is not the aim of meditation. An empty mind, if we could achieve it, would be a vegetative state, not a productive one. But taking up meditation is an acknowledgement that much of our thinking is counterproductive to good living. So what, ideally, should our minds contain when we meditate?In meditation, we’re replacing conscious thoughts with sensory experience. When a thought arises...

How and why to meditate

After a few decades of daily meditation, in 2024 I became certified as a mindfulness and meditation instructor at my Buddhist home, the Zen Life and Meditation Center of Chicago. Since then I've received plenty of questions about meditation from people who've been paralyzed by the many varieties of meditative practice that appear in a web search. You want to know if I can boil it down to a few...