I Should Be Meditating with Alan Klima: Guided Mindfulness Meditation and Discussion

The states of mind we generate through meditation are like all states that come and go. If they don’t last, what’s the point of meditation? This talk explores two reasons why temporary states of equanimity through meditation help us to recognize our fundamental, always present and unshaken stillness, and also break the cycles of negativity. […] The post Talk 8: After I Meditate, It Goes Away appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

This guided meditation focuses on the inner mental attitude, on becoming intimately familiar with it. By reinforcing our connection of attention with the inner mental attitude, we head off cycles of negative thought and emotion sooner, naturally, and effortlessly. This practice sets this positive influence in our lives in motion. Practice it often! Good thing […] The post 32: Intimate with Your Inner Mental Attitude appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

  Use this when you don’t have a lot of time but want to be consistent with your practice and not skip a day. Or as a quick pick-me-up anytime you need to re-establish intimate contact with your breath again. Then again, when is that not a good thing to do? The post 31: Short Guided Meditation on the Breath appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

Use this meditation to stabilize the mind and focus in on a single meditation point. While this classic meditation is understood in the west to be merely for enhancing ones mental powers of concentration, in fact it has a direct connection to the development of wisdom and insight into our presence and freedom. This guided […] The post 30: Guided Meditation for Focus and Presence appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

A Questioner asks: what’s going on with chattering little thoughts all the time while feeling the breath? Should we attend to these chattering thoughts? The practical answer to this question parallels the very purpose of meditation and the very meaning of freedom. This talk points in this direction even alongside the related issue of long, […] The post Talk 7: Chattering Thoughts and Loud Thoughts appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

A guided meditation on sustaining the presence of sensations also leads us deeper into understanding the practical meaning of “mindfulness” and what is awareness. This meditation practices the ability to keep a meditation object present by getting clear on what is the precise action that we do to make that happen. At the same time, […] The post 28: Continuity of Sensation Shows Us What is Mindfulness appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

Mindfulness and Awareness can mean two very different things– what is the benefit we meditators can have from drawing this distinction? What does it point to? The post Talk 6: What is Awareness? appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

This guided meditation focuses on the natural support we already have in our practice, on recognizing the awareness that is always there. Meditation need not be a lot of striving and effort– we can recognize this and relax into awareness and relax into the fact that it can do the work of mindfulness for us. The post 26: Letting Awareness Do the Work of Meditation appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

Half guided meditation, half talk, this intro to the inner mental attitude explores something that colors all of our experience. While we can’t monitor our attitude indefinitely, even by knowing it only sometimes we can turn our whole life around. The post Talk 5: Knowing your Inner Mental Attitude appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

Scan the breath with this meditation that travels along the core path of breath sensations. It’s a massage for the body, from the inside! And it also helps us explore the inner regions of our body where we store emotional traces. This can be a key tool in finding your bridge between breath and intimate […] The post 24: Follow the Path of the Breath guided meditation appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

How do I stop thinking so much? It’s a question with the wrong target, pointed in the wrong direction. In this live Q & A recording a meditator asks the question that naturally arises to anyone who tries to meditate. A question that is always going to come up from time to time for everyone. […] The post Talk 4: Where Can I Stop Thinking? appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

Use this guided meditation to contact the layer of basic, innocent sensitivity with which we receive all the echoes and reverberations of emotion in our body. The post 22 Breathe into Your Emotional Core appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

Wandering thoughts can be part of the meditation. Then there is no such thing as distraction! Just as important, with this noting thoughts mindfulness practice we can get increasingly clear on understanding the nature of thought, distinguishing it from bodily sensation, and becoming aware of what we are actually thinking. All this gives us a […] The post 21 Mindfulness of Thoughts appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

Another favorite back again in a new form– whole body breathing. And here breath meditation and the recognition of simple presence are combined in this guided audio that is a great initiation into simply being. The post 20 Breathing into Your Presence guided meditation appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

Fresh perspectives are great for practice. Variety can be a spice of Meditation! This talk explores the meaning of “meditation techniques” and shows how a variety of ways of attending to our experience is immensely helpful in sustaining a practice within a busy modern life. Most important, is doing it consistently, and variety and freshness […] The post Talk 3: One Technique or Many? appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

This guided meditation teaches a valuable tool for seeing the motion and change in body sensations, and is worth practicing often as a way to enter into a more comfortable relationship with sensation as well as explore and verify when our attention to body sensations is properly vivid. The post 18 Exploring Sensations of Change in the Body appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

Playing with meditation is a natural way to stay engaged, and in these exercises you can play along with Alan at knowing and noticing thought and recognizing our awareness itself. Rather than trying to figure it out, better to play around with it and gain direct experience. There is actually quite a lot of potential […] The post 17 Mindfulness Games appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

There are not only two kinds of breath: deliberate and automatic. There is a whole spectrum between and in fact our understanding of intention is much better felt, sensed, and experienced than defined in words. This breath meditation explores the realities of our relationship with the breath and is a powerful way to come to […] The post 16 Letting the Breath Go guided meditation appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

The idea can reach a meditator that we must stare straight into suffering without flinching, and also not be attached to pleasure. This is usually not a skillful idea and is not good for mindfulness practice. In this talk, we are pointed in another direction, toward our simply being present and the inherent joy of […] The post Talk 2: Face the Suffering or Turn to Joy? appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

This lesson and guided meditation practices the art of checking our inner mental attitude. It is a good lesson to go through at least once to investigate our awareness of something intimate and powerful, that colors our every experience. Change your attitude, change your life! The post 14 Awareness of our Inner Mental Attitude appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

Delve into the intimate and subtle feelings of the heart region, use the breath to explore and bring to light what it is that we are feeling. A simple and fundamental pointing to what meditation can be: actually feel what you feel. The post 13 Feel What You Feel guided meditation ISBM appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

Sensitizing the awareness to walking and the feet is a great meditation and complement to sitting meditation. Learn this meditation here, or refresh your connection to it with this guided walkthrough of walking meditation. The post 12 Walking Meditation appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

Starting with a grounded sense of the body, this breath meditation explores breathing into and from a sense of presence, and has a contemplative benefit to it as well as a centering effect. The post 11 Grounded Body Breath guided meditation appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

Commitment to the moment is to the moment alone, and does not even include committing to meditation or any future endeavor or even to future moments, and it is not regret about past moments lost to distraction. In this guided contemplation we explore presence and distraction in the light of what is immediate and real. The post 10 Contemplation of Commitment and Distraction appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

Bodies are made up mostly of space, on the atomic level, and the sensations in our body can be experienced as space-like, giving us a new perspective on them, taking our sensitivity deeper, and helping us accept and make room for our denser, more challenging sensations and pains to release. The post 9 Body of Space, Space of Body Guided Meditation appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

Learn mindfulness on whole body breathing, a very deep meditation that gains us access and sensitivity to the body. It can also be deeply healing. The post 8 Whole Body Breath guided meditation appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

Meditation that prepares the body and mind for sleep, using a guided body scan leading into a guided rest in a natural effortless awareness. Great as a regular sitting meditation when we are stressed and over-energized too! The post 7 Guided Sleep Body Scan Meditation appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

One of the first, best tools that a meditator can acquire is an awareness of attention itself, and a way to experiment and play with, and investigate, attention. In this guided exploration we will develop a taste for attention and an awareness of some of its behaviors. The post Guided Meditation 6: Attention to Attention appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

Today’s guided body scan meditation is medium-length, definitely enough to sink very deeply into awareness of the body. This is one of the fundamental practices of meditation, because it sensitizes us in a way that helps any other kind of meditation we do. Mindfulness of the body helps us come out of excessive thinking, deal […] The post Guided Body Scan Meditation – 35 min. appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

This 10 Minute Guided Mediation on the Breath gets us directly in touch with our feeling presence and resets the day, readies us for the day, or prepares us for night. The post 10 Minute Breath Meditation appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

There is more to breath meditation than “Pay Attention to the Natural Breath.” This talk explores some of the ways to play with and experiment with the breath that are equally “mindful” as the more common instruction, and have surprising extra benefits. This talk goes with the last guided meditation and helps start the inquiry […] The post Talk 1: Should I Use a Natural or a Pleasant Breath? appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

This Breath Meditation is much more effective and enjoyable than simply “paying attention to the breath.” Find out how much fun and fascination is possible with this mindful breathing meditation. Just follow along. The post Guided Breath Meditation in a New Way appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

When we are assailed by thinking, it seems like thought is big and we are surrounded by thought, engulfed by thought. Or even when the mind is just plain noisy, this meditation helps really experience the smallness of thought and gives us a clear perspective on thinking. With this meditation on space and thinking, the […] The post Be the Space of Thought appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.

Every meditator encounters the challenge of rampant thinking, and the stresses it sinks into the body and the many ways it colors our experience. Coming to clarity, however, does not mean to stop thinking. In our first audio podcast, I get the chance to introduce the heart of meditation and I look forward to many, […] The post Episode 0: The Most Powerful Approach to Thinking and Meditation appeared first on I Should Be Meditating.