Our Second “Sanctuary Within” Day-long is October 8!

Hey everyone,

Have you ever wanted to just hit the pause button on life and dive deep into a space of clarity and calm? I’ve got some awesome news for you! I’m teaming up with some fantastic folks for another day-long retreat that promises just that, and a whole lot more.

Nestled along the banks of the James River is the gorgeous Roslyn Center in Richmond, VA. Picture this: 150 acres of beauty where we’ll immerse ourselves in a day of mindfulness, yoga, and sound.

Here’s the Scoop

I’m excited to kick things off with a Unified Mindfulness Workshop. We’ll explore a mindfulness technique that helps you boost concentration, find clarity, and promote a sense of balance. And that’s just the start! The day’s magic continues with a delicious lunch, rejuvenating yoga session and a surreal sound bowl meditation. Huge shoutout to Cyn Nwarache & Jasmine Turner Perry for bringing their expertise to the table, and for Linda Thomas for masterfully organizing the whole event.

Who’s It For?

All you wonderful folks out there – whether you’ve dabbled in mindfulness or yoga before, or if it’s your very first time. Everyone’s welcome! We’ve got a mix of activities that cater to all levels, so come just as you are.

Wrapping Up

This retreat is designed to give you tools to cultivate your own inner peace, using mindfulness, yoga, and sound – each playing its part in giving you an incredible experience. This is our second time doing this and many participants last time just gushed about how much they didn’t even know they needed this by the end. It was a powerful day, and we hope to have you included in the next one!

Check out all the details and sign up here: Sanctuary Within. Use code FRIENDS&FAMILY for a $30 discount!

Defining mindfulness is challenging. Many definitions lack precision. Shinzen Young, an American mindfulness teacher, created his own system of mindfulness known as Unified Mindfulness with its own uniquely useful definition of the term.

Defining Mindfulness with Shinzen Young

Shinzen created a brilliant definition by defining mindfulness as three attentional skills all working together: concentration power, sensory clarity, and equanimity.

Although this definition requires some explanation, understanding these three skills makes the benefits of mindfulness more accessible.

Mindfulness practice develops mindful awareness. Shinzen removes the vagueness of that statement by discussing mindfulness practice in terms of the skills that it develops.

Developing Concentration Power

First, concentration power is the ability to focus on what you consider relevant. This skill allows you to stay focused and be less distractible. Everyone has experienced deep focus that felt pleasant and increased productivity, as well as the opposite feeling of being scattered unproductive.

For instance, you might remember trying to read a book and found yourself reading the same passage repeatedly because you kept getting lost in thought. Increased concentration power allows you to stay focused on your reading. You build concentration power any time you intentionally focus on something and set distractions aside. Like any skill, the more you practice, the better you become.

Enhancing Sensory Clarity

Developing concentration supports the other skills. Sensory clarity is the ability to track and explore our experience in real time. This skill enables you to be aware of what’s happening at any given moment. Clarity allows you to detect subtler experiences and separate the individual sensory components of an experience, making it less solid and more manageable.

For example, when you feel overwhelmed by stress, sensory clarity lets you to identify the specific sensations and thoughts that make up that stress. When the parts are separated, they stop feeding each other and you feel relief.

Gaining Insight Through Clarity

Additionally, clarity can also lead to insights. We begin to see our experiences for what they truly are, rather than confusing our thoughts about them with reality. From a Buddhist perspective, sensory clarity helps us see the true nature of our experiences. It allows us to recognize that our experiences are always changing (impermanence), don’t bring lasting satisfaction (unsatisfactoriness), and don’t define who we are (emptiness). Gaining insight into these aspects of experience can lead to liberation.

Cultivating Equanimity

Concentration and clarity partner with equanimity. Equanimity is the ability to allow our sense experience to come and go without push or pull. We train equanimity when we welcome all sensations into our meditation, whether perceived as good, bad, or indifferent.

Equanimity helps us find balance in our reactions to experiences. Instead of resisting or clinging to our experiences, we learn to let them flow freely, reducing our suffering. This balanced attitude enables us to face life’s ups and downs with greater ease and maintain focus and courage in our mindfulness practice. This skill liberates us from constantly needing to change things or seek comfort, allowing us to find ease in living within any conditions.

Applying Equanimity in Daily Life

Imagine you’re stuck in a traffic jam, feeling frustrated and impatient. These feelings show up as sensations in your body, such as tightness in your chest or tension in your shoulders. There may be mental talk about how terrible the situation is. By practicing equanimity, you can learn to accept these sensations without resistance, which prevents them from overwhelming you. When you experience these emotions and thoughts with equanimity, they can release their energy and hold on you, helping you return to a calm state. This balanced attitude helps you stay even and focused, making the experience more tolerable.

How Equanimity Supports Other Skills

An attitude of equanimity not only enhances your experience but also boosts the development of concentration and clarity. With less resistance and reactivity, you can stay focused without avoidance and courageously explore the true nature of your experiences without fear or aversion holding you back.

Equanimity: Experience vs. Situations

It’s essential to distinguish equanimity in our experience from resignation to objective situations. Mindfulness training doesn’t imply passively accepting everything that happens or disregarding the world around us. Instead, it enables us to confront our reactions to situations with clarity and non-resistance. By letting go of the struggle against our experiences, we can tackle challenges with greater wisdom and compassion for ourselves and others.

Understanding the Power of Mindfulness

Defining mindfulness as the interconnected attentional skills of concentration, clarity, and equanimity helps us better comprehend mindfulness’s transformative power in how we perceive and relate to life experiences. Recognizing the individual skills and their benefits answers the question, “Why would I want to practice mindfulness?” It cultivates your ability to focus, see things accurately, and live a more effortless life by mastering the art of non-resistance.

Staying Motivated in Your Practice

A skill development approach to mindfulness practice also encourages practitioners to maintain their training in the long run. Even without experiencing significant, obvious shifts in consciousness, maintaining awareness that each practice session strengthens your skills can keep you motivated. Any mindfulness technique helps develop these skills. You can practice any technique you enjoy for at least ten minutes on most days. You can start with the Core training at UnifiedMindfulness.com/core, or connect with a Unified Mindfulness coach like myself.

This was me nine years ago. I remember how emotionally upset I was, how much I was suffering.

Now when I see this memory pop up on Facebook, I have compassion for the me of nine years ago, and I’m reminded of how far I’ve come in my spiritual journey.
 

Sometimes progress is so gradual, we don’t always see it. But a reminder from the past of how we used to relate to our life can put it into sharp contrast. Thankfully, having this kind of reaction to anything seems very unlikely for me today, and that’s thanks to many years of mindfulness practice and education.

Back in those days I used an app with music and was reaching pleasant states of concentration regularly. This was good in a way – that pleasantness is a great motivator to keep practicing. But I was clearly very attached to both the app I used and the pleasant states. Both of these, like all conditioned phenomena, are impermanent. They don’t last. And getting too attached to something that doesn’t last and thinking it’s so important to hold on to is a recipe for suffering. It’s an important lesson to learn that mindfulness meditation is not about feeling good when you’re doing it – often this happens, but not always. Sometimes it’s a real struggle. Knowing that you are developing your attentional skills of concentration, clarity, and equanimity when you practice regardless of what sort of state you’re experiencing is very important for our long term growth.

Over the past nine years I’ve learned to practice without any music, without any apps or guidance, in any and all situations. I’ve had “transcendent” states that have far exceeded anything I experienced back in those days, yet I know better than to get stuck in them now. Now I simply enjoy them while they last, and explore them with clarity and equanimity. I know pleasant experiences can be helpful on the path but they can also be a hindrance, because as Shinzen Young says, one of the biggest dangers facing a meditator on the path is “getting stuck in a good place”.

We need to keep going, and not get attached to particular states. The path is about changing your relationship to all sensory phenomena, pleasant or unpleasant.

Not only am I far less likely to get stuck in a pleasant state, grasping and clinging desperately to it, I also now am comfortable accepting unpleasant sensations and states without pushing them away. I have discovered the secret that even difficult and unpleasant emotions and situations can be an opportunity for opening the heart, bringing mindfulness to more and more aspects of our experience, and how doing so leads to an incredible sense of freedom.

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By Jeff Sinclair

We’ve all been there. You’re twenty minutes deep into a remote meeting and you hear your name.

“What’s your take on this?”

You panic, realizing you’ve been completely distracted again and have no idea what’s being talked about.

Oops.

You’re not alone. According to a large-scale study of Microsoft workers in 2020, in about 30% of all video meetings, employees interacted with their emails, while in around 25% of meetings they worked on files such as Word documents. [1] Add to that all the unrelated chat messages we may be getting, not to mention smartphones, pets, kids and all the other distractions and temptations at our fingertips when we work remotely, it’s no wonder we have trouble staying focused.

Yet we’ve also all had the experience of a productive meeting where everyone was fully engaged. The creative ideas flowed, and everyone was energized. Often these meetings are over with more quickly yet get a lot more accomplished.

The good news is, we don’t have to leave it to chance whether we have a distracted scattered meeting or a focused productive one. Here are some tips on how to use mindfulness techniques to optimize your meeting time.

• Limit Distractions – Know what types of things commonly pull your attention away and remove them ahead of time. This will minimize the willpower needed to resist the distraction. This could mean closing your email app, putting your smart phone across the room, or going on Do-Not-Disturb in your chat client.
• Start with a mindful pause. Start your meeting by taking a brief pause and encouraging everyone to intentionally set aside whatever they were previously working on or thinking about and bringing their full attention to the present meeting. You might invite everyone to take three mindful breaths, noticing the physical sensations of the breath. Then get started. Especially for those who are in back-to-back meetings, it can be extremely helpful to take this short break for transitioning attention. If you don’t think your team will be into this, just take a few moments to do this on your own right before joining a call.
• Practice noting with distractions. When you’re in a meeting and you find yourself pulled to email or another task, see if you can notice that pull and just say to yourself “distraction” in a gentle tone of voice. Then see if you can let it go and return your attention to the meeting.
• Do a background mindfulness practice. If you’re in a meeting where you don’t have to be fully engaged, it’s still beneficial to remain as present as possible. To satisfy your mind’s desire to do something when others are discussing a matter that doesn’t directly involve you, try focusing on the sensations of your breath at the tip of nose. Continue to listen, but in the background, check in with the breath. Or you may notice the sensations of where your feet touch the floor. Every now and then, check in with those sensations. Getting in touch with what your body is feeling in the moment can help keep you present and prevent mind-wandering or the impulse to start multi-tasking.

Don’t underestimate the subtle ways you can influence others as well. When one person is distracted in a meeting, that lack of focus can be contagious. In the same way, the energizing presence of just one person can enliven the whole group. Communicate that you’re present by making “eye contact” with your camera and nodding and smiling when appropriate. Others will notice this, just as they notice when people are either off camera or looking away in another direction.

By bringing the right mindset into a meeting from the start and using some mindfulness techniques, you can make every remote meeting more efficient and enjoyable.

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[1] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/getting-distracted-during-video-meetings-youre-not-alone-says-microsoft/

There are many good reasons to take up and continue a meditation practice. You may have multiple reasons, or just one really good one. Your reasons may also change over time. Mine certainly have. Mostly I have found more and more great reasons to keep going.

I started practicing more than twenty years ago due to a nascent interest in spirituality, which at the time was mostly of the “new age” variety. I found that meditating felt really good. I got peaceful, I experienced some blissful states, and sometimes it seemed to help me deal with my raging college-age emotional life.

After college I stopped practicing and lived a relatively happy but pretty un-spiritual life. In 2015 when my wife and I were expecting our first child, I had an instinctual paternal urge to turn inward and work on myself again so I could be the best version of myself for my son. By this point I was well-studied in Ken Wilber’s Integral meta-theory and one thing that particularly stuck with me was how highly Wilber spoke of the contemplative practices and their impact on a person’s development. So this time my reasons for meditating were to become a better person for my son and enhance my personal self-development.

Around this time I started learning a lot more about Buddhism, and my practice starting turning from a less specifically spiritual or Integral type of practice to more of a Buddhist and mindfulness style.

Early on during this time I was having some of the reward states that can result from practice – feeling very relaxed and blissful. I was mostly concerned with these states at the time. I practiced in a certain way, and I expected these states to arise. When they didn’t, I was disappointed. I knew on some level that I as practicing for long term development, but I didn’t often remember that in the moment.

I used a particular app with some particular audio tracks to meditate and I really enjoyed it. One day the app developer took the app down, and suddenly I could no longer use it. I got very upset, and thought this was a huge blow to my meditation practice.

In the end though, this was a good thing. Realizing how much I was “chasing states” ultimately helped lead me to a more mature practice. While these states are nice, and can help motivate us, if you’re practicing only to get into certain states, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. Inevitably these states will change or you won’t have access to them. Also a temporary feel good state is really a small fraction of the incredible transformation that can come from mindfulness practice. It’s important to have a long view of your practice and remember that you’re developing skills over time, just like with physical exercise. With this view, even a practice session that doesn’t feel that great, or even feels unpleasant, can be viewed as valuable still.

After learning about Shinzen Young’s Unified Mindfulness system, I really internalized this developmental view of mindfulness practice. I say mindfulness practice now as opposed to just “meditation” because I now have a bevy of techniques to develop mindfulness skills during all sorts of activities, beyond just meditation in seated stillness.

My reasons now include some of the earlier reasons, like personal development as per Wilber, but my main focus is building my skills of concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity over time. The reasons I want to build these skills are laid out in Shinzen’s happiness grid. In short, it’s to be happy, independent of the conditions of my life. More specifically it’s to increase happiness in five dimensions;

• Minimize Suffering – to make life easier, to deal with unpleasantness and difficulties without it feeling like it’s ruining my life. Over the past several years I’ve known deep suffering that in my youth I came nowhere close to experiencing. Mindfulness has helped me through this and at this point I can’t imagine getting through the tough times without it. I continue to find new ways to take refuge in my practice during the most painful and difficult moments of my life.
• Maximize fulfillment – to more fully enjoy the good times, savor the pleasant moment, experience more lasting satisfaction from positive experiences
• Understand myself – to know myself at all levels including the deepest levels of transcendence, oneness, non-duality. The expansive and contractive activity of the Source.
• Mastery – acting skillfully. To develop means of acting skillfully. This affects my work, my relationships, my parenting, even my leisure activities like playing hockey and video games. Mindfulness can enhance all of these things and I have seen it in my own life.
• Service – Serving from Love – Shinzen also recently is modifying this dimension to include “connection”. This resonates well with me. As I have seen the benefits of mindfulness in my life and begun to teach others, I have been delighted to see if help others and this feels really good, for both the reasons of knowing that I’m benefiting someone else, and the connection I feel with that other person when I’m really helping them in an important way.

At this point my main reason for meditating could be summarized as – I want to become awakened, enlightened. What does that mean? Essentially to me it’s the culmination of those five dimensions of happiness. Reaching their ultimate levels.

What are your reasons?