All posts tagged: meditation

Most Westerners know Buddhism through meditation, but everyday Buddhist life looks quite different in Thai temples

Most Westerners know Buddhism through meditation, but everyday Buddhist life looks quite different in Thai temples

Published by Sam Flores

(The Conversation) — I recently returned from leading an educational program in Thailand focusing on how Buddhists practice the religion in their day-to-day lives. The participants – Buddhist practitioners from North America and Europe – wanted to deepen their understanding and practice of the religion. Many Western Buddhists’ practices centers on meditation. As a scholar of contemporary Thai Buddhism, I have taught many students and adults in the U.S. who have a similar understanding. Although meditation can be very important to many practitioners, as I show in my 2023 book, “Living Theravada,” Buddhism is more than an intellectual tradition focused on the mind. In countries with a majority Buddhist population, such as Thailand, Buddhist practice involves rituals, offerings to monks and visits to temples, among others traditions. Here are three ways in which Buddhism shapes daily life in Thailand. 1. Merit-making A central part of daily practice is performing rituals associated with merit-making. To make merit means to do something morally good that will generate good karma – actions that are believed to impact this …

Meditation Is Having Its Gallup Moment

Meditation Is Having Its Gallup Moment

Published by Jenni Sidey

A new global study on meditation and well-being arrives at a moment of rising stress, loneliness, declining mental health, and workplace burnout. If used well, it could do what the best public-opinion surveys have done before: transform a largely private practice into a measurable public-health issue—and turn private suffering into public action. For years, meditation has occupied an ambiguous place in public life. To some, it is an ancient discipline rooted in spiritual traditions. To others, it is a wellness trend, a workplace perk, a phone app, or a quiet practice squeezed into the margins of an overburdened day. But a new global study from Gallup and The Art of Living could move meditation into a different category altogether: a measurable, comparable, public-health-relevant behavior that societies can understand, track, and act on. The meditation study is timely because distress is measurable, widespread, and increasingly normalized. Recent global emotional health data show that negative emotions remain elevated worldwide, with 39 percent of adults reporting worry and more than one-third reporting stress for much of the previous …

Is a Few Minutes of Meditation Better Than More?

Is a Few Minutes of Meditation Better Than More?

Published by Jenni Sidey

Over many years, I tried to meditate with a baby in my lap (not recommended), in yoga class, before getting out of bed, after getting into bed, in meditation groups, alone, and even (literally) in the closet. It never worked. I could rarely make it to 20 minutes. But even if my mind wandered like crazy, I thought I had to sit there for that full, magical meditative 20 minutes. Turns out, that was the wrong approach, according to a new study published by Insight Timer (the most utilized free digital meditation app), which spins what we thought about meditation on its head (pun intended). Today, it makes sense nothing worked to jumpstart my meditation practice until my kids were older (or at least toilet-trained). Then, I gave Headspace a try—a meditation app that offers ten days of free, ten-minute meditations. Even ten minutes seemed like a lot, but I could make that work. After the free trial, I was too cheap to buy in, but the meditation habit finally stuck. It’s almost ten years …

Whistler by Ann Patchett – The Most Distilled Meditation on the Past

Whistler by Ann Patchett – The Most Distilled Meditation on the Past

Published by Jenni Sidey

There are stories that whisper to us about the threads connecting our past selves to who we’ve become, and Whistler by Ann Patchett speaks in precisely this hushed, intimate register. In her latest novel, Patchett excavates the archaeology of a single childhood year—one that seemed inconsequential at the time yet carved channels deep enough to shape an entire life. This is a book about the bravery of being nine years old and the courage required to reckon with that bravery decades later. The Chance Encounter That Changes Everything The novel opens with Daphne Fuller, a fifty-three-year-old English teacher, visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art with her husband Jonathan. When a white-haired stranger follows them through the galleries, what begins as mildly uncomfortable vigilance transforms into something far more profound: Eddie Triplett, Daphne’s stepfather for barely more than a year when she was nine, has found her again after forty-four years of silence. Whistler by Ann Patchett excavates what happens when two people who shared a defining moment are given an unexpected second chapter together. Patchett …