Category Archives: media

The Buddhist precepts

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I’m taking a class at Appamada Zen Center on the Buddhist precepts. Yes, I know I’m overextended — full time job, yoga teacher training, NLP activity, this blog — but it meets only once a month on a Sunday evening.

A precept is a commandment, instruction, or order. The Buddhist precepts come from the monastic tradition and have been adapted for laypeople. We use the book Waking Up to What You Do, by Diane Esshin Rizzetto. Here’s a link to it on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Waking-What-You-Intelligence-Compassion/dp/1590301811

Rizzetto presents the precepts as aspirations: “I take up the way of speaking truthfully,” for example.

I view the precepts as an invitation to increased mindfulness. A teacher, a book, and classmates make it a connecting, learning, growing experience.

In class, we’ll be covering one precept from the book per month. We journal at least weekly and assess ourselves periodically. I will be including my journaling here on this blog.

New image

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The new title image on this blog is a sunrise over the dragon’s tail, taken from the black sand beach at Wai’anapanapa State Park, Hana, Maui, October 16, 2008.

The boilerplate image that came with this WordPress theme began to remind me of a dirty aquarium. I hope you don’t mind me changing the photo!

Article: Seven Things I Want to Tell My Beginner Yoga Students

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Click here to read this article, originally posted in elephantjournal.com. Boulder yoga teacher Tiffany Hutchings lists what she’s like her beginner students to know.

I agree.

http://www.elephantjournal.com/2010/06/seven-things-i-want-to-tell-my-beginner-yoga-students/

Six month blog stats

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As of today, this blog has received 1,233 views, excluding my own, which averages out to about 7 per day. I’m pleased that you stop by and read!

There are 52 comments, including my responses to readers’ comments. I appreciate hearing from you!

Outside of my home page, the most popular post has been a poem, The Journey, by David Whyte. Next were these posts:

  • Feedback sought on new blog look
  • Trance dance trance
  • Trauma releasing exercises
  • Book influences meditation

What this tells me is that people respond when I invite feedback (thank you!), that readers like it when I connect my sitting practice to other practices like trance dance and trauma releasing exercises, and that you’re curious about books influencing my meditation practice.

Eleven posts have only had one view. (I’ve learned that titles are important. “Awareness and attention” was not a good title.)

By far the most popular referring sites have been Facebook and Twitter. Viewers also find me through Google Reader, from my friend’s blog It Starts TODAY at http://frontporchstory.blogspot.com/, and a few other places.

The most popular search term that brought viewers to this blog has been “shoveling snow with buddha,” a Billy Collins poem I posted. Glad the poetry fans are finding me. I take care choosing the poems I post. They have to really resonate with me. They are not just filler – it’s just that sometimes, a poet has said something so well that I experience and yet cannot articulate, or that I would like to experience, that I want to share. The poems posted here are actually shortcuts to an expanded, present state of mind.

Thanks for reading!

Photo added, two more blogging tasks

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Yay, I added an image widget with my photo to this blog!

Friend Katie suggested that I post one because people like to see what bloggers look like. Here I am!

Actually, Katie took this photo, in a restaurant after a day of NLP master practitioner  training sometime in 2009, I think.

It’s a snapshot, capturing a moment, rather than anything I prepared for, yet I liked this moment. The photo captures a moment of joy and presence. Of all the photos I have of myself, this one best represents meditating.

Hmm. I could ask someone to take a photo of my face when I’m actually meditating and post that. Stay tuned.

I have two more blog chores to accomplish: first, learning how to make the type a little larger (haven’t found a text-sizer widget for WordPress yet, am inexperienced with behind-the-scenes tinkering), and secondly, recording the “Waiting for the love of your life” post – it is actually a guided meditation, at the request of friend Jazz – and posting the mp3 file.

If you have any experience or advice for accomplishing these tasks, please give me a holler.

Sitting like a king or queen

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“Meditation practice begins by sitting down and assuming your seat cross-legged on the ground. You begin to feel that by simply being on the spot, your life can become workable and even wonderful. You realize that you are capable of sitting like a king or queen on a throne. The regalness of that situation shows you the dignity that comes from being still and simple.” -CTR, The Sanity We Are Born With

Quote found on Facebook from my friend Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (or whomever maintains his Facebook page).

Maybe one of these days/weeks/months/years, I’ll get around to reading one of his books. Meanwhile, I totally love getting an excerpt from time to time. Brilliant teacher.

You don’t have to do anything. You can just sit and be, and be the king or queen of your own life.

Don’t forget to elongate your spine while you release tension!

Article: Visual perception heightened by meditation training

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Intensive mental training has a measurable effect on visual perception, according to a new study from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis. People undergoing intensive training in meditation became better at making fine visual distinctions and sustaining attention during a 30-minute test.

I read about this and wondered if that was what was going on with my experience of strange left eye energy in May. Even though my eyes were closed, I somehow had an impression that my visual acuity had increased.

Imagine getting to meditate for 6 hours a day for 3 months in the Rockies! I’d like to volunteer for more experiments like this.

http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=9487

How to make the type appear larger

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Until I have time to learn how to permanently make the type larger or add a text-sizer widget to this blog so you can choose the size you like, you can click Ctrl and + together to enlarge the type. Click again to enlarge even more. Ctrl and – reduces the size.

I just learned this trick, and it’s very handy on all kinds of sites.

I could use lessons in WordPress. Know of anyone?

Yoga teacher training

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Last Thursday I started my yoga teacher training.

I am working with a private teacher, not going through a studio. There are two other students. My teacher, Eleanor Harris, has trained yoga teachers for studios before. This is the first time she’s offered it at her home.

This will be my life outside work  for the next few months. We meet Tuesday and Thursday evenings, some Friday evenings, and Saturdays. She will be offering classes at her home studio, so we will have real students to work with as we learn to teach poses and whole classes.

When complete, I will be certified to teach yoga by Yoga Alliance (RYT-200). I will be able to teach beginner, mixed level, restorative, and vinyasa flow classes.

After 12 years of yoga, in two classes I have already learned concepts new to me — linking poses and the 5 pranas.

I will be taking 6 or 7 yoga classes over 3 or 4 days a week. I’m sure it will strengthen my sitting practice.

Yoga has ideas about meditation — in fact, the Buddha was a yogi before he became enlightened (only rather ascetic about it), and yoga had a deep influence on him and thus on Buddhism.

I’ll be exploring both yoga and Zen meditation and writing about my understanding and experience of them here.

~~

Bindu Wiles is a yogi and blogger. She is undertaking a challenge — taking yoga classes 5 days a week, writing 800 words per day, for 21 days, as an online community project. I am not going to join her, but I want to support her. I may do something similar at some point!

Here’s the link to her blog, if you’d like to catch her: http://binduwiles.com/buddhism/my-new-project-21-5-800/

Feedback sought on new blog look

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If you like this theme better than the previous theme, will you let me know via a comment? You can comment here on the blog, comment on Facebook, reply on Twitter, or let me know in person — lately I’ve run into a couple of readers who haven’t commented in writing but who let me know they check out my blog. It’s very nice to know it’s worth reading to someone.

On a whim, I decided to look at WordPress’s blog themes. The previous theme just seemed very cliche for meditation. This one feels much fresher to me — but is it too dark?