When we take up the practice of meditation and truly bring these practices into our lives, whether in a Buddhist or a modern mindfulness context it is essential that we truly commit to the unknown. That moment, we think we know where we are going, is a moment which unavoidably traps us into believing we are going anywhere. If we put this into the context of the Buddha’s Eightfold Path we can look to Right View—the first factor on the path.

You’ve just completed a meditation class or come home from your first retreat and naturally there is a concern that you will lose the momentum of your practice. Maintaining a daily practice is often the biggest concern for new meditators. One of the important qualities of mindfulness is to “re-collect” so if you re-collect what you’ve gained from meditation so far this can lay the bedrock of right intention and motivate you to keep up a daily practice.

There was an interesting and sad article in the NY Times a few weeks ago regarding a funeral home in the Bronx mixing up two women’s bodies, and presenting the wrong body at an open casket viewing. Almost all the adults believed that they were viewing the body of Val-Jean McDonald. While most of them noticed that she didn’t look as they expected this was attributed to her cancer treatments. So the conditions that created the perception were the trust in the funeral home and the belief that because of how she died she wouldn’t look like herself.

On retreat recently, I found myself in meditation often having intense internal debates about some of the plot twists in the show “Homeland”. I was getting very upset with the decisions made by some of the characters. This was creating an incredible amount of proliferation in the mind and “wasting” valuable minutes of my meditations. If I was going to proliferate at the very least, couldn’t it be about something that was “real” and from my life. Proliferating around a fictional TV drama seemed absurd.