Heart Haven Meditations Tess Callahan

Open awareness is a non-referential meditation, meaning you don’t use any reference point such as the breath or the body to keep your mind focused. Those focal points are useful as first, but as you progress, they can hold you back. In open awareness, your attention rests with everything that’s happening. To this end, you meditate with your eyes gently open. Normally our eyes are trained to focus on a single object. Here, you softly take in everything in your field of vision simultaneously, p...

Join novelist, essayist, and canoe adventurer Mar’ce Merrell as she unpacks her spiritual and creative toolbox, sharing how she uses meditation to move through stuck places in life and on the page. Mar’ce describes the steppingstones of her journey from the moment her therapist first suggested meditation to a literal “breakthrough” experience at an MBSR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction) Retreat with Jon Kabat-Zinn and Saki Santorelli at Mount Madonna Center. The breakthrough encouraged her...

This is a shorter version of Episode 71 "Tranquil Ocean Shamatha," with a bit less instruction. Shamatha or “peaceful abiding” helps stabilize the mind by cultivating a steady awareness of the object of meditation, in this case, the breath. You can do the same practice using alternative anchors such as bodily sensations or sounds. Staying present to an anchor provides scaffolding or training wheels to help keep your mind focused. Over time, practicing Shamatha meditation steadies you in...

Shamatha, which means “peaceful abiding” or “tranquility," is the foundational meditation of Buddhist practice. It helps stabilize the mind by cultivating a steady awareness of the object of meditation, in this case, the breath. You can do the same practice using alternative anchors such as bodily sensations or sounds. Staying present to an anchor provides scaffolding or training wheels to help keep your mind focused. Once you become proficient at Shamatha, you no longer need an o...

Lovingkindness, also known as "metta," is a Buddhist practice of cultivating good will and positive regard toward yourself and others. The practice invites us to expand the good will of our hearts to reach ever widening circles, extending to loved ones, neutral acquaintances, difficult people, animals, and the planet itself. A longer version of this meditation can be found under the title "Lovingkindness Deep Immersion." Whether done on the meditation pillow or spontaneously in the course of ...

Join sculptor and poet Don Freas, author of In-Between: Creativity Set Free and Swallowing the World: New and Selected Poems, in a rich exploration of the relationship between meditation and creativity. Don describes how his practice of Liangong, a form of Qigong, deepens his somatic awareness in the studio and in life. He explains how his process of journaling, partly inspired by Robert A. Johnson’s book Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth, has deepened self-i...