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Alistair Appleton
May 08, 2024
In Alistair Clips
Teri asked a question on Monday which chimed with my thinking about what meditation permits. Worth a listen:
https://share.descript.com/view/U65ycpFJlj1
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Alistair Appleton
May 01, 2024
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Alistair Appleton
May 01, 2024
In Alistair Clips
I wasn't able to record our session which I led from a service station on the A12 near Colchester last night. But we did have a good discussion about grief prompted by a question from Margaret. I re-recorded an audio version of my answer below:
https://share.descript.com/view/LJeRsVFOlgo
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Alistair Appleton
Apr 25, 2024
In Alistair Clips
This is an excerpt from our Thursday teaching, emphasising the Buddhist emphasis on recognising how we fundamentally misperceive reality. First, we only partially perceive and then we hazily generalise by conceptualizing.
https://share.descript.com/view/Za1S2xSEBL2
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Alistair Appleton
Apr 23, 2024
In Questions & Answers
One of the Mindspringers let me know that he's getting six reminders for every booking he makes for the Live Sessions. Is anyone else having the same problem?
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Alistair Appleton
Apr 18, 2024
In Sharing Space
We had a lovely session of shamata practice this morning and I read this quote from Trungpa’s The Path of Individual Liberation p 232
If you don't have a good relationship with yourself, you cannot understand the dharma, and your body and mind will not be properly coordinated. The practice of meditation helps you to coordinate your body and your mind. You realize that your mind can be directed to a particular effort, that your mind works. Through shamatha you are able to raise your mind to an adult level. Your mind does not jump all over the place whenever you try to do something. In this samsaric world, most of you have grown up physically, but psychologically you are very young. You can't concentrate. You can't eat even one good meal properly because your mind is constantly jumping all over the place. The basic message of shamatha practice is that your mind could be as adult as your body.
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Alistair Appleton
Apr 02, 2024
In Sharing Space
I don't know if you've noticed but I've added a search bar at the top of the Mindsprings main site. I'm hoping it will make it super easy to find what you're looking for as the site gets bigger. Please try it out and give me any feedback!
😀
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Alistair Appleton
Mar 26, 2024
In Sharing Space
As I mentioned in this evening's class, I'm currently working on a short Self-Study course on the material I have been teaching of late on Liberating the Ego Loop.
I would love to get your feedback as I create the course and see if it is hitting the right notes; and is clear and cogent.
So if you're interested in being a guinea pig, please join the LEL group by clicking the link below:
https://www.mind-springs.org/group/liberating-the-ego-loop-1/discussion
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Alistair Appleton
Mar 21, 2024
In Sharing Space
I'm posting the teaching from early March which was explaining the shamata path using the old Tibetan teaching aid of the Elephant path.
Here's the full teaching:
https://share.descript.com/view/p5x3rKWNimY
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Alistair Appleton
Mar 20, 2024
In Sharing Space
Apologies for the delay but I have just loaded the booking page for our Scarborough course this winter!
Please do check out the details:
https://www.mind-springs.org/weekend-courses/scarborough-2024
I hope it's free of any bugs but please let me know if you find any!
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Alistair Appleton
Mar 20, 2024
In Sharing Space
Just given the members' library a bit of a Spring clean. I realised it was quite hard to navigate, so I've put all the guided meditations at the top with the SEARCH bar just above them, so you can search for subjects (beingfulness) or specific practices (polyvagal tuning) and it will turn up everything with that tag.
Check it out here:
https://www.mind-springs.org/members-library
And please let me know if there's any other improvements that need looking at.
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Alistair Appleton
Mar 08, 2024
In Alistair Clips
We've started a new cycle of teaching on Thursdays which is focusing on meditation practice - particularly the two flavours of shamata (Tibetan: shi-ne ) and vipashyna (Tib: lhak-tong). This balance of 'calm abiding' and 'special insight' is going to be our subject for the next month or so. Here's a brief explanation of these terms.
https://share.descript.com/view/B85QRmiG2yN
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Alistair Appleton
Mar 08, 2024
In Sharing Space
Hello Mindspringers,
I'm putting together this month's Mandala mail, so if you have any must-sees, must-hears, or must-reads then please let me know in the next few days.
https://www.mind-springs.org/mandala-offerings
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Alistair Appleton
Dec 08, 2023
In Sharing Space
Sick of the consumer orgy of Xmas shopping but don't want to be Scrooge.
Hey Presto! Positive News curates beautiful gifts that don't cost the Earth 🌏
https://www.positive.news/society/presents-with-purpose-33-sustainable-gifts-to-give-this-christmas/(https://www.positive.news/society/presents-with-purpose-33-sustainable-gifts-to-give-this-christmas/)
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Alistair Appleton
Nov 30, 2023
In Sharing Space
Got this interesting link from Reasons to be Cheerful (David Byrne's excellent website). How do concert spaces make themselves more mindful? This is how the Carnegie Hall did it:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/7s228b75hxo2z9c0jd238/211130-Thursday-D-The-Fragrance-of-Virtue-Right-Speech-is-Doable.mp4?rlkey=x7qbuood77x5nmemht2sopk1y&dl=0(https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/7s228b75hxo2z9c0jd238/211130-Thursday-D-The-Fragrance-of-Virtue-Right-Speech-is-Doable.mp4?rlkey=x7qbuood77x5nmemht2sopk1y&dl=0)
I often use concerts and performances as a way of being more aware. Not just the music but also my response to the music; my body's movements; the presence of other listeners. I practice pulling focus from the perfomer's fingers to the whole auditorium, indeed to the world outside the building.
There's a nice Spotify playlist attached:
Music for Well-Being,https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7o2qmxfEMYFanTkUsDPaCF?si=0def95fecb5a4b99
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Alistair Appleton
Nov 01, 2023
In Sharing Space
Mindsprings's member @Michael Gaffney kindly shared this interview between Gabor Maté and his daughter on the terrible events in the Middle East.
Much as we might want to shy away from the atrocities committed by both side since October 7th, Gabor gives some heartfelt and well-considered and compassionate thoughts here.
Gabor Mate is a world renowned speaker and writer on mental health, addiction and trauma. He is also a Holocaust survivor who lost his grandparents in Auschwitz. Yet he also has well-researched critical thoughts about the actions of the Jewish state. He speaks very movingly about the horrors that both sides have endured and are enduring.
I recommend making some time to watch.
The interview is 35 minutes long
https://youtu.be/SHDBw-wx6w0(https://youtu.be/SHDBw-wx6w0)
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Alistair Appleton
Oct 31, 2023
In Alistair Clips
Since it was Halloween, we did some practice that involved deliberately scaring ourselves. Deliberately going into the things that annoy, trouble us and swinging back and forth from a safe place into homeopathic doses of over-egged scare. (The Practice will be in the video library later this week) - here's my Halloween thoughts:
https://share.descript.com/view/pKemEHE8iwg
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Alistair Appleton
Oct 20, 2023
In Sharing Space
My BBC colleague Ben picked a fabulously sunny day to visit Holy Isle and meet Zangpo and crew.
The Island looks stunning of course. I hope it inspires lots of people to make the journey!
The island part starts at 33'.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001rmhk(https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001rmhk)
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Alistair Appleton
Oct 19, 2023
In Sharing Space
We're starting a new cycle of teaching on Thursday mornings looking at the six perfection or 'paramitas' in Mahayana Buddhism. These are generosity, discipline, patience, effort, meditation and wisdom. And we'll be spending two weeks on each - plus the introductory teaching which was today.
We started by looking at the crucial issue of 'shunyata' and how essential it is to make turn these paramitas into something transcendental.
Thich Naht Hanh translates the experience of emptiness as "the insight which takes us to the other shore" - the other shore being enlightenment.
You can catch up with the opening practice Experiencing Emptiness (https://www.mind-springs.org/premium-videos?wix-vod-video-id=729d9dfbb36b4ddd9df639cd3a309b81&wix-vod-comp-id=comp-l9svp7fb)- but here is a snippet of the discussion after that practice:
https://share.descript.com/view/k1ak8b7Wol9
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Alistair Appleton
Oct 03, 2023
In Alistair Clips
From our session last week:
https://share.descript.com/view/q345o8yH9AV
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Alistair Appleton
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