River Valley Insight Meditation Community

A welcoming Buddhist Sangha in western Massachusetts

What is Mindfulness?

We hear a lot about mindfulness when we come to a meditation center or read about Buddhism. It is a very important factor in our practice, and I’d like to spend some time going into more depth about what it is and how to create the conditions for its arising.

Loving Friendliness practice

As our practice progresses, attention becomes more stable by using the sensations of the breath, and mindfulness increases with our positive feedback and intention to keep peripheral awareness open. With the elimination of mind wandering and very little forgetting, we start to enter the territory of Stage IV, Continuous Attention. One thing which may happen […]

Excerpts about Awareness

Some Excerpts about Awareness, Attention and Intention Culadasa (John Yates); Matthew Immergut; Jeremy Graves. Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain   Spontaneous introspective awareness is the “aha” moment when you suddenly realize there’s a disconnect between what you wanted to do (watch the breath) and what you’re actually doing.   […]

Change

The Buddha named impermanence as one of the primary aspects of our experience. We often don’t notice small changes, and we rarely notice that everything is in a state of flux. At other times, there are major changes, that we can’t help but notice. And this is one of those. A new meditation center in Northampton.

Mindfulness

The Magic of Mindfulness Talk given at Insight Meditation Center of Pioneer Valley April 4, 2018 We hear a lot about mindfulness when we come to a meditation center or read about Buddhism.  It is a very important factor in our practice, and I’d like to spend some time going into more depth about what […]