A Weekend With Jason Siff When preparing for my weekend of teaching at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, my initial schedule started with a forty-five meditation sitting followed by a talk on structured and unstructured meditation practice. Fortunately, the staff reminded me that this wasn’t really a meditation retreat, and that starting off with a long sitting with no context might not be the most appropriate thing to do. As the participants began arriving, it became clear that many … [Read more...]
Jason Siff
Awareness of Thinking: Recollective Awareness Practice
Jason Siff, a Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka in the late 1980's, has been teaching meditation in the United States since 1990. He is the founding teacher of the Skillful Meditation Project in Los Angeles. He will teach Awareness of Thinking at BCBS August 13-17. Insight Journal: We heard something about your upcoming book, Thoughts are Not the Enemy, about a year ago. Are you getting any interesting reactions to the ideas in the book? Jason Siff: The book will be released in October, though I … [Read more...]
Meeting Your Thoughts At a Resting Place
There is a particular discourse, titled, Vitakkasanthāna Sutta, that is taught as the Buddha's way of working with thoughts in meditation, for when I teach in a more traditional or orthodox setting, I encounter people who swear by it and take me to task on it. So, I am now going to face my biggest critic, the Buddha himself, as he is interpreted by scholars and lay meditation teachers alike. When this discourse is viewed with unprejudiced eyes regarding thinking in meditation, the Buddha may … [Read more...]
The Language We Use to Talk about Meditative Experiences
The words, phrases, and concepts found in the language we use to talk about meditative experiences has tremendous effect on our meditation practice. Believing that the purpose of meditation is to get beyond concepts and words doesn't necessarily free us from the traps of language, especially when we need to express, or somehow represent, our experiences to ourselves or another person. A wordless experience may still someday make its way into words; and contrary to popular belief on this matter, … [Read more...]
