Reading Archives (Author)
Three Stages Of Perceiving Impermanence
Shinzen Young
Impermanence is just appreciating the normal changing-ness of each experience at deeper levels of poignancy. One way to think about this is in terms of three aspects of impermanence: the trivial, the ...
Recycling Karmic Trash
Shinzen Young
It’s very common for people on a meditative or spiritual path to develop a kind of sensitivity to the poison and pain of others. Sometimes it’s formulated with the phrase “I pic...
Two Ways of Learning Relaxation
Shinzen Young
There are two ways of learning relaxation, because there are two distinct levels at which a person can relax. I speak of top-to-bottom relaxation versus bottom-to-top relaxation. "Top" refer...
The Test for Meditation in Action
Shinzen Young
When we first come into this life we form a self in order to cope with the world. The baby has a rather scant self and commensurately little ability to deal with the world. We develop a self to deal w...
Learning to Suffer More Effectively
Shinzen Young
Psychological grasping is your main source of suffering, not the physical sensations in your legs -- that is to say, how much you are tightening psychologically around those sensations is the ma...
Equanimity: the Radical Permission to Feel
Shinzen Young
Equanimity is a fundamental skill for self-exploration and emotional intelligence. It is a deep and subtle concept frequently misunderstood and easily confused with suppression of fee...
Addicted to Thinking
Shinzen Young
The issue is not so much the presence or absence of thought activity during meditation. Rather, the issue is the degree to which ones thought activity is driven, unconscious and fixated. The great m...
Share Pain Not Suffering
Shinzen Young
Just as insight has many facets, so also with service. I would like to talk about just one aspect -- compassion. Compassion is practiced in two ways: subtly and overtly. You can subtly serve any per...