"USS Callister" is the 1st episode of the fourth season of the Netflix TV show Black Mirror which debuted on 29 December 2017. The episode follows Robert Daly, a reclusive but gifted programmer of a popular online game who is bitter over the lack of recognition he gets from his coworkers. He takes out his frustrations …
Continue reading Vipasssana Mediation vs “USS Callister” Episode of Black Mirror
When my practice starts to feel stale, or rote, or like a chore, it’s time to ask myself again—is this the path I want to walk? I need to dig deep and remind myself why my Vipassana meditation practice is so important to me, to tap into the inspiration I need to continue devoting 2 …
Insight Timer is a great free app used by over 3,000,000 meditators. The app supports many different traditions by giving access to many different teachers and their teachings. I use the app because it allows me to log my daily meditations and connect to nearly 20,000 other Vipassana meditators trained by SN Goenka. I'm currently …
There’s a great Dhamma movie called Wings of Desire that I highly recommend, it came out in 1987. After finishing Peace Corps Sri Lanka in 1996 and sitting and serving in India and Nepal, I came back to Sri Lanka to settle at a meditation center near Kandy. I followed a daily schedule that …
Since the first talk to my high school classes titled Are We Living Loving Lives? was well received, I gave a second talk that linked meditation to a life centered on truth and love. You can see the presentation slides here if you're interested. I now have around 60 high school juniors choosing to meditate for …
Solid evidences from neuroscience support that meditation not only reduces stress, but also changes the brain; i.e. meditators had more gray matter in the frontal cortex, which is associated with working memory and executive decision-making. According to Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School who studied mediation, 8-week of 40 minutes of daily mediation practice …
Continue reading These books gave me insights to sign up for a 10-day Vipassana meditation
I am now several weeks into re-establishing my consistent practice of meditating 2 hours a day. Mostly, this was a personal decision motivated by my desire to re-center myself in Dhamma, but there is a bit of added motivation in the form of guidelines that old students accepted to sit a Satipatthana Sutta course should …
Goenka's stories and discourses are so good that for years I found myself using his language and sharing his stories in casual conversation as if they were my own. Vipassana was so novel and different from anything I had ever experienced that I hadn't developed the necessary language to articulate my personal thoughts and feelings …
I’ve been thinking about a comment on a blog I came across recently (okay, it's Rivers Cuomo's website...see my last post, lol :). Anyway, the comment was in response to a post by Cuomo about the benefits of Vipassana meditation in his life. Inexplicably, the commenter felt the need to suggest his own meditation practice …
As the mindfulness movement grows, I wonder if the Goenka organization is missing an opportunity to lead. While focusing on preserving Goenka's teachings and enforcing the 2 hour a day minimum, teachers from other traditions have shown that as little as 3, 5, or 10 minutes of meditation a day can make a positive change …
Living Vipassana 