Guided Meditations
These guided sessions are contemplative methods drawn from Buddhist traditions and presented here for educational purposes as thought-experiments—not religious rituals or prayers, and no beliefs or commitments—in a secular, academic format, as tools for developing focus, self-reflection, insight, and compassion.
A Brief Introduction to Buddhist Meditation
This introduction describes the two interrelated aspects of any Buddhist meditation, which aims to settle the mind (shamatha) in order to develop insight (vipashyana) investigate the nature of one’s experience and purpose in life. If you have never studied Buddhist or done Buddhist meditation before, listen to the following file first.
The Four Immeasurable Qualities
The Four Immeasurable Qualities are immeasurable loving kindness, immeasurable compassion, immeasurable sympathetic joy, and immeasurable equanimity. This guided meditation explains how Buddhists cultivate these four in order to gain a deeper sense of meaning in life.
The Four Applications of Mindfulness
The Four Immediate Spheres of Mindfulness are the sphere of the body, the feelings, the mind, and mental phenomena. This guided meditation explain how Buddhists investigate the nature of one’s immediate experience in order to gain insight into the way that mind entangles itself in mental constructs and become free from them.