Guided Meditations

Dartmouth students can elect to join optional meditation sessions outside of class. But whether or not students attend those sessions, it has no impact on grades. Please forgive the quality of the following sample recordings that were made live during those optional meditation meetings.


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.