Mind is endlessly moving, meandering, outflowing. Meditation is about bringing the mind back through the use of particular reference points. Use the guided meditation to firmly, kindly, repeatedly bring the mind back.

When we meditate, we notice that mind is like a river, constantly moving along, continually generating conditions. One thing we can always come back to is paying attention. When we want or don’t want something, it generates stress. Just be open and pay attention. This unbiased attention is most useful. Mind settles by just paying attention.

Begins with guidance to establish a relaxed, steady, upright posture, wishing well throughout the body. When a balance of energy comes, begin turning the mind around. Get back to where the thoughts and memories are coming from. Direct yourself to the place of arising, before it takes form. The sense of formlessness and openness can then be experienced.

Practice meeting your reality directly, just being with what arises without getting involved. The spiritual faculties come alive and support you. When there’s nothing you can’t meet, what else do you need? Through this cultivation, you have a calming, cooling refuge place in your life.

One particular faculty of mind is ability of step back and review the noise of the mind. It’s an amazingly remedial quality, to be able to hold our doubts and difficulties in this way. You don’t get an answer, but you get a result. The deconstruction of suffering, of stress.

These 5 faculties when cultivated and developed merge in the deathless. Faith, energy, concentration, mindfulness, wisdom. These are faculties we all have, but they may be poorly developed. Guidance is given for how to touch into these and strengthen them.

A reflection on the faculty of energy and how to apply it skillfully. Energy for investigation that leads to wisdom, energy for devotion and aspiration that uplifts the heart, energy for mindfulness of body that results in calm and insight.

Mindfulness means looking more carefully. As we sustain attention on an object, we can begin to discern how we get caught and how we get free. Body as a foundation for mindfulness can mean mindfulness of breathing in and out, the elements, walking up and down, the unattractive parts, or contemplating a dead body. A review of several of these practices is given.

Openness, the willingness to meet what arises, is one of our basic resources as human beings. The ability to open what is pleasant and unpleasant alike, knowing we can benefit, learn from it, gives a certain confidence. Mindfulness of body is our workshop to cultivate that ability to open to and bear with painful feeling. Not resisting or fighting it, just sustaining awareness and knowing it for what it is.

Awareness is one of the fundamental properties of mind. The practice of meditation is just bearing witness to what affects mind with a quality of primary openness. Bearing with experience and, rather than referring it to reactions or views or opinions, referring it awareness.