Podcast

Sometimes indecision stops us in our tracks. This simple guided meditation goes directly into that, to enhance your sense of power and ability to follow your heart, right at the micro-level of where indecisiveness arises. After each long thought phases passes, a moment of potential arises and in that moment you do what you intuitively […]

How can we feel present in our life, and stay that way? In this talk we explore what it means to be mindful beyond trying to remember to “pay attention.” Typically, we’ll “remember” to be present for something when it is just about to end, whether it’s a meditation or even at the end of […]

Using the flavor of appreciation in your attention makes for a wonderful experience where you are grateful for meditation and grateful for life.

This guided meditation is a pointing and a training in shifting to the heart of meditation, the source that keeps it going and alive and growing. For just a few moments here and there when the opportunity strikes cast aside all concerns for only just a moment no obligation for more and throw the power […]

Does your Meditation practice get stale? Does it still grow and grow in depth? Should you just accept plateaus? No, don’t fall for that. This talk is about real change, and what is the one thing that you MUST have in your meditation for it to keep flourishing. It wont last long, meditating like a […]

In this meditation we bring our attention to ‘being present.’ without assuming what that is. What does it really feel like to be present now? What is it like when we recognize our presence, and attention is close to us, not dispersed and feeling like it is far? We observe what that state is like; […]

In this meditative talk we look closer into how meditation provides us with the tools to recognize that there are different channels – so to speak – that we can tune in to. Through an exercise of self-inquiry we sense that many things are going on at once in our bodies and minds. But through […]

Inject power of intention into your meditation. Intention is a temporary state where we have a feeling like we can choose. In this guided meditation we repeatedly exercise the ability to insert intention into the mix of meditation at the moments that it is possible, working with the breath and the moments when we have […]

The third part of the talk series on Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. In this conversation we delve into how our state of being present relates to arising negative or violent feelings and reactions. We ask what is our behavior like when we are in our being? In answering this we look into how […]

The second installment of a series of talks on Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. Alan Klima discusses questions sent by listeners regarding Eckhart Tolle’s book. Join in for an interesting discussion reflecting on trust. What does it mean to find the right balance between everyday life and what we are truly seeking for? What […]

Part one of a series, listeners submit questions and Alan takes up some of the top things that come to mind when reading this book. The talk delves into questions like what relation our past history has to who and what we are as being, and whether or not it is necessary to suffer first […]

In this mindfulness meditation session learn to notice thoughts and mental activity while developing your awareness for intentionally being present. Going from the tensions in the body and hectic mind activity to subtly playing with your inner mental attitude. Sometimes we call it the wandering mind, but there really only is wondering and then it […]

Relax into this mindful body scan and start developing skills to make the experience of the body joyful and interesting to play with. We move our attention through every inch of our body kindly noticing and becoming aware of what is already there. It is a simple technique to get in touch with bodily sensations […]

Have you ever wanted to quiet your thoughts? To be able to silence all distractions, negative thinking, or simply noise in your head? This talk on mindfulness meditation as well as a meditation practice helps you develop a technique to begin to distance yourself from thoughts, but more importantly to distinguish between different forms of […]

Recognize the quality of attention, how experiencing the breath shifts and changes things so easily around. Release into the sensation of breath and allow thoughts, feelings, and tensions to be present while the breath becomes the center of attention. Explore the body through the breath and notice how much can be observed by simply focusing […]

A talk and a meditation. A contemplation of life. Use this training to get acquainted with and understand in your bones two meditation skills that are most important to finding a natural way to practice meditation, not forced, not pressured. Our ability to enjoy life is to accept that all is temporary and we can […]

It’s great to train the attention to be fast and agile and play a kind of game to see how fast you can bring the attention home, or how fast you can hop off the train of the thought. It’s a great training skill with some profound effects in your everyday life, where things happen […]

What is it like to be present? In this guided meditation practice of looking inwardly, you return to that sense of presence to find another way of feeling, another way of being. Dwelling in presence, recognizing it, checking it out. Understanding the delicate task of looking inwardly, of just being. It is there that freedom […]

[Podcast] Life is constantly in flux, often presenting changing situations you need to adapt to. This guided meditation is a practice in two (or maybe three) techniques for training to become flexible, adaptable. Understanding that peace of mind can already happen. Here. Now. By practicing mindful meditation we become well rounded and ready for anything. […]

In this whole world that is your life there are thoughts and busyness, emotions and sensations, but there’s also something else here. Something that is always present. This guided meditation points towards that awareness of life, living as you, and here all along. A meditation to recognize this and be present.

The pure pleasure of hanging out with yourself! Find the most direct way to enjoy the inwardness that meditating on a regular basis provides. Through this guided lesson you will get closer to that inner refuge that is within us. A simple way to connect yourself with what is already there and bask in the […]

Thoughts and worries can seem to distract you. By practicing this simple exercise you are reminded of the power of feeling your breath. Staying with the breath allows your inner mental attitude to brighten. Appreciating your presence. Being at home in your body and mind.

When we think about life we often make judgements about it, have ideas of how it is, or how it should be. In this guided meditation we commit to life as it already is. Through this practice we move from what our idea of being present is, to simply being present. This easy to practice […]

Use this guided meditation to connect with the breath in all kinds of ways you haven’t tried before. Playing with the Breath hones our skills in relating to what feelings and emotions arise in our experience later. Practice now to get ready for when you’ll need calm presence and a calming breath.

There is a powerful breathing technique for facing hard times, but you must practice it now if you want to use it later. It’s not always a good idea to try and zap your problems with meditation while they are happening. Instead prepare for them by practicing mindfulness of the pleasant breath so that you […]

How should one breathe for panic attacks and how to breathe for regular worry? Panic Attacks and every day worry have some things in common, but also a big difference. We can learn a lot from panic attacks, whether we have them or not, because they point us in the direction of the right attitude […]

This classic formula for cultivating compassion is an excellent way to bring us back to the fact that mindfulness attention is a kind attention. It is also a great meditation to use at bedtime to sleep great!! Mindfulness is not a neutral or clinical or objective attention. This guided meditation takes us through several layers […]

This classic formula for cultivating compassion is an excellent way to bring us back to the fact that mindfulness attention is a kind attention. It is also a great meditation to use at bedtime to sleep great!! Mindfulness is not a neutral or clinical or objective attention. This guided meditation takes us through several layers […]

This guided meditation is very simple and short, giving you the space and pause to do nothing but remain as you are. Simply being is a refreshing, restful pause that brings us back to ourselves, from one point of view, but really dispels a whole lot of extra stuff that when gone reveals what we […]

Meditation is about more than Self-Improvement. That is only its possible side-effect. If we bend meditation to our will and make it serve us, the only definite side-effect is frustration. At some point the meditator will have to make the switch over to something bigger than their sense of “Selfyness” and to a longing for […]

In this guided meditation on the breath the emphasis is on receptivity, sensitivity, and opening. By offering up the breath sensations to the world to which they belong, we also cultivate an attitude of allowing everything to be as it is.

If you play with the edge between conscious deliberate attention and open awareness, your meditation in enhanced so that you can quickly find yourself in a state of ease.

This breath meditation explores the difference between when we consciously, deliberately feel the breath, and when we let it go and allow it to appear by itself. These two flavors of attention are great to recognize, and are easier to recognize by contrast. This meditation will make this clear on an experiential level and give […]

A connection with the inner mental attitude is made, and then sustained, with this guided meditation that makes a sense of the inner mental attitude vivid and clear, and then helps you to maintain and sustain it. This is a great way to remain present, close and intimate with your home in this body and […]

This guided meditation begins with a 3 step settling process and then explores feelings of exchanging the breath between the interior feeling of alive presence, and the greater world beyond the body, surrounding the body. It contains a balance and exchange between active enjoyment of the breath and surrender to whole world and universe in […]

Whenever possible, it is very powerful to recognize and confirm our effortless and fundamental right-ness. Some meditators have yet to catch a whiff of this, while all of us can vary in how easily it comes forward to our attention. This guided exploration moves through different levels of relaxing into presence. Each level is important […]

This guided meditation training is a great introduction to a basic tool in the mindfulness toolkit. It pinpoints a three step process which you can use repeatedly to bring you to focus. Train this a few times with this audio and it will stick with you as you go forward. And hint: it is great […]

Season 2 is Back with a Point that Cuts Straight at one of the Biggest Obstacles stopping us from getting what we want in meditation. It is a belief, a thought lodged in the mind, and if we just get past it a whole new world opens up for us, whether what we want is […]

This guided contemplation points to something essential that every meditator must see and understand if they are to go beyond worry over wandering mind. There are many ways to deal with wandering thoughts, but the most important and most powerful is to see the knowing that is beyond wandering or not-wandering. Recognize this and your […]

What does “Life is an Illusion Mean” and what does it have to do with your electricity bill? I mean, you have your real life, while there are many spiritual statements that seem to indicate there is an ultimate reality and it is different than what we see as real and true now. In this […]

Making the body more accessible to us gives us a base point with which we can get perspective on excessive thinking, explore our emotions, and get communication from our body that leads us in beneficial directions. The body scan opens these lines of communication! Use it early and often.

The huge question of how to balance our striving in meditation practice opens a whole lot of possible things to say. In this talk however one very important point is made that before trying to work all that out, it is crucial to fully explore and surrender to single moments of allowing everything to just […]

This guided meditation starts with a soothing breath to feel your way into the core of the breath-body and from your alive, sensitive presence, and then guides you to remain there, to enjoy your being now and to more easily return to it in the midst of busy life.

There is a natural joy always here. Where is it? This question is an important one that requires radical honesty to answer, yet it is otherwise simple and natural to get into contact with this fount of aliveness.

Without having to do very much at all, simply being as you are is a very powerful meditation that uses our intention and attention in just about the most skillful way possible, which is to say, in the slightest, easiest, and simplest way. Practice this guided meditation and then apply it in your life to […]

The real Quiet is not the physical quiet of sounds, nor is it even a quiet from thoughts or a quiet mind. What is it and how can we recognize it? This can be a sticky point for meditators, but this sticky point cannot overpower the quiet itself, a silence greater than sound or thought […]

This guided tour through the body sensitizes you to all the flavors of feeling in the body, and brings you to the vivid enjoyment of subtle breath sensations interacting with whole body sensations. This is a profoundly accessible and healing meditation that leads us toward the shift into a mindful life.

The tensions between meditation and our natural state are explored through great questions about restlessness, how to begin a practice, and what the “inner mental attitude” is all about . This is the straight raw recording of our live online video stream with call-in questions. You can join the next one!

This guided meditation leads you to discover the light-hearted, warm-hearted feeling that is already there, and from that place give a gift to yourself and the world. Very simple, very easy, very good.

The states of mind we generate through meditation are like all states that come and go. If they don’t last, what’s the point of meditation? This talk explores two reasons why temporary states of equanimity through meditation help us to recognize our fundamental, always present and unshaken stillness, and also break the cycles of negativity. […]

This guided meditation focuses on the inner mental attitude, on becoming intimately familiar with it. By reinforcing our connection of attention with the inner mental attitude, we head off cycles of negative thought and emotion sooner, naturally, and effortlessly. This practice sets this positive influence in our lives in motion. Practice it often! Good thing […]

  Use this when you don’t have a lot of time but want to be consistent with your practice and not skip a day. Or as a quick pick-me-up anytime you need to re-establish intimate contact with your breath again. Then again, when is that not a good thing to do?

Use this meditation to stabilize the mind and focus in on a single meditation point. While this classic meditation is understood in the west to be merely for enhancing ones mental powers of concentration, in fact it has a direct connection to the development of wisdom and insight into our presence and freedom. This guided […]

A Questioner asks: what’s going on with chattering little thoughts all the time while feeling the breath? Should we attend to these chattering thoughts? The practical answer to this question parallels the very purpose of meditation and the very meaning of freedom. This talk points in this direction even alongside the related issue of long, […]

A guided meditation on sustaining the presence of sensations also leads us deeper into understanding the practical meaning of “mindfulness” and what is awareness. This meditation practices the ability to keep a meditation object present by getting clear on what is the precise action that we do to make that happen. At the same time, […]

Mindfulness and Awareness can mean two very different things– what is the benefit we meditators can have from drawing this distinction? What does it point to?

This guided meditation focuses on the natural support we already have in our practice, on recognizing the awareness that is always there. Meditation need not be a lot of striving and effort– we can recognize this and relax into awareness and relax into the fact that it can do the work of mindfulness for us.

Half guided meditation, half talk, this intro to the inner mental attitude explores something that colors all of our experience. While we can’t monitor our attitude indefinitely, even by knowing it only sometimes we can turn our whole life around.

Scan the breath with this meditation that travels along the core path of breath sensations. It’s a massage for the body, from the inside! And it also helps us explore the inner regions of our body where we store emotional traces. This can be a key tool in finding your bridge between breath and intimate […]

How do I stop thinking so much? It’s a question with the wrong target, pointed in the wrong direction. In this live Q & A recording a meditator asks the question that naturally arises to anyone who tries to meditate. A question that is always going to come up from time to time for everyone. […]

Use this guided meditation to contact the layer of basic, innocent sensitivity with which we receive all the echoes and reverberations of emotion in our body.

Wandering thoughts can be part of the meditation. Then there is no such thing as distraction! Just as important, with this noting thoughts mindfulness practice we can get increasingly clear on understanding the nature of thought, distinguishing it from bodily sensation, and becoming aware of what we are actually thinking. All this gives us a […]

Another favorite back again in a new form– whole body breathing. And here breath meditation and the recognition of simple presence are combined in this guided audio that is a great initiation into simply being.

Fresh perspectives are great for practice. Variety can be a spice of Meditation! This talk explores the meaning of “meditation techniques” and shows how a variety of ways of attending to our experience is immensely helpful in sustaining a practice within a busy modern life. Most important, is doing it consistently, and variety and freshness […]

This guided meditation teaches a valuable tool for seeing the motion and change in body sensations, and is worth practicing often as a way to enter into a more comfortable relationship with sensation as well as explore and verify when our attention to body sensations is properly vivid.

Playing with meditation is a natural way to stay engaged, and in these exercises you can play along with Alan at knowing and noticing thought and recognizing our awareness itself. Rather than trying to figure it out, better to play around with it and gain direct experience. There is actually quite a lot of potential […]

There are not only two kinds of breath: deliberate and automatic. There is a whole spectrum between and in fact our understanding of intention is much better felt, sensed, and experienced than defined in words. This breath meditation explores the realities of our relationship with the breath and is a powerful way to come to […]

The idea can reach a meditator that we must stare straight into suffering without flinching, and also not be attached to pleasure. This is usually not a skillful idea and is not good for mindfulness practice. In this talk, we are pointed in another direction, toward our simply being present and the inherent joy of […]

This lesson and guided meditation practices the art of checking our inner mental attitude. It is a good lesson to go through at least once to investigate our awareness of something intimate and powerful, that colors our every experience. Change your attitude, change your life!

Delve into the intimate and subtle feelings of the heart region, use the breath to explore and bring to light what it is that we are feeling. A simple and fundamental pointing to what meditation can be: actually feel what you feel.

Sensitizing the awareness to walking and the feet is a great meditation and complement to sitting meditation. Learn this meditation here, or refresh your connection to it with this guided walkthrough of walking meditation.

Starting with a grounded sense of the body, this breath meditation explores breathing into and from a sense of presence, and has a contemplative benefit to it as well as a centering effect.

Commitment to the moment is to the moment alone, and does not even include committing to meditation or any future endeavor or even to future moments, and it is not regret about past moments lost to distraction. In this guided contemplation we explore presence and distraction in the light of what is immediate and real.

Bodies are made up mostly of space, on the atomic level, and the sensations in our body can be experienced as space-like, giving us a new perspective on them, taking our sensitivity deeper, and helping us accept and make room for our denser, more challenging sensations and pains to release.

Learn mindfulness on whole body breathing, a very deep meditation that gains us access and sensitivity to the body. It can also be deeply healing.

Meditation that prepares the body and mind for sleep, using a guided body scan leading into a guided rest in a natural effortless awareness. Great as a regular sitting meditation when we are stressed and over-energized too!

One of the first, best tools that a meditator can acquire is an awareness of attention itself, and a way to experiment and play with, and investigate, attention. In this guided exploration we will develop a taste for attention and an awareness of some of its behaviors.

Today’s guided body scan meditation is medium-length, definitely enough to sink very deeply into awareness of the body. This is one of the fundamental practices of meditation, because it sensitizes us in a way that helps any other kind of meditation we do. Mindfulness of the body helps us come out of excessive thinking, deal […]

This 10 Minute Guided Mediation on the Breath gets us directly in touch with our feeling presence and resets the day, readies us for the day, or prepares us for night.

There is more to breath meditation than “Pay Attention to the Natural Breath.” This talk explores some of the ways to play with and experiment with the breath that are equally “mindful” as the more common instruction, and have surprising extra benefits. This talk goes with the last guided meditation and helps start the inquiry […]

This Breath Meditation is much more effective and enjoyable than simply “paying attention to the breath.” Find out how much fun and fascination is possible with this mindful breathing meditation. Just follow along.

When we are assailed by thinking, it seems like thought is big and we are surrounded by thought, engulfed by thought. Or even when the mind is just plain noisy, this meditation helps really experience the smallness of thought and gives us a clear perspective on thinking. With this meditation on space and thinking, the […]

Every meditator encounters the challenge of rampant thinking, and the stresses it sinks into the body and the many ways it colors our experience. Coming to clarity, however, does not mean to stop thinking. In our first audio podcast, I get the chance to introduce the heart of meditation and I look forward to many, […]