This World Meditation Day

In recognition of World Meditation Day on May 21st, I’m curating recent finds from my own practice. I started a daily practice in 2016 that turned into five years of daily sitting. Eight years later, meditation, along with movement and physical training, have been crucial for getting through a decade of health issues and Crohn’s Disease, and provide a direct through line to deep remission. Mindfulness and meditation are having a(nother) moment with the rise in apps and in response to the collective and individual struggles of the last few years.

1) This Tetragrammaton podcast episode with Rick Rubin and Jon Kabat-Zinn is my favorite fly-on-the-wall conversation. Jon wrote “Wherever You Go, There You Are” 30 years ago and recently revisited the book for a new edition and audiobook. Jon’s book is one of the best and most easily digestible works on mindfulness and I will be listening to this episode regularly.

2) The Way app by Henry Shukman offers a guided and progressive meditation path, providing one of the best in-app meditation experiences. While there's a subscription to access all of The Way, the freely available content is exceptional.

Shukman's recent discussion with Kevin Rose, and a few years ago with Tim Ferriss are great listens, with the latter being my second favorite contemporary conversation about mindfulness.

4) New consciousness studies use superposition to argue for the possibility that our brains can connect with the entire universe. Requires membership - https://apple.news/AkjZJu0S_S2i5xSbhQHPmww, https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a45574179/architecture-of-consciousness/

5) A 2-minute meditation snack from Henry Shukman for World Meditation Day

Bonus) I’ve been using the Insight Timer app for a decade now and it's still my favorite. It offers free and paid content forsleep, binaural beats, secular meditation, and content from nearly every tradition you can think of.

One of my favorite discoveries in Insight Timer has been the Mindfulness In Daily Life (MIDL) practice from Stephen Proctor. Stephen's website offers powerful courses, including a beginner's path. I’ve gone through his 52-week meditation on Insight Timer probably 4 times in the last 8 years, and would say that it aligns closely with The Way from Henry Shukman.

No matter how you go about it, where you get it from, a mindfulness and meditation practice is the best technology, available freely to all humans, for connecting to ourselves and others, as well as overcoming and enduring the difficulty of modern life.