Welcome back for week three of Meditation Month, our annual challenge to sit all 31 days of March. 

If you’re just joining us, Meditation Month teacher Guo Gu is leading a series of four free guided meditation videos. Guo Gu is the founder of and a teacher at the Tallahassee Chan Center and the Sheng Yen Associate Professor of Chinese Buddhism at Florida State University. Each Monday, we’re releasing a new video, which builds on the previous week’s lesson. 

This week, Guo Gu discusses the importance of paying attention to our habits of perception. Buddhist teachings have a lot to say about the limits of our sensory experience, Guo Gu says. Our experience of the world is always filtered through—and actually created by—our perception and the workings of our mind and body. 

To put this exploration into perception into practice, Guo Gu asks us to focus our attention on one steady object, connect to the felt presence of the sitting body, and open to don’t-know mind, suspending the labels we normally attach to the objects of our perception. Next week, in the final installment of Meditation Month, Guo Gu will help us use these building blocks of practice to launch into a teaching of silent illumination.

Download a transcript of this talk. It has been edited for clarity.

Mark your calendar:

More meditation material to support your practice:

  • Are you bombarded by thoughts when you sit down to meditate? Zen monk Haemin Sunim offers three methods for working with our monkey mind.
  • Although we may not live in the radical present, our bodies do, writes Lama Willa Blythe Baker.
  • How to let go of our inner control freak 

This week’s Meditation Month articles:

♦

Sign up for Meditation Month!

* indicates required

Tricycle Foundation will use the information you provide on this form to be in touch with you and to provide updates and marketing. Please let us know all the ways you would like to hear from us:

You can change your mind at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link in the footer of any email you receive from us, or by contacting us at tricycle@tricycle.org. We will treat your information with respect. For more information about our privacy practices please visit our website. By clicking below, you agree that we may process your information in accordance with these terms.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp’s privacy practices here.

Thank you for subscribing to Tricycle! As a nonprofit, to keep Buddhist teachings and practices widely available.