Meditation is a practice in which an individual uses a technique to train attention and awareness and detach from reflexive, "discursive thinking," achieving a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state, while not judging the meditation process itself.
Walking meditation is a meditation practice done while walking common in Buddhism. It can be done as a standalone practice or as a break in between long periods of sitting meditation. In different forms, the practice is common in various traditions of both Theravada and in Mahayana Buddhism. The term kinhin consists of the Chinese words 經, meaning "to go through ", with "sutra" as a secondary meaning, and 行, meaning "walk". Taken literally, the phrase means "to walk straight back and forth."
Mahāsī Sayādaw U Sobhana was a Burmese Theravada Buddhist monk and meditation master who had a significant impact on the teaching of vipassanā (insight) meditation in the West and throughout Asia.
Satya Narayana Goenka was an Indian teacher of vipassanā meditation. Born in Burma to an Indian business family, he moved to India in 1969 and started teaching meditation. His teaching emphasized that the Buddha's path to liberation was non-sectarian, universal, and scientific in character. He became an influential teacher and played an important role in establishing non-commercial Vipassana meditation centers globally. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan by the Government of India in 2012, an award given for distinguished service of high order.
Buddhist meditation is the practice of meditation in Buddhism. The closest words for meditation in the classical languages of Buddhism are bhāvanā and jhāna/dhyāna.
A Jewish Buddhist is a person with an ethnic Jewish background who believes in the tenets of a form of Buddhism.
Jon Kabat-Zinn is an American professor emeritus of medicine and the creator of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Kabat-Zinn was a student of Zen Buddhist teachers such as Philip Kapleau, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Seung Sahn, and a founding member of Cambridge Zen Center. His practice of hatha yoga, Vipassanā and appreciation of the teachings of Soto Zen and Advaita Vedanta led him to integrate their teachings with scientific findings. He teaches mindfulness, which he says can help people cope with stress, anxiety, pain, and illness. The stress reduction program created by Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), is offered by medical centers, hospitals, and health maintenance organizations, and is described in his book Full Catastrophe Living.
The Vipassanā movement refers to a branch of modern Burmese Theravāda Buddhism that promotes "bare insight" (sukha-Vipassana) meditation practice to develop insight into the three marks of existence and attain stream entry. It gained widespread popularity since the 1950s, including through its western derivatives which have been popularised since the 1970s, giving rise to the more dhyana-oriented mindfulness movement.
Jack Kornfield is an American writer and teacher in the Vipassana movement in American Theravada Buddhism. He trained as a Buddhist monk in Thailand, Burma and India, first as a student of the Thai forest master Ajahn Chah and Mahasi Sayadaw of Burma. He has taught mindfulness meditation worldwide since 1974. In 1975, he co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, with Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein, and subsequently in 1987, Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California. Kornfield has worked as a peacemaker and activist, organized teacher training, and led international gatherings of Buddhist teachers including the Dalai Lama.
Sati, literally "memory" or "retention", commonly translated as mindfulness, "to remember to observe", is an essential part of Buddhist practice. It has the related meanings of calling to mind the wholesome dhammas such as the four establishments of mindfulness, the five faculties, the five powers, the seven awakening-factors, the Noble Eightfold Path, and the attainment of insight, and the actual practice of maintaining a lucid awareness of the dhammas of bodily and mental phenomena, in order to counter the arising of unwholesome states, and to develop wholesome states. It is the first factor of the Seven Factors of Enlightenment. "Correct" or "right" mindfulness is the seventh element of the Noble Eightfold Path.
Gil Fronsdal is a Norwegian-born, American Buddhist teacher, writer and scholar based in Redwood City, California. He has been practicing Buddhism of the Sōtō Zen and Vipassanā sects since 1975, and is currently teaching the practice of Buddhism in the San Francisco Bay Area. Having been taught by the Vipassanā practitioner Jack Kornfield, Fronsdal is part of the Vipassanā teachers' collective at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. He was ordained as a Sōtō Zen priest at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1982, and was a Theravāda monk in Burma in 1985. In 1995, he received Dharma transmission from Mel Weitsman, the abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center.
The Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, and the subsequently created Mahāsatipaṭṭhāna Sutta, are two of the most celebrated and widely studied discourses in the Pāli Canon of Theravada Buddhism, acting as the foundation for contemporary vipassana meditation practice. The Pāli texts of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta and the Mahāsatipaṭṭhāna Sutta are largely similar in content; the main difference being a section about the Four Noble Truths in the Observation of Phenomena (Dhammānupassana), which is greatly expanded in the Mahāsatipaṭṭhāna Sutta. These suttas (discourses) stress the practice of sati (mindfulness) "for the purification of beings, for the overcoming of sorrow and lamentation, for the extinguishing of suffering and grief, for walking on the path of truth, for the realization of nibbāna."
Joseph Goldstein is one of the first American vipassana teachers, co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) with Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzberg, a contemporary author of numerous popular books on Buddhism, a resident guiding teacher at IMS, and a leader of retreats worldwide on insight (vipassana) and lovingkindness (metta) meditation.
Martine Batchelor, a former Jogye Buddhist nun, is the author of several books on Buddhism currently residing in France. She and her husband, Stephen Batchelor, work mostly in the United Kingdom and occasionally in the United States. In addition to writing books, she leads meditation groups with her husband that incorporate aspects of Zen, vipassanā, and Tibetan Buddhism. Batchelor also blogs frequently for the U.S.-based Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. She studied Jogye Zen Buddhism for ten years at Songgwangsa with her former teacher Master Kusan Sunim, being ordained as a nun in 1975. Batchelor served as Kusan's interpreter on speaking tours of the United States and Europe from 1981 to 1985, the year she left monastic life, married Stephen Batchelor, and returned to Europe. There she became a member of Sharpham North Community and served as a guiding teacher at Gaia House, both of which are based in Devon, England. She has also led a Buddhist studies program at Sharpham College in Totnes, Devon. MB speaks English, Korean, and French and can read Chinese characters.
Larry Rosenberg is an American Buddhist teacher who founded the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1985. He is also a resident teacher there. Rosenberg was a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and Harvard Medical School. In addition to teaching at the Insight Meditation Center in Cambridge, he is also a senior teacher at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts.
Samatha, "calm," "serenity," "tranquility of awareness," and vipassanā, literally "special, super, seeing ", are two qualities of the mind developed in tandem in Buddhist practice.
Phillip Moffitt is a vipassana (insight) meditation teacher, former publishing executive, author, and an instructor at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California.
Shaila Catherine is an American Buddhist meditation teacher and author in the Theravādin tradition, known for her expertise in insight meditation (vipassanā) and jhāna practices. She has authored three books on jhāna practice and has introduced many American practitioners to this concentration practice through her writings and focused retreats.
Vipassana Meditation Centre is a Buddhist centre in Singapore set up in 1993 to propagate and perpetuating Theravada Buddhism and provide opportunity for the practice of Vipassana meditation in Singapore. This group is not related to non-sectarian society "Vipassana International Center (Singapore)", which offers 10 Day residential meditation courses, taught by SN Goenka, in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin.
Mindful Yoga or Mindfulness Yoga combines Buddhist-style mindfulness practice with yoga as exercise to provide a means of exercise that is also meditative and useful for reducing stress. Buddhism and Hinduism have since ancient times shared many aspects of philosophy and practice including mindfulness, understanding the suffering caused by an erroneous view of reality, and using concentrated and meditative states to address such suffering.
