Buddhism Archives - Minding The Bedside

Meditation Tip of the Week: When You Meditate, Forget About Yourself!

MEDITATION TIP OF THE WEEK MEDITATION THIS WEEK MARKS THE FIFTH WEEK OF A NEW KIND OF POST ON THIS SITE, IT'S CALLED "TIP OF THE WEEK." TIP OF THE WEEK WILL BE PART OF A WEEKLY SERIES OF EASY TO REMEMBER, SHORT AND BASIC TIPS ON MEDITATION. PLEASE LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK, IS IT HELPFUL? When we learn to meditate, there can be a period of time when we encounter a "claustrophobia of self." It usually takes the form of thinking, "Am I doing this correctly?", "Am I making progress?", "Is this working for me?" "Will I [...]

2019-10-24T13:50:17-06:00By Jerome Stone|Meditation Tip of the Week|0 Comments

Losing Compassion at the Bedside? Five Instant Tips….

COMPASSION ISN'T OUTSIDE OF YOU Compassion isn't something foreign to our minds and our hearts. It isn't something "out there" that we have to get or acquire. And, it isn't something that we need to learn (although we may need to remember it at times). Granted, there are times when we feel that to find even the smallest compassionate impulse for certain patients requires of us the most Herculean effort. There are also times when, either due to the amount of stress that we're experiencing, or the number of patients we're dealing with, it doesn't feel like there's "...enough to go [...]

2019-01-17T14:22:08-07:00By Jerome Stone|Compassion, Nursing|7 Comments

How To Meditate: Ten Reasons Not to Meditate!

This post is inspired by my friend Erric Solomon, blogger and administrator on the site, What Meditation Really Is. His post, Ten Reasons Why We Should Never Meditate, inspired me to write a similar post. I know that this site is loaded with advice and how to meditate, where to meditate and why you should meditate. But...maybe you shouldn't meditate. Maybe meditation is really a waste of time, a waste of time that you could be using for other things like surfing the internet, watching TV or playing video games (the list goes on, doesn't it?!) Here is a list, [...]

2015-01-28T19:04:36-07:00By Jerome Stone|Meditation|4 Comments

The Buddha Walks Into a Bar…[this is meditation?]

There's a joke that goes something like this: A monk walks up to a hot-dog stand and says "make me one with everything"...you've heard this one before? Well, you may have heard that corny joke about the hot-dog stand, but you haven't read a book like this before...unless you've read some of the late Chogyam Trungpa's works, in which case you're ahead of the crowd. And even then, what author Lodro Rinzler has to say is new, fresh and definitely unique. Appealing to a younger crowd, "The Buddha Walks Into a Bar" brings some key Buddhist concepts about meditation and [...]

2012-04-20T11:18:44-06:00By Jerome Stone|Uncategorized|0 Comments

Meditation Isn’t About Arriving Somewhere; You’re Already There!

A colloquialism favored in the state of Maine is that you can't get there from here, or - spoken as a Mainer "you can't get they-ah from he-ah." But, why talk about Maine when the topics of this blog are mindfulness, awareness and compassion at the bedside? (with bits of the mundane daily stuff tossed in for grins) The "from here" that we work with when beginning meditation is our ordinary - some might say deluded - mind. And, the "there" that we're working to achieve to some degree is a state free from delusions, free from distractions. The premise of [...]

2011-09-06T17:45:45-06:00By Jerome Stone|Meditation|0 Comments