Many Ways to Meditate

Want to learn to meditate, with or without Zen Coffee?

Aro Buddhism offers a free online course which consists of a series of emails delivered once a week which help you learn how to meditate. I just signed up and received my first email. I've been meditating for 30-some years, using a variety of meditation methods. There are so many ways to meditate and to easily incorporate meditation into your lifestyle, including meditating by coffee. This course offers a new perspective and puts some variety into my practice.

Their FAQ explains what their form of Buddhist meditation is and what
it isn't. It answers the questions of: Why meditate? What is meditation, exactly? And many others including dealing with your monkey mind: I can’t stop thinking for even a moment so I can’t meditate. Their answer is: It is not necessary to stop thinking in order to meditate. Meditation does help calm the mind and with practice, the rush of thoughts slows and clarifies. Eventually, you will find gaps in your thoughts and then periods of peaceful silence combined with intelligent awareness.

The email begins with: "Learning to meditate is a gradual process.
Each week, this course delivers an email that provides new techniques and facilitates new insights. The techniques either address particular problems that may arise when you meditate or provide progressively more advanced methods which deepen your experience. One advantage of this email-based meditation course is that it paces you. If you learn meditation from a book, you may be tempted to read it all in a week. You might rush through the early exercises in order to experiment
with later ones. That is rather like leaping onto a 1000cc motorcycle
and hoping to roar off into the sunset before having learned to ride a bicycle without training wheels. You need substantial experience with each exercise to obtain the benefit it provides and to prepare you for the next exercise. The earlier exercises are not mere preliminaries. They are central methods in their own right to which you will return repeatedly, no matter how advanced your practice becomes."

If you're interested in learning how to meditate, this might be a really fun and educational course to take. It might just be your cup of coffee. All you have to do is make the time to actually meditate and do it every day. One of the things I already like about this course is they don't tell you how many emails they'll be sending you. All you know is they'll send you an email once a week. Puts you right into the here and now--into the present which is the perfect time to meditate.