My mindfulness podcast recommendations from 2020
I enjoy listening to podcasts and lectures on mindfulness and meditation, and here are some of my favorites from last year. Some of them are older than 2020, but they were new discoveries for me.
Most of them are for listening only, but there are also some videos.
I hope they are useful and inspiring to you.
The Zen of Drucker: Mindfulness and the Practice of Self-Management with Professor Jeremy Hunter
Professor Jeremy Hunter highlights the themes of mindfulness and self-management found in Peter Drucker’s philosophy.
Daniel Ingram — Pandemic Edition — Guru Viking Podcast
How to work with anxiety, fear, and panic? How to work with isolation? How to work with sickness and death? And how to help others having those experiences?
Daniel Ingram is a meditation teacher and author of ‘Mastering The Core Teachings Of The Buddha’.
How to do “AUTO-WALK” ~ Stephanie Nash
Steph shares a way in which she taught Shinzen’s “Auto-Walk” technique at a retreat where she was co-teaching with Shinzen. Shinzen was delighted at how quickly and easily people seemed to pick it up, and he requested that Steph make a video of how she presented it and post it here on his YouTube channel.
Sensory Clarity is a mindfulness skill. It is the ability to monitor the sensory events that you’re experiencing in the present moment.
The Pragmatic Dark Web — with John Vervaeke, Rafe Kelley, Mike Nahan and Mark Walsh
Four clever embodied blokes discuss practices, democide, ecologies of practice, parkour, the meaning crisis, martial arts, cognitive science, embedding, the four “Es”, liminality, play, the heroic, masculinity, and much much more.
Effortlessness in Meditation, with Jud Brewer
Neuroscientist and mindfulness expert Jud Brewer speaks with host Michael Taft about his research into the four steps of Rigpa (with teacher and psychologist Dan Brown), effortlessness in meditation and the feeling of openness vs. closedness, the neurochemistry of reward, the historical Buddha’s insight into the results of exploring gratification “to its end” and how that leads to effortless change (the system corrects itself), and the fact that willpower is a myth.
The Nondual Heart, with John Prendergast
Nondual teacher and psychotherapist John Prendergast speaks with host Michael Taft about the heart area as an opening to infinite space, contacting the “dark matrix” of the ground, the body as a vibrant expression of emptiness, moving out of the cycle of reactivity into the creative life, working with energy in meditation, and much more.
How to Jhana — with Michael Taft
Jhanas are special states of deep absorption that make a wonderful setup for doing awakening practices. In this video, meditation teacher Michael Taft describes what jhanas are, and clarifies the basic steps for getting into the first jhana.
Evolving Ground with Rin’dzin Pamo and Jared Janes
Host Michael Taft speaks with Rin’dzin Pamo and Jared Janes about their new project, entitled “Evolving Ground,” which is a community of practitioners that seeks to reinterpret and revitalize Vajrayana practice in a contemporary Western context. Topics include: the failure of Tibetan Buddhism to adapt to Western culture, the importance of the worldview in practice, creating new language around meditation, cheese-filled dorje snacks, and much more.
Why does traditional Theravada meditation look like tantra?
Why does traditional Theravada meditation look like tantra? Recovering pre-modern technologies of transformation
This talk looks at the pre-modern meditation practices of Theravada of which only traces remain in Southeast Asia today. These practices have sometimes been labeled as tantric Theravada because of the somatic nature of their practices in which qualities of Buddhahood are internalized by the practitioner. This talk will examine how these practices reflect a shared Indic scientific context with more familiar forms of tantra, but also how they differ and are fundamentally Theravada in their understanding of the relationship between consciousness, the body and Buddhahood.