Meditation strengthens and directs our attention through the cultivation of three key skills - concentration, mindfulness, and lovingkindness.  

Concentration steadies and focuses our attention so we can let go of distractions. Distractions waste our energy and concentration restores it to us. You'll improve your concentration by focusing on something you've known how to do all your life - breathing. In this way meditation trains us to stay in the moment before us instead of reliving the past or worrying about the future. Breathing Meditation.mp3 

Mindfulness refines our attention so that we can conect fully and directly with whatever life brings.  It moves our focus from a single object, the breath, to anything that's happening inside or outside of s at a given moment.  We practice observing thoughts, feelings, sights, smells, sounds, without clinging to what's pleasant, pushing away what's painful, or ignoring what's neutral.  Mindfulness helps us get better at seeing the difference between what's happening and the stories we tell ourselves about what's happening, stories that get in the way of direct experience.  Meditation on Emotions.mp3

Lovingkindness is compassionate awareness that opens our attention and makes it more inclusive.  It transforms the way we treat ourselves, our family, and our friends.  By spending time paying careful attention to our thoughts, feelings, and actions (postive and negative) we understand them better and it opens our hearts to loving ourselves genuinely for who we are, with all our imperfections.  And that's the gateway to loving others.  Loving Kindness Meditation.mp3 

Benefits of meditation:

• You'll begin to spot the unexamined assumptions that get in the way of happiness
• You'll stop limiting yourself
• You'll weather hard times better
• You'll rediscover a deeer sense of what's really important to you
• You'll be in closer touch with the best parts of yourself
• You'll recapture the energy you'e been wasting trying to control the uncontrollable
• You'll understand how to relate to change better - to accept that it's inevitable and believe that it's possible