The Meditative Life

Practical instruction on how to tap into your mind and heart, plus inspiration from great meditation teachers.

by Arthur Zajonc

Contemplative Dimensions of Leadership

The truly great societal and economic transformations occurred because someone was awake, profoundly awake, not because they were following a strategic plan. How can we awaken ourselves and keep ourselves awake? Read More

Thinking Like Einstein

Learning to think like Einstein: Einstein's genius was, in part, his ability to sustain his attention for long periods of time on a single question. This is what the Dalai Lama calls "analytic meditation." Read More

Meditation and Art

Only after long contemplative looking could Rilke finally truly see Cezanne's paintings; he remarked that suddenly he had "the right eyes." Meditation creates new ways of seeing ourselves and our world. Read More

Practicing Friendship

Rumi wrote, "Our friendship is made of being awake." How can we learn to be more awake to each other, and thereby strengthen our experience of friendship and love? Read More

Breathing Light: a Yoga of the Senses

All absolute perception is religious.Novalis Read More

Toward an Integrative Science of Mind

Meditation offers us a unique resource for examining the mind first-hand. When joined with the third-person methods of neuroscience, we have the possibility for the first time of creating a science that bridges the gap between subjective experience and the hard data of fMRI and EEG. Read More

Meditation and Mortality: Practice and Parkinson's

The diagnosis came a few months ago; I had stage one Parkinson's disease. The most prominent symptom was a persistent resting tremor in my right hand. I had been meditating for many years, and now I was experiencing firsthand the ways in which meditation and a chronic medical condition can intersect. Read More

Toward a Contemplative Curriculum

Last night I welcomed thirty faculty from U.S. and Canadian colleges and universities to the opening session of a weeklong gathering on Contemplative Curriculum Development. Read More

Meditating our Emotions: Finding Martin Luther King

Google's new personal development course Search Inside Yourself combines meditation with an understanding of emotional intelligence. We too can benefit from contemplative engagement with our emotions, finding peace and refining our feelings so we become more sensitive, insightful, and compassionate. Read More

Meditation and the Practice of Virtue

Establishing a meditative life can lead to a more settled and attentive mind, but to what end will you direct these capacities? If you are more attentive, to what will you direct your attention? If more settled, on what will you rest your mind? Humility and reverence can be the trusted entryways into the meditative life. Read More

Establishing Peace, Cultivating Wakefulness

Meditation entered the 21st century on August 4, 2003... Read More

Arthur Zajonc is professor of physics at Amherst College, where he has taught since 1978. His latest book is Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry: When Knowing Becomes Love.

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