Responding to student questions, Joseph Goldstein invigorates listeners to have faith and confidence in dharma practice.

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This week on Insight Hour, Joseph Goldstein answers questions on:

• Mental noting throughout meditation
• Working with a greedy mind
• Dukkha and craving as the fundamental cause of suffering
• Small moments of renunciation
• The deepening of concentration over time and why practice is non-linear
• Keeping confidence in the dharma
• Doubt as the most problematic feeling within practice
• Dealing with shame, depression, unworthiness, and other painful mind-states
• Balancing self-knowing and deepening insight into non-self
• Fear of impermanence and attachment to things staying the same

This special group mentorship program recording was originally published on Dharmaseed

“We really just need to continue doing the practice and have that trust that the dharma will lead us onward, which it does. I’ve seen it in myself and I’ve seen it in thousands of yogis. I have a lot of confidence in that.” – Joseph Goldstein

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Explaining the subtleties of practice and the energy between mind and body, Joseph Goldstein offers both insight and humor to his students.

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This time on Insight Hour, Joseph Goldstein :

• The variety of practice ways to strengthen concentration
• Animals and questions on karma in the natural world
• Free our minds from fear when nearing the end of our lives
• Watching the mystery of life unfolding
• The wholesome and unwholesome actions that determine our rebirth
• Habitual karma and having a place of refuge from repeated practice
• Humility and the understanding of selflessness
• Cultivating relationships of equanimity
• The ongoing discovery of the mind-body energy system
• Sexual desire and the refinement of our sensations
• Why neutrality is better than pleasure
• The unhelpful ways that we relate to pain
• How practice helps with boredom and restlessness
• Keeping an effort to pay close attention
• Using our precious lives very well

This 1990 recording was originally published by Dharmaseed

“Each of these practices not only addresses a particular conditioning of the mind, they all very much strengthen the power of concentration. It’s just to see how through many different doors we can enter the realm of understanding, taming the mind, coming to a place of stillness where we can really see the essential nature and come to freedom. There are many ways depending on temperament.” – Joseph Goldstein

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Highlighting the impermanence of experience, Joseph Goldstein leads a practice in noticing mental and physical sensations.

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This time on Insight Hour, Joseph Goldstein offers a guided practice on:

• Working with thought and emotion
• Full body awareness without effort or struggling
• Noticing the breath and other sensations
• Being aware of thoughts just as they are arising
• Opening up to the fullness of experience
• The power of naming emotions
• Sensing the impermanent nature of all things
• Moving from the conceptual into direct experience
• The seduction of our thoughts

This 2018 recording from an Insight Meditation Retreat was originally published by Dharmaseed

“We don’t have to do anything to make things change. The very nature of whatever is arising, whether it’s in the body or the mind, the very nature is that whatever arises will also pass away.” – Joseph Goldstein

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In a dharma talk on working with thoughts and emotions, Joseph Goldstein explains the impersonal and empty nature of the mind.

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This week on Insight Hour, Joseph Goldstein teaches us about:

• Observing how mind states and thoughts mutually condition each other
• The way that thoughts carry us away into different emotional states
• Looking at the direct nature and meaning of thought
• Noticing the difference between being lost and being awake
• Viewing our thoughts just as they arise
• Not overthinking and focusing on the simplicity of a practice
• The six things that are ever arising or passing: our senses
• Maintaining open awareness and experiencing the flow

“Well, what is a thought? It’s quite remarkable because when we look at that level, not on the level of the story or the content, but thought as a phenomenon, we see that it is barely more than nothing. It is so phenomenal. These thoughts arise, and the content can be so compelling, but as a phenomenon, as the nature of thought, it’s just this little energy blip in the mind. If we’re not getting hooked by the content, it has no power at all.” – Joseph Goldstein

This 2019 dharma talk from Insight Meditation Society was originally published by Dharmaseed

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Joseph Goldstein meets us at the constellation of self, the duality of self, and the need for mindfulness.

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This time on Insight Hour, Joseph Goldstein gets into:

• Duality and how it relates to our meditation practice
• The fundamental split of object and subject
• Limitations from perceiving ourselves as separate
• Persona and the identification we have with the world
• The progression from fullness/oneness to constriction
• Having compassion for the shadow side
• How fear desire, and attachment, make us more attached to our sense of self
• Being imprisoned and conditioned by dualistic perception
• The integration of mind and body and love for all experience as the connector
• From the ego center to the zero center
• Being totally honest with what is happening
• Mindfulness as the tool to stop identification
• The power of renunciation and restraint

This 2005 dharma talk was originally published by Dharmaseed

“As long as we are identified with that sense of self in the mind, that identification creates fear, attachment, separation, comparing. If there’s an “I”, if there’s a self, then we have to defend it, we have to protect it, we have to gratify it, and our whole lives revolve around this particular identification.” – Joseph Goldstein

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Joseph Goldstein discusses how working with fear is absolutely essential in our practice of understanding, opening, and accepting.

This 1983 dharma talk was originally published on Dharmaseed.

This week on Insight Hour, Joseph Goldstein teaches us about:

• Releasing tension through awareness
• The body as an energy system
• Opening up to the Buddha nature
• Working with fear and emotional pain
• Resistance and unwillingness to be uncomfortable
• Becoming open to pain and discomfort
• Insecurity and the fear of being judged
• How the fear of feeling certain emotions keeps us bound to negative habits
• How openness allows our hearts to be touched
• Death and fear of the unknown
• Being okay with being afraid
• Having space for fear without demands
• Lovingkindness as the antidote for fear

“What we’re doing in our practice is learning how to work with those experiences which often cause trouble, which often cause resistance, which we’re afraid of.” – Joseph Goldstein

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Offering instruction for metta practice, Joseph Goldstein explains the many flavors of loving-kindness that we can try.

This 2018 talk was originally published on Dharmaseed.

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This time on Insight Hour, Joseph Goldstein explicates:

• The unconditional quality of metta
• Helping each other see our individual loveliness
• Using mantra to evoke the feeling of loving-kindness
• Metta as a tool for deep concentration
• Experimenting with the different ways metta can be applied in meditation
• The three aspects of practicing of loving-kindness
• A 12-minute guided metta practice to settle into the feeling of well-wishing

“There are two main purposes for doing metta meditation. One is metta, or loving-kindness, which can be used as a vehicle for developing concentration. So, not only for the metta quality itself, but it is a technique or a method for developing strong concentration, even to the point of absolution.” – Joseph Goldstein

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Guiding us in three short, guided meditations, Joseph Goldstein helps us break down our identification with the body and the self.

This talk from the Insight Meditation Society was originally published on Dharmaseed.

In this episode of Insight Hour, Joseph Goldstein guides us in:

• Accessing deeper meditative states outside of a retreat
• Turbo-charging our practice through shorter meditations we can do in our daily lives
• Finding the mental areas where our mistaken sense of self is created
• Listening to sounds and considering the ‘knowing’ rather than being a “knower”
• Breaking through the identification we have with the body
• Directly experiencing bodily sensations and their changing nature
• Watching our thoughts and being aware in their moment of arising
• Enlivening our understanding of the Buddha’s teaching through a combination of practices

“This exercise allows us to see the selfless nature of thought and gives us the ability to choose which are helpful, which are not. Which do I act on, which do I let go of.” – Joseph Goldstein

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