In terms of exercise, I’m an avid telemark skier and a slow but joyful trail runner. My trainer is the fabulous Lisa Andrews.
In terms of meditation, one fall day in 1990 I parked my VW bus behind Naropa Institute (now University) in Boulder, Colorado and went inside for my first meditation class.
Now, having studied and practiced meditation for 30+ years at the intersection of Tibetan and American Buddhism, I’m currently a meditation student of Lama Liz Monson ( finished the Longchen Nyingtik Ngöndro) and Lama Willa Baker (Wakeful Body). I’m also on the board at Natural Dharma Fellowship, which includes the incredible retreat center WonderWell in Springfield, New Hampshire.
In October I attended a wilderness retreat led by Lama Liz and Lama Willa. Meditating outside is basically all I want to do now… Here’s a poem I wrote at the end of the retreat.
In April 2022, Lama Liz Monson and I led a four day retreat called “Wild for Waking Up: A Retreat on Crazy Wisdom”. As the main practice of the retreat, we did an incredible meditation by Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche called “The Sadhana of Mahamudra”. Here is a video of an early talk from that retreat.
We are doing a new version of this retreat at the end of March, 2024. Details here!
Every Tuesday and Thursday at 9am ET, I co-teach an online meditation class with the fine folks at MindfulAware.com. Anyone can drop in and it’s free. Here’s a recent talk and guided meditation on Kindness and the Tibetan teacher Trungpa, Rinpoche.
I often make notes for those classes, which turn into little talks and guided meditations you can do yourself. Here are some of my favorites:
Sometimes I record or get recorded doing guided meditations. You can see a selection of those here:
Here’s a very quick meditation:
https://twitter.com/mbellows/status/1369983441513680901?s=20&t=1mouL8a7NBM_eVoF1jCQFg