Ep380: Cultivating the Jewel of Mindfulness - Har-Prakash Khalsa
Har-Prakash Khalsa is an artist, meditation teacher, and senior student and archivist of American meditation teacher Shinzen Young.
Available on Youtube, iTunes, SoundCloud & Spotify – search ‘Guru Viking Podcast’.
Har-Prakash takes a walk through London drawing on the sights and sounds of the environment to demonstrate meditation techniques and express his experience as an advanced meditator.
Har-Prakash reflects on being an introvert, shares meditation strategies to work with pain and sensory overload, and recalls his early days studying with Shinzen Young.
Har-Prakash also addresses common misconceptions about meditation and enlightenment, describes mystical experiences of cessation and nonduality, and emphasises the importance of adding psychological work to meditation practice.
00:00 - Intro
00:51 - Har-Prakash’s experience of the world as a meditator
04:25 - How to see the world differently
06:13 - Har-Prakash’s experience of the self
09:03 - Different types of cessations
12:23 - Experiencing emptiness in real time
14:11 - First cessation + working with Shinzen Young
15:16 - Dance of sensory experience
16:09 - Are mystical experiences inevitable for meditators?
18:06 - So what?
19:31 - Being useful to others
19:50 - Introversion and overcoming overwhelm
20:46 - Alienation and becoming invulnerable
22:09 - How to practice in daily life
25:24 - From meditating to “being meditated”
27:19 - Noting and labelling practice
32:48 - Dissociation and fast noting
34:07 - Noting practice as avoidance
35:54 - The ultimate addiction
40:01 - Common misunderstandings about Shinzen’s system
41:01 - Background equanimity
44:03 - Simultaneous zoom in / zoom out for knee pain
49:30 - #1 misunderstanding about enlightenment
51:43 - Adding psychological work to mindfulness
To find our more about Har-Prakash Khalsa visit:
Music ‘Deva Dasi’ by Steve James.