A-Z Index

Practice: steady, repeated, patient effort kept up over a long time, the doing side of yoga.

Things outside your own judgments and choices, health, money, reputation, that are neither good nor evil, only reasonably preferred or avoided.

Not-self: the observation that no part of what you call yourself is reliably under your command or lasting, not a flat claim that there is no you.

Impermanence: the first of the three marks, the fact that nothing conditioned stays.

Freedom from the passions, the disturbances of excessive desire, fear, grief, and pleasure. Not an absence of feeling, but the absence of tumultuous feeling.

Freedom from bodily pain, the other half of Epicurus's idea of pleasure alongside ataraxia.

The eight limbs of Patañjali's path, from ethical conduct through posture, breath, and concentration to absorption.

An untroubled mind, free of disturbance. For Epicurus, the summit of a pleasant life.

Self-sufficiency: wanting little enough that what you already have is enough.

The mind, taken broadly: the intellect, the ego, the part that processes what the senses bring in.

The brain network active during mind-wandering, remembering, planning, and imagining other minds; not a bad network, just one that can run unnoticed.

Changing your relationship to a thought so it carries less weight, without touching its content or arguing about whether it is true.

Remembrance: the Sufi practice of repeating a name or phrase of God.

Usually translated suffering, closer to unsatisfactoriness: the way conditioned things cannot finally hold the weight we put on them.

Stoic teacher born a slave, whose student's notes (the Enchiridion) open with the dichotomy of control.

Founder of the garden school in Athens that made pleasure, carefully redefined, the aim of a philosophic life.

In Attention Restoration Theory, what catches attention without effort. Soft fascination (clouds, water, light) rests the effortful faculty; hard fascination (a fight, a screen) does not.

A Swedish coffee pause taken with someone else, a break made into a small shared ritual.

The Japanese practice of slow, sensory time among trees, named by the country's forestry agency in 1982.

Author of Walden, who went to the woods to live deliberately and pared his wants down to a short list.

Harvard cardiologist who named the relaxation response and showed it could be brought on with a repeated focus and a passive return to it.

A Greek word for stillness: not an empty room but a settled, attentive, present inner quiet, the goal of the hesychast tradition.

Equanimity understood as a genuine indifference to praise and blame, from the Kabbalistic and Hasidic literature.

Secluded, spontaneous prayer, spoken aloud in your own words, as taught by Rebbe Nachman of Breslov.

A Danish word for warm, sensory, social coziness. Not moderation, atmosphere.

A series of progressively deeper states of meditative concentration, each shedding a coarser mental factor.

Aloneness: the seer resting in its own nature once even the subtlest fluctuation has stilled, Patañjali's final goal, one step past samadhi.

A paradoxical question or story used in Rinzai Zen to exhaust conceptual thinking and provoke direct insight.

A Swedish word meaning just the right amount, not too much and not too little.

The charged, meaningful interval, in space or time: the gap that gives what surrounds it its shape.

Roman emperor whose private notebook, the Meditations, is the source of the Stoic view from above.

Built dialectical behavior therapy after straight CBT failed her most severe patients; wise mind is her name for the integration beneath reason and emotion.

Rest of the soul: a Mussar virtue, a settled center that meets the day's ups and downs without being thrown by them.

Lovingkindness: a deliberate, cultivated, unconditional good will, widened until it leaves no one out.

No-mind: a state of acting without the interference of a separate, deliberating self.

A Dutch verb meaning to do nothing, to loaf, lifted lately into the idea of doing nothing on purpose.

A settling, a quieting: the calming of the mind's churn, not its destruction.

The initial impression an event makes on the mind, before any judgment is added to it.

The regulation of the breath, one of the eight limbs.

The premeditation of adversity: deliberately imagining a loss in advance so it cannot ambush you.

Thoreau's mentor and the center of the Transcendentalist circle; owned the Walden land.

The heart speeding up a little on the inhale and slowing on the exhale, as the brainstem eases and reapplies the vagal brake.

Family therapist who built Internal Family Systems after noticing clients describing themselves in the plural.

A tranquility that, the Qur'an says, God sends down into the hearts of believers. Not generated by striving, but given.

Absorption so complete that the sense of a separate watcher drops away; the eighth limb.

The cultivation of a mind that can rest, steady and unhurried, on one thing.

Just sitting: a Soto Zen practice of sitting with no object of focus and nothing to attain.

Beginner's mind: approaching something familiar as though encountering it for the first time.

Named experiential avoidance, the effort to escape unwanted inner experience even when it costs you, as a process running across many disorders.

The end or goal a life aims at. For the Stoics, virtue itself, with tranquility as a byproduct, not the target.

Epicurus's four-line summary of the whole philosophy: don't fear god, don't worry about death, what is good is easy to get, what is terrible is easy to endure.

Equanimity: the still quality that remains once the second arrow is set down, distinct from both indifference and numbness.

The long nerve whose outgoing fibers carry the brake to the heart, cleared fast enough to ease off on one beat and clamp down on the next.

Non-attachment: loosening the grip of craving and releasing your claim on how things turn out, abhyāsa's paired opposite.

The raw felt tone of an experience, pleasant, painful, or neutral, that arrives before any reaction is added.

Insight: the clear seeing of how experience actually behaves, samatha's partner practice.

A turning, a ripple: any movement that passes across the mind.

The Japanese acceptance of things imperfect, worn, and passing.

Non-forcing, effortless action: not the absence of action but the absence of strain.

Self-so: the naturalness of a thing simply following its own grain, with no separate self straining against it.