Skillful Mind

Glenbarr is three weeks away, and it's the deepest weekend we run.

Friday 13 to Sunday 15 November, at the Glenbarr Retreat Centre in Strathalbyn. This one carries on from the earlier teaching and goes into how the mind manufactures the problems it then gets busy solving. Long sits, quiet, and enough time that things genuinely settle.

It suits you if you already have a practice and want to take it further.

skillfulmind.com.au/events/insight-retreat-glenbarr-november-2026/

If you have stopped meditating and feel guilty every time you think about it, the guilt is doing more damage than the missed sits.

Nobody has ever practised their way out of a gap by feeling bad about the gap. The gap is not a debt you have to repay before you are allowed to start again.

Two minutes today. Six months off does not have to mean anything.

The sit isn't the practice. It's the training for the practice.

Ten minutes on the cushion is where you learn what attention feels like when it's steady. The actual work is the other fifteen hours, when you notice you've been somewhere else for the last twenty minutes of a conversation.

Most people judge their meditation by how the sit went. Better question: over the whole day, how many times did you notice? That number going up is the whole thing.

What's the thing you tell yourself when you don't want to sit?

Mine is that I'll do it later in the day, which is almost always a lie. Curious what everyone else's is, because I suspect there are about five in total and we all think ours is original.

Meditation tomorrow morning. Online and free. 9am Adelaide time. Camera off is fine.

skillfulmind.net/zoom

A feeling doesn't last fifteen minutes. The story about it does.

Anger itself moves through the body in well under a minute if you leave it alone. What stretches it out is the rehearsing. Replaying what they said, what you should have said, what it means about them.

So the practical bit isn't "don't get angry". It's noticing the moment you start narrating. That's the point where a passing feeling turns into an afternoon.