We find ourselves in an unprecedented time in human history facing a new reality of social distancing, fear and anxiety over a highly uncertain future, and concern for the health and well-being of ourselves, loved ones, and society. The situation is rapidly changing and evolving globally in front of our eyes as we watch the news and respond to pings from our phones throughout the day.
Resources
This page lists resources we have posted for those interested in contemplation, mindfulness, yoga, and general well-being. Please check our articles page for other discussions on a variety of topics.
These are general tips for practicing meditation. Additions or adjustments to these guidelines may apply to specific meditation practices and may be provided by individual contemplative instructors leading a particular practice, including Preparing for Meditation Practice, Addressing Common Challenges During Meditation Practice, and Transitioning Out of Meditation Practice.
These are links to various resources on the CSC website, Insight Timer, and YouTube for those interested in practicing meditation or contemplation. There are tips for beginners, loving-kindness practices, instructions on how to use Insight Timer as well as specially crafted Insight Timer playlists on specific topics. Finally, some links to short contemplation practices recorded as part of CSC’s Virtual Meditation from the Lawn series in 2021-2022.
CSC staff have created several different playlists of recommended Insight Timer recordings with annotated guides to the recordings included in each list. These playlists are grouped by general purpose or by type of practice or recording. Note that for ideal functionality, it is best to link to these resources via the Insight Timer app on your mobile device rather than through the Insight Timer website.
This brief outline on how to use Insight Timer explains the two types of contemplation sessions, basic and guided, and how to access them within the Insight Timer app along with saving presets for easy access to your favorite session timer. These instructions are somewhat outdated and will be updated shortly.
Disrupted sleep patterns are common in busy, screen-driven modern lives. These contemplations present iterations of several popular aural remedies, from sleep yoga that guides progressive relaxation in the body, to visualization and bedtime narratives, to binaural music that helps the brain decelerate into lower frequency wave patterns conducive to a good night’s rest.
Unquestionably, the fundamental obstacle to developing strength in contemplation is relentless distraction from internal chatter, daydreams, and/ or external sounds and movement. In the following recommended recordings, music is the object of concentration. In this playlist, however, the music and sounds are the primary focus. In some, the artists have deliberately applied entrainment theory to their musical compositions, which means they use binaural sounds (different tones in each ear) to create the illusion of a beat at carefully calibrated frequencies. Listeners are meant to focus their attention solely and directly on the sounds of the track itself.
Virtual Meditation on the Lawn was created in October 2020, during the height of the COVID pandemic, to bring an opportunity for contemplative pause and intentional renewal each week to the UVA community and broader public. The weekly program was inspired by the 2013 in-person meditation on the lawn featuring Deepak Chopra and Arianna Huffington. It is currently not being offered but has been replaced by the comparable Meditation from the Dell on Tuesday mornings. All of the Virtual Meditations on the Lawn were recorded and posted on YouTube.
Insight Timer is an award-winning smartphone app and web portal featuring a meditation timer and one of the world’s largest repositories of guided meditations, music tracks, and other recorded and live events for relieving stress, improving sleep, coping with challenges, and addressing many other facets of well-being and flourishing.
We’re pleased to be able to provide these recordings of our series Practice and Process: Conversations With Yoga Teachers - Q&A in 2020. These Q&A conversations feature select yoga teachers from around the world moderated by CSC’s Ashtanga Yoga Program Manager John Bultman.
Listen to SoundCloud recordings of CSC's Ashtanga Yoga Program Manager, John Bultman, speaking intimately with yoga experts from around the world on a variety of topics with a focus on ashtanga yoga.
Over several days in March and early April 2021, Maria Kozhevnikov at the National University of Singapore convened a private online workshop, "Bridging Esoteric Vajrayana Buddhism Practices with Science to Enhance Human Cognition."
Some of the most prevalent forms of contemplative practice are designed to help the practitioner relax by calming the mind and body and/or develop concentration, the ability to focus attention for sustained periods. Both objectives are usually pursued by means of the same contemplative technologies, which are considered foundational.
On December 12, 2023, the National Geographic published an article on lucid dreaming in which CSC's Michael Sheehy was interviewed:
This playlist includes guided practices and talks focused on the intersection of contemplation and racial justice. The practice of contemplation can fortify efforts toward racial justice in a number of ways—cultivating awareness, supporting activism, facilitate creativity, and promoting self-transformation. The talks included on this playlist cover a broad range of themes and perspectives on racial justice, many of which complement and build on the others. The guided practices involve a mix of meditations, affirmations, movement, and creative practices that address various dimensions of racial justice.
Contemplation is often thought of as something you do with the mind; the body is just the thing that gets us to the cushion so we can start our contemplation and then distracts us with discomfort when we do! However, many contemplative traditions deeply integrate body practices into their total regimen, for one objective is not just to develop awareness when formally practicing in stillness, but to apply that awareness to everything we do, no matter the activity, whether in stillness or in motion. The guided content below provides instructions for mindfully experiencing the body in states of rest as well as states of movement.
Insight Timer offers an array of resources specifically designed to help ease the stress caused by the challenges and uncertainties of the Coronavirus pandemic. While many of the other recommendations in this guide such as those under Resources for Relaxation at Ease can also help relax and redirect the mind during this difficult time, the resources listed here directly addresses the experience of living through the present pandemic.
Relaxing the mind and body has been the foundation of contemplative practice for millennia. When stressed and anxious, it can be difficult to concentrate, accomplish tasks, attain your goals, and enjoy the positive circumstances that are present right in front of you. In neurobiological terms, relaxation techniques activate the parasympathetic nervous system, thereby undermining the natural but often overactive physiology of the body’s stress response through deliberately engaging slow, deep breathing.
While all contemplative techniques relate to self-care or -development in some respect, this category specifically addresses thought patterns that may keep you down and hold you back. These can manifest as hard resistance to giving yourself a break, as the belief you don’t deserve kindness, love, or the respect of others, and as debilitating self-critique. These guided instructions invite listeners to deliberately affirm the positive aspects of themselves and their lives while addressing these negative thoughts with new patterns of acceptance and warmth.