Mindfulness Meditation (For Everyday Life)

sharpening and deepening of my own meditation
practice.
This is not to deny that meditation can be thought of
fundamentally as a "spiritual practice." It's just that I
have a problem with the inaccurate, incomplete, and
frequently misguided connotations of that word.
Meditation can be a profound path for developing
oneself, for refining one's perceptions, one's views,
one's consciousness. But, to my mind, the vocabulary
of spirituality creates more practical problems than it
solves.
Some people refer to meditation as a "consciousness
discipline." I prefer that formulation to the term
"spiritual practice" because the word "spiritual"
evokes such different connotations in different
people. All these connotations are unavoidably
entwined in belief systems and unconscious
expectations that most of us are reluctant to examine
and that can all too easily prevent us from developing
or even from hearing that genuine growth is possible.
On occasion, people come up to me in the hospital
and tell me that their time in the stress reduction clinic
was the most spiritual experience they ever had. I am
happy that they feel that way because it is coming
directly out of their own experience with the
meditation practice, and not from some theory or