Johnathan Woodside Meditation

10/03/2026

Begin Sunday with practice.

Each Sunday morning, we meet online for a short period of guided meditation.

We begin at 9:00am Central with a 20-minute guided sit. The practice is simple and there is nothing you need to prepare beforehand. Just find a quiet place to sit and join us on Zoom.

Whether meditation has been part of your life for years or you are just beginning, you are welcome.

Online Guided Meditation
Sundays at 9:00am Central
20-minute guided meditation
Free to attend

You can find the Zoom information through the link in my bio.

10/02/2026

Pay attention to the version of the story in which you are always reasonable.

Something happens between you and another person. Maybe you say something you probably shouldn’t have said, become impatient, withdraw, or make a decision that affects them in a way you hadn’t fully considered.

Later, when you think about what happened, the mind begins assembling the story.

You remember what led up to your response. You remember how tired you were, what the other person had already said, what you were trying to accomplish, and all the things you could have said but didn’t. Your own behavior arrives surrounded by context.

The other person’s behavior may not receive the same treatment.

We may remember their impatience without remembering what preceded it. Their defensiveness seems unreasonable even though our own defensiveness made perfect sense at the time. Before long, their failure to understand us becomes part of the evidence that we were justified in responding the way we did.

None of this requires deliberately lying to ourselves. The mind can tell a largely accurate story and still arrange the facts in a way that protects something.

This is one of the more interesting places to practice because certainty can feel so convincing. We may spend a great deal of time asking whether our version of events is correct when a more revealing question is available:

What does my version of the story leave out?

We may have been treated unfairly. The other person may indeed have behaved badly. Seeing our own mind clearly does not require taking responsibility for what belongs to someone else.

But it does require becoming interested in the context we give ourselves and withhold from others.

Sometimes the part of the story we least want to examine is the part in which our own behavior makes a little less sense than we would like it to.

10/01/2026

You can oppose what someone is doing without wishing them harm.

Mettā, loving-kindness, is sometimes understood as a benevolent feeling we develop toward ourselves and others. A feeling of warmth or connection may arise in mettā practice, and over time it often does. But the practice does not depend upon our being able to produce that feeling.

We begin with an intention of friendliness, the wish for ourselves and others to be well and free from suffering.

This matters especially when the person we call to mind is someone we find difficult. There may be no warmth at all. Perhaps this person has hurt us. Perhaps we strongly disagree with what they are doing. We may need to tell them no, create distance, or do what we can to prevent them from causing further harm.

Mettā does not require us to pretend otherwise.

What becomes interesting is the point at which wanting harmful behavior to stop becomes wanting the person to suffer. We may begin to imagine their humiliation or failure. We may feel satisfaction when something goes badly for them. The mind can move from opposition into ill will without our immediately recognizing that it has happened.

This is where understanding mettā as an intention matters. I don’t have to like this person. I don’t have to approve of what they are doing. I don’t even have to feel kindly toward them in this moment. I can still examine whether I am willing to let go of the wish that they suffer.

With practice, something warmer may begin to emerge. But we don’t have to manufacture it. We return to the intention of goodwill and allow the heart to develop from there.

There are times when mettā may accompany a very firm no. What matters is whether hatred has to come with it.

10/01/2026

Equanimity isn’t being unaffected by what happens. It’s not being ruled by it.

Upekkhā, equanimity, is the capacity to remain balanced in the midst of experience. We still feel what happens. We still care about outcomes. We still have preferences, disappointments, hopes, and people we love.

Indifference can look remarkably like equanimity from the outside. What separates them is that indifference withdraws from experience. Equanimity remains present for it.

You can care deeply and still have equanimity. You can grieve without being lost in grief. You can be disappointed without becoming bitter. You can recognize that something is wrong and work to change it. You can love someone deeply while knowing that you cannot control what happens to them.

The Buddha spoke of eight worldly conditions that continually move through our lives: gain and loss, praise and blame, pleasure and pain, fame and disrepute.

What can change is how completely they govern the mind.

When praised, do I need to hold on to it? When criticized, must I defend myself? When something pleasant appears, can I enjoy it without needing it to remain? When something painful happens, can I respond without immediately being consumed by resistance?

Upekkhā does not make us less available to life. It allows us to remain present without being continually pulled and pushed by everything that changes.

You can be affected without being ruled.

09/30/2026

You can cause harm while believing you’re being compassionate.

Karuṇā, compassion, is the response of the heart to suffering. But in Buddhist practice compassion does not stand alone. It develops alongside wisdom.

This matters because wanting to relieve suffering does not automatically mean we understand what will actually relieve it.

We can give someone what they are asking for and strengthen the very behavior that is hurting them. We can avoid saying something difficult because we don’t want to cause discomfort. We can continually rescue someone from consequences they may need to encounter. We can become so identified with another person’s pain that our own distress begins making the decisions.

There is a provocative expression sometimes used in Buddhist circles: “idiot compassion.” It describes behavior that appears compassionate but lacks discernment, when being kind, agreeable, or helpful in the immediate moment takes precedence over understanding what may actually be beneficial.

More recently, the phrase “suicidal empathy” has been used in contemporary discourse for a related concern: empathy pursued without sufficient regard for consequences, boundaries, or competing responsibilities. The term raises a worthwhile question.

Is what I am about to do actually helpful, or do I simply need to feel that I am helping?

Sometimes compassion gives. Sometimes compassion refuses. Sometimes it comforts. Sometimes it tells someone something they do not want to hear.

Compassion asks us to care about suffering. Wisdom asks us to look carefully at what we are doing in response to it.

09/29/2026

Notice what happens when someone else has what you want.

A friend gets the opportunity. Someone else receives the recognition. Their relationship is going well. Their work succeeds. Something they have been hoping for finally happens.

You may genuinely care about them and still notice something tighten.

It can be uncomfortable to admit this because we would rather think of ourselves as generous people who are happy when others are happy. But the mind does not always cooperate with the person we believe ourselves to be.

Another person’s good fortune can somehow feel like evidence that there is less available for us. Their success becomes a comparison. Their happiness reminds us of something missing in our own life.

The Buddha taught muditā, often translated as appreciative or sympathetic joy, as the cultivation of gladness in the happiness and good fortune of others.

I don’t think this requires pretending to feel something we don’t. In cultivating muditā, we practice the intention of taking joy in another person’s happiness. Over time, that intention can give rise to genuine gladness.

And when gladness isn’t there, the contraction is itself worth knowing. What happens in the mind when someone else has the thing we want? What story begins? What does their good fortune seem to say about us?

Muditā offers another possibility. We can learn to take pleasure in another person’s happiness without immediately measuring it against our own. We can recognize goodness without needing to possess it.

And sometimes the place to begin is simply being honest about the moment when we can’t.

09/28/2026

The mind can use the Dharma to protect the very things the Dharma is meant to expose.

We learn the language of practice. Mindfulness. Acceptance. Compassion. Non-attachment. Letting go.

And after a while, that language can become useful to the very habits we are trying to understand.

Avoiding a difficult conversation can look like letting go. Not admitting that we are angry can look like equanimity. Wanting other people to behave differently can be dressed up as concern for their practice. Even the desire to think of ourselves as someone who is becoming wiser can survive quite comfortably inside years of meditation, masking the very thing we most need to look at honestly.

This is one reason practice requires more than knowing what the teachings say. We have to become interested in what is actually happening in the mind, especially when the explanation we are giving ourselves sounds convincing.

Sometimes the most revealing question is not, “What is the Dharma teaching me about this?”

It is, “What am I unwilling to see here?”

09/27/2026

Notice how often the mind makes a deal with the future.

I’ll feel better when this is over. I’ll be able to relax once this problem is resolved. Things will be different when I have more time, more money, a better relationship, a quieter mind.

Of course, sometimes circumstances really do need to change. There are problems that need solving and things worth working toward. But it is also possible to spend years waiting for life to reach the point where we can finally be at ease.

What interests me in practice is the moment when that bargain becomes visible. You get what you were waiting for, perhaps even enjoy it for a while, and before long the mind has found something else that needs to happen.

The Buddha used the word taṇhā, literally “thirst,” for this movement of craving. In the Second Noble Truth, taṇhā is identified as the origin of dukkha, the dissatisfaction and suffering that arise through clinging.

Taṇhā does not always appear as an obvious desire for something. Sometimes it is the quiet conviction that our ease depends upon something else happening first.

Pay attention the next time you find yourself waiting for some future condition before allowing yourself to settle. Not because you shouldn’t want things or make plans, but because you may discover how much of your life is being lived in anticipation of another one.

09/26/2026

Where is the present moment?

We talk about being present as though the present were a place we could arrive and remain. But when we look closely at a breath, a sound, a sensation, or a thought, experience is already changing.

This week’s Insight Meditation Newsletter explores impermanence, the present moment, and what observing change can teach us about clinging.

Read this week’s newsletter below. If you’d like to receive these reflections each Saturday, there’s an invitation to join the newsletter at the end.

We speak often in meditation about being present. We notice when the mind has wandered into the past or moved ahead into the future, and we return to what is happening now. But the more closely we pay attention to the present moment, the stranger it becomes.