Jonathan Foust

By Jonathan Foust

What's Jonathan Foust about?

Senior teacher at the Insight Meditation Community of Washington and co-founder of the Meditation Teacher Training Institute, Jonathan Foust share weekly talks, guided meditations and inquiries that explore how to cultivate an awakened heart and mind.

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Deconstructing Pain

03.15.2023

This talk explores strategies for working with physical pain and beyond. You’ll learn about your primary and secondary response to pain, how to discern your ‘pain recipe,’ the cost of ignoring the messages of pain and a practice where you’ll ...

Jonathan Foust episodes:

03.15.2023 Deconstructing Pain This talk explores strategies for working with physical pain and beyond. You’ll learn about your primary and secondary response to pain, how to discern your ‘pain recipe,’ the cost of ignoring the messages of pain and a practice where you’ll ...
03.09.2023 Pain is a Holy Messenger This talk explores how to shift your relationship to physical pain. You’ll learn how pain lives in both the body and mind, how ‘pain’ is looking out for your well-being and how your attention can dramatically affect your experience of ...
03.01.2023 My Thoughts on “How We Live is How We Die” This talk offers some thoughts and practices on how to stay awake through the journey of your life …. As told through the lens of a recent travel misadventure. You’ll learn about the nature of the ‘two selves,’ the conditioned ...
02.22.2023 How to Increase Your Capacity for Equanimity This talk explores how you can open more fully to what is considered the highest expression of practice. You’ll learn a helpful working definition of equanimity, the near-enemies and challenges of the practice and what it means to be open ...
02.21.2023 How to Increase Your Capacity for Joy This talk explores both the experience of internal joy as well as the joy that can arise on behalf of others. You’ll learn about the habitual pursuit of joy, the radical pursuit of joy, the shadow side of joy and ...
02.20.2023 How to Increase Your Capacity for Compassion This talk explores how to cultivate a wise response to suffering. You’ll learn the roots of the practice, the pitfalls and challenges, where to start and how you can tap into the immeasurable aspects of compassionate presence.
02.20.2023 How to Increase Your Capacity for Kindness This talk explores how to practice being a well-wisher to all. You’ll learn about the origination of the heart practices, where to start, how it can evolve and why these practices can be so life-changing for you.
01.10.2023 Water the Root and Enjoy the Fruit: Living from Awake Presence This talk explores the power of stepping back and hitting the reset button in your life. You’ll learn about what can happen when you remember the results you are driving toward and the power of pausing and ruthlessly taking stock ...
12.26.2022 What You Really Want Is Already Here This talk explores the nature of enlightenment. You’ll learn about the qualities of an awake being and some of the practices and traditions that help make awakening possible, ranging from willful effort to deep surrender. This talk contains multiple short ...
12.16.2022 Conversations with Depth Practitioners: Whole Brain Healing with Dr. John Britton You’ve heard about right brain / left brain functioning and may be familiar with Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s “God” experiences when her left brain was damaged. But what happens when you experience a right brain injury? Dr. John Britton describes ...
12.07.2022 Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast This talk explores how slowing down can transform your life. You’ll learn about the impact of slowing down not only to be more effective in getting things done, but how slowing down can open up new insights into the nature ...
12.02.2022 Help with Future Thinking: An Interview with Rachel Krantz from “Help Existing” This week’s podcast is from my interview with Rachel Krantz and her wonderful podcast, “Help Existing.” This week I'm talking with meditation teacher Jonathan Foust about the tendency of the mind to live in the future. Whether it's fantasizing or ...
11.24.2022 The True Magnitude of Gratitude This talk explores the transformative power of gratitude. You’ll learn how gratitude is a doorway to happiness, how gratitude is related to “evolutionary biology,” how gratitude can help you reframe your biggest challenges in life and can help you access ...
11.21.2022 Waking Up via the Seven Factors: #7 Cultivating Steadiness and Equanimity This talk explores the seventh factor of awakening. You’ll learn how this factor is the the complete expression of all and as you cultivate both spaciousness and steadiness, wisdom and compassion can flow unrestricted.
11.14.2022 Waking Up via the Seven Factors: #6 Cultivating Concentration and One-Pointedness This talk explores the power of sustained attention. You’ll learn about the consequence of chronic distraction, the levels of concentration you can achieve in your meditation practice, how to balance concentration with deep relaxation and how to bring more sustained ...
11.03.2022 Waking Up via the Seven Factors: #5 Cultivating Calm and Tranquility This talk explores how to cultivate a calm and relaxed presence. You’ll learn how tranquility is critical to mindfulness practice and sets the stage for more and more intimate awareness of what is happening and how you are holding it.
10.26.2022 Waking Up via the Seven Factors: #4 Cultivating Rapture and Joy This talk explores ways you can bring more joy into your life. You’ll learn about the two essential forms of joy and how practicing ‘yes’ to life can cultivate more aliveness, radiance and upwelling of well-being in your life.
10.23.2022 Waking Up via the Seven Factors: #3 Cultivating Energy and Vigor This talk explores ways you can cultivate greater aliveness and vitality. You’ll learn how mental and physical energy, vitality and aliveness are integral to the process of being more awake, aware and present in your life.
10.06.2022 Life is Amazing When You Align Your Actions with Your Aspirations This talk explores what happens when your actions actually align with your highest intentions. You’ll learn about what happens when your ego is in charge of autopilot, the distinction between aspiration and intention and practical techniques for bringing clear intention ...
09.29.2022 Waking Up via the Seven Factors: #2 The Art of Investigation (encore) This talk explores the power of looking closer at what is present. You’ll learn how cultivating curiosity, examining what is arising and how you are relating to it can lead to not only greater freedom, but profound insights into the ...
09.21.2022 Waking Up Via the Seven Factors: #1 Establish Mindfulness (encore) This talk explores the factors that go into not only waking up, but working with the most profound challenges in your life. You’ll learn how recognizing the filters through which you perceive is truly a key to liberation and how ...
09.17.2022 Are You Sure You Want What You Think You Want? This talk explores the nature of the wanting the mind. You’ll learn about the qualities of desire, the nature of reality, what can happen when you suspend the wanting mind and the challenges that arise when you cultivate a more ...
09.03.2022 Choose What is Already Changing This talk explores how to embrace impermanence. You’ll learn about the inevitability of change and how understanding your reactivity and biases can help you access a quality of awareness that can help you move from reactivity to wisdom, compassion, creativity ...
08.23.2022 Riding the Wave (encore talk) This talk explores how you can be more fully present to experiences as they spontaneously arise. You’ll learn how energy is intelligent and evolutionary, how you instinctively shut down the flow of things, how to fully embrace what is arising ...
08.23.2022 Meditation: Soften Inward with Mindful Outbreaths (12') In this twelve minute meditation, you'll be guided to focus on particular somatic points while relaxing with progressive exhalations, softening, feeling and moving into deeper, spacious states of awareness and presence.
08.17.2022 To Live a Life of No Regrets This talk explores what it takes to live life with a clear conscience. You’ll learn how regret is a natural part of our human experience, how helpful it can be to slow down and address your regrets as well as ...
08.13.2022 How My Practice Has Evolved (Part 3) This talk explores more on the evolution of meditation practice. I share stories from some of my more intense explorations from my 50 years of meditation practice and here I'll talk about about the practices of will and surrender. There ...
08.03.2022 How My Practice Has Evolved (Part 2) This talk continues to explore how meditation practice evolves over time. You’ll learn how your practice can unleash new possibilities, build energy and vitality and how important it is to continue to focus on purifying your desires. I share some ...
07.29.2022 How My Practice Has Evolved (Part 1) This talk explores how meditation practice evolves over time. You’ll learn about the sacred moment when you are first aware of the mystery of awakening, the egoic call to be somebody, the drive to be somebody special and ultimately, the ...
07.21.2022 Help Figuring Out "The Most Important Thing"—Meditation Teacher Jonathan Foust and Rachel Krantz How do you figure out the most important thing? Maybe you're caught between two ideas. Maybe you're trying to decide whether it's time to change careers, or whether to have kids. Maybe you're trying to discern where to best spend ...
07.13.2022 Awakening the Guru Within This encore talk explores how to wake up your deepest inner knowing. You’ll learn how you are the product of all your teachers so far in your life, how some teachers come from a lineage while others don’t, how valuable ...
07.01.2022 When Relationships Get Difficult …. (Encore talk) This talk explores how to stay present when the going gets tough. You’ll learn about the inherent drive for wholeness, the nature of attraction and desire, how to stay awake in a relationship and how to navigate things when a ...
06.21.2022 How to Work with Feeling in Your Meditation Practice (Encore talk) This talk explores how to work with the realm of feeling tone in your practice. You’ll learn why the body is so instrumental in liberation practices, what you can learn by deepening attention to sensations, a review of three primary ...
06.14.2022 Is It OK to be Happy in an Unhappy World? This talk explores how to increase your happiness level. You’ll learn how stress and dissatisfaction can be transformed and how happiness is not only your birthright, but your greatest responsibility and contribution to others.
06.10.2022 What I Learned on my Ten-Day Retreat (Encore Talk) This talk is fresh from my return from a ten-day silent unstructured retreat at the Forest Refuge in central Massachussets in 2014. We'll explore some specific practices I found helpful for developing concentration as well as how to look deeply ...
05.25.2022 Questions to Help You Make Room for Grief and Loss This talk explores the art of practicing mindfully with grief and loss. You’ll learn what the Buddha taught about loss, practices for being with the rogue waves of grief and how grieving fully can awaken you to be more alive, ...
05.20.2022 Because You Believe It Doesn’t Mean It’s True This talk explores how to amplify self-awareness and see more clearly into what is true. You’ll learn how you tend to get locked into certain perspectives and explore a profound ‘technology’ for deconstructing thoughts and beliefs. Asking the right questions ...
05.11.2022 What if the Obstacles are Your Path? This talk explores the possibility of ‘problems’ as profound opportunities for growth and expansion. You’ll learn the importance of equanimity, cultivating convergent and divergent thinking and deep investigation into the nature of attachment and the nature of self.
05.05.2022 What if Your Problems Aren’t Really Problems? This talk explores the power of shifting your perspective. You’ll learn about the power of active investigation, how asking a particular question can create a shift in your viewpoint and perhaps the most radical shift of all, contemplating death as ...
04.27.2022 Mindful Problem-Solving This talk explores how you can draw on mindfulness when you encounter sticky and problematic situations. You’ll learn about the radical act of pausing, how ‘reframing’ helps you shift out of your linear, rational mind and how reflecting on karma ...
04.22.2022 How to Make Better Decisions with Somatic Inquiry This talk explores how you can use your body as a tuning fork to make decisions. You’ll learn what gets in the way of good decisions, the power of pausing and tapping into the observer and a technique for making ...
04.13.2022 A Model for Somatic Inquiry This talk explores the importance of cultivating somatic awareness and offers a model for practice. You’ll learn about the importance of intention, what it means to cultivate the body as a friend and ally and you’ll get to try on ...
04.13.2022 How to Listen with the Body This talk explores the power of somatic inquiry. You’ll learn how awareness of the body can be a means for steadying the mind as well as developing your capacity to be the non-judging observer. You’ll learn how you can develop ...
03.31.2022 How to Listen Within, Part 2 This talk explores the ‘how to’ of inner listening. You’ll learn the essentials of the practice, the importance of formulating the right question and explore a model for your practice.
03.25.2022 How to Listen Within, Part 1 This talk explores the optimal conditions for inner listening and investigation. You’ll learn about the power of sincere heart, seven faculties of mind required to be fully present and some cautionary words on the altered states that can arise in ...
03.16.2022 The Nature of Knowing This talk explores what it means to cultivate the ‘knowing faculty” of mind. You’ll learn what gets in the way of true knowing, what we discover when we examine what arises out of the moment and how to turn attention ...
03.09.2022 Here’s How Your Questions Influence Consciousness This talk explores the power of questions in your life. You’ll learn how questions have evolved consciousness through the human experience and how inquiry, when applied correctly, can help you see more clearly into the nature of reality and to ...
03.02.2022 Meditation: Experiencing the Here and Now (24’) After settling into a posture of inner balance, you’ll be guided to opening awareness to the senses, turning your attention to the inner experience and focusing on feeling from the inside. You’ll explore an effortless quality of feeling and noticing, ...
03.02.2022 Cultivating Insights and New Possibilities through the Practice of RAIN This talk explores the power of the RAIN practice. You learn how to explore and potentially convert the most challenging situations into new possibilities. I walk you through the steps and offer some reflections to help you internalize the practice.
02.16.2022 Speaking from the Awakened Heart This talk explores the power of looking for the good in yourself and others. You’ll learn about what these teaching say about cultivating a generous heart, how being a well-wisher to all can shift your consciousness, some of the challenges ...

Older episodes

Jonathan Foust

What's Jonathan Foust about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Jonathan Foust episodes:

Deconstructing Pain

Pain is a Holy Messenger

My Thoughts on “How We Live is How We Die”

How to Increase Your Capacity for Equanimity

How to Increase Your Capacity for Joy

How to Increase Your Capacity for Compassion

How to Increase Your Capacity for Kindness

Water the Root and Enjoy the Fruit: Living from Awake Presence

What You Really Want Is Already Here

Conversations with Depth Practitioners: Whole Brain Healing with Dr. John Britton

Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast

Help with Future Thinking: An Interview with Rachel Krantz from “Help Existing”

The True Magnitude of Gratitude

Waking Up via the Seven Factors: #7 Cultivating Steadiness and Equanimity

Waking Up via the Seven Factors: #6 Cultivating Concentration and One-Pointedness

Waking Up via the Seven Factors: #5 Cultivating Calm and Tranquility

Waking Up via the Seven Factors: #4 Cultivating Rapture and Joy

Waking Up via the Seven Factors: #3 Cultivating Energy and Vigor

Life is Amazing When You Align Your Actions with Your Aspirations

Waking Up via the Seven Factors: #2 The Art of Investigation (encore)

Waking Up Via the Seven Factors: #1 Establish Mindfulness (encore)

Are You Sure You Want What You Think You Want?

Choose What is Already Changing

Riding the Wave (encore talk)

Meditation: Soften Inward with Mindful Outbreaths (12')

To Live a Life of No Regrets

How My Practice Has Evolved (Part 3)

How My Practice Has Evolved (Part 2)

How My Practice Has Evolved (Part 1)

Help Figuring Out "The Most Important Thing"—Meditation Teacher Jonathan Foust and Rachel Krantz

Awakening the Guru Within

When Relationships Get Difficult …. (Encore talk)

How to Work with Feeling in Your Meditation Practice (Encore talk)

Is It OK to be Happy in an Unhappy World?

What I Learned on my Ten-Day Retreat (Encore Talk)

Questions to Help You Make Room for Grief and Loss

Because You Believe It Doesn’t Mean It’s True

What if the Obstacles are Your Path?

What if Your Problems Aren’t Really Problems?

Mindful Problem-Solving

How to Make Better Decisions with Somatic Inquiry

A Model for Somatic Inquiry

How to Listen with the Body

How to Listen Within, Part 2

How to Listen Within, Part 1

The Nature of Knowing

Here’s How Your Questions Influence Consciousness

Meditation: Experiencing the Here and Now (24’)

Cultivating Insights and New Possibilities through the Practice of RAIN

Speaking from the Awakened Heart