webulite.com

Thanissaro Bhikkhu has a website with audio dhamma talks, that is simple and easy of use.

His talks were completely different than the books I had read about meditation in my 20s. The books were written to understand meditation intellectually. The problem with that is that the practice of meditation is not primarily an intellectual thing, like learning chemistry or the law but a skill, like learning to drum or play football. There are people that know all about football, and can even make a living talking about football, but have never played football in their life. The books of my past taught me how to talk about meditation, but not how do actually do it. So Thanissaro's talks were like a revelation, and I ate them up. He has a website with 20 years of almost daily talks, and a page that will let you choose a random talk and listen. So at first I was hitting random, listening to a talk, and doing that over and over. Sometimes I'd listen to a half dozen talks a day.

Later I learned how these talks are used at his monastery. In the evenings, the monks would meditate for an hour. At the beginning of the hour, Thanissaro would give the talk while the monks began to meditate, and then when the 10-20 minute talk was over, they would continue to meditate for the remainder of the hour. I started to do this, and crated a little 20 minute mp3 of silence, and a bell sound mp3, and then I would download a random talk, and then with the VLC media player and drag first the talk, then the bell, then the silence, then the bell again into a little 4 items playlist and then use that to meditate. The bells and silence let me know when the time was up, and I didn't have to keep my eye on the clock.

Later, I found a collection of talks similar to Thanissaro's by another respected teacher, Gil Fronsdal. I noticed his talks were similar, but as they were two different people, they were also slightly different. I also noticed the way Gil uses his talks is that he has his students meditate first, and then after they meditate he would have them stop, and then he would give a talk. I found that I liked Thanissaro's method better, so I ended up using one Thanissaro talk in the morning, after I eat breakfast, in his style, to listen to, and do my meditation, and then after dinner I would listen to a talk by Gil without meditating, just listening to it as a podcast. I even created a link favorite for myself where I linked to just Gil's talks and filtered out his guided meditations, so that I could access and download just the talks.

I've been doing this for years, and I've found it really helpful. I spend no time searching other meditation sites or books, and all my time is spend simply listening to the dhamma talks from these two teachers, and meditating. I think many folks, especially intellectuals spend way to much time randomly searching for information, and talking about the ideas of meditation, but are not actually meditators. I try to avoid talking about meditation, and concentrate on doing it. If someone asks me stuff, I may give them a short answer, or even do a quick search on the talk libraries and send them a link to a specific talk, but I generally try to direct them to the meditation page, were you'll find links to both Thanissaro's and Gil's talk library, one or two other useful links, and tell how they have helped me. I've come to learn that meditation is best learned if you avoid trying to ask a teacher specific questions, and trying to understand meditation, but instead to find one or two teachers you respect and then fall into the method they use for teaching.