This week’s meditation session is led by Kimberly Brown and the theme is Self-Discovery. The guided meditation begins at 7:37.

In Tibetan Buddhism prayer beads are used to count the recitations of prayers and devotional invocations (mantras), a process that allows the practitioner to accumulate merit—the more recitations, the more merit accrued. This strand has a standard 108 beads, an auspicious number rooted in early Buddhist literature on prayer beads and pre-Buddhist Indian beliefs and also symbolic of purifying the 108 causes of negative karma.

Prayer beads are ritual objects of a particularly personal nature, and so the materials often reflect both the status and taste of the beads’ owner. These prayer beads are made out of sheep bone. Beads made out of carved bone are most suitable for practices related to wrathful deities.