Meditation Class Notes Introducing Buddhist meditation techniques to Westerners (in this quietly desperate land of I, Me, Mine) is particularly challenging, I think. I recently was privileged to attend a six-week meditation course at my local Insight Center (mtstream.org) presented by one of our dedicated lay-sangha members, Bruce Pardoe (bpardoe@heartfluency.com). It was definitely well received, and I know I benefited from it. […]
Introduction to Meditation Class Six Notes Awareness—Review and Exploration Awareness is the capacity to know or be conscious of our experience. We are aware all the time when we are awake. By awake I simply mean not being asleep in our beds or physically unconscious. We know we are awake because we are aware of what is happening. If we […]
Introduction to Meditation Class Five Notes Mindful Awareness—AKA Choiceless Attention or Choiceless Awareness In our previous classes, we have focused on specific, direct aspects of our experience to follow with a mindful awareness while meditating. We started with the breath, then moved to bodily sensations, with emotions next, and, most recently, thoughts. This creates a useful framework of concentric rings of […]
Introduction to Meditation Class Four Notes Thoughts—the Outer Ring As I said in our first class, we can look at our process through this series as if we were exploring our direct experience in different concentric rings of awareness. At the very center of our physicality is the breath. Around that is the body. In our last class, we explored the […]
Introduction to Meditation Class Three Notes Feeling our Feelings—Exploring Emotions Eckhart Tolle states that emotions are where the mind meets the body. Last week we explored the direct experience of our bodies as a collection of sensations. We developed a vocabulary that correlated with the elements of: Earth—pressure, heaviness, hardness, and softness Air—flowing, pulsing, vibrating, tingling, stabbing, expanding, and contracting […]
Introduction to Meditation Class Two Notes Direct Experience of Our Bodily Sensations In our first class, we focused on the breath, which is often our most-noticeable, bodily process. Our intention in Class 2 is to drop out of a conceptual relationship with our bodies and experience them directly as a constellation of sensations floating like clouds in the sky of […]
Introduction to Meditation Class One Notes Buddhism & Vipassanā Buddhism is not a belief system or dogma; it is a map and practice for exploring your life, enabling you to tap into your innate happiness, love, wisdom, and balance. In this course you don’t blindly take our word for it; you test Buddhism by practicing meditation to see if you […]