What do you want for yourself?
Buddhist Style Meditation & Self-Inquiry is an Invitation to Be Willing to Sit within
Your Very Own Mind. It is a uniquely sane approach to mental Clarity, which can offer
you vital access to Human Kindness & Self Transformation. You want that for yourself?
What do you want for yourself?
By means of meditation we can teach our mind to be calm & balanced: Calm. Then, within
this calmness itself is found an already resident richness and a potent potential, an
innate creativity, a ready-to-go inner-knowledge which can gift our lives to be
boundlessly satisfying and meaningful. Then we can tap the true healing qualities of
our mind. While the mind may be what traps us in unhealthy patterns of stress and
imbalance, it is also the mind which can free us.
The practice of a Buddhist-style Awareness Meditation uncovers the awakened state of
mind. That's what it does. In order to understand what is meant by "awakened",
it is necessary to understand what is meant by the opposite of awakened.
The opposite of awake is "asleep". Being asleep refers to the joyless cycle of
conflict and hassle which pervades so much of our daily lives. We shuttle between
feeling that things are terrific or that things are terrible, and we become wrapped
up in continuous anxiety trying to establish some sort of solid ground. This
suffering produces fear, anger, frustration and confusion - that blocks and shuts
down our true ongoing experience of ourselves. What a loss!
In meditation -- for a little while (in the beginning). In meditation, by seeing,
by softening, by giving up and letting go of this habitual knee-jerk struggle, we
are able to fully appreciate each "experience" and the exquisite power, the
"in-the-moment" richness of what it means to just be alive. With clarified
awareness, we no longer see our "experiences" just in marketable terms of what it
can get or do for us or how it can hurt us. This grand appreciation is the first
glimpse of what it means to be awake.
Meditation is the heart of the practice. Although it starts with specific techniques,
Awareness Meditation is ultimately a path of very clear seeing and a wholesomely
spontaneous way of being. No spiritual contortions, contrivances or gimmicks.
Meditation is a process of slicing through the views, opinions, commentary and
judgments which normally cloud our experience of life. No, the intellect or
feelings are not rejected -- they are liberated from the bondage of both hope and
fear, becoming less confused and more enhanced and vivid to awareness. Meditation
is, quite simply, just being in the present moment, clear -- between the "this" &
the "that" - Media. Right here in the "middle". The middle of the moment.
That's what "meditation" means.
In an Awareness Meditation Class or Retreat, you work with silence, stillness and
inquiry, to train the mind to come back again and again to the here and now.
Here & Now. Directly experiencing just "what is" - and just what "isn't". The
practice of meditation and the goal of meditation are the same: to be Awake.
So, are you sincerely interested in giving up your notions of self-protection,
the need to be "right", the need to be in "control"-- and in letting go of out-dated
thought patterns, heavy programmed agenda, naive belief systems and confusing
attachment-avoidance tendencies -- and taking up a self-perpetuating process by
which you can wake yourself up? Then you will be treated to a constantly expanding
spacious clarity of life based on non-clinging and non-confusion. You'll know
what's what! And you'll be free!
Complete awakening has been achieved by ordinary human beings. Enlightened
awakening is not a promise, a heaven, a dream or an idea. It is actually possible
to seek out our own liberation and to attain a completely awakened state of mind.
Just as sleep belongs to us, is inside us, so a meditatively clear wakefulness
is inside us. Wakefulness is happening all the time, and the meditation practice
consists of merely training ourselves to become aware of it. That makes sense,
doesn't it. Sure it does.
We say "Buddhist-style meditation", not "Buddhist". We are not at all interested
in you having a relationship with Buddha (he's dead) or in you becoming a "Buddhist,"
(you can't, there is no such thing). These meditation approaches are merely
human developments in evolving human consciousness over the course of time.
We offer no salvation and there is nothing to save.
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