Mindfulness

Mindfulness 'Insight Meditation' The practice of looking inwardly and seeing things as they are.   Mindfulness means paying attention in the moment.  Patiently caring in our awareness.  A non judgmental, unfolding of experience moment by moment.

About Vipassana (Insight or mindfulness meditation)

Mindfulness meditation or insight meditation (Vipassana) changes lives significantly, sometimes dramatically, and is a resource to dissolve problems. A growing number of people, with regular guidance from a teacher, have also entered into the discipline of a personal retreat, without fellow companions, with its emphasis on silence and solitude lasting from weeks to a year or more. This is another powerful resource for depths of insight.

The background to all Vipassana practices relies, appropriately, on a talk by the Buddha called the Satipatthana Sutta, (the Discourse on the Applications of Mindfulness, MLD 10) namely, body, feelings, states of mind and the Dharma consisting of the Four Noble Truths, mental hindrances, relationship of senses to sense objects.

Teachers use the form of a retreat to enable Dharma yogis to learn to use the powerful resource of method and technique to cultivate an authentic depth of calm (samatha) and insight (Vipassana) into impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and the non self (impersonal) characteristics of existence. The practice encourages direct observation of immediate experience of the body/mind process.

1. The practice of ethics
2. The practice of mindfulness and meditation
3. Insights and the application of a liberating wisdom.

We meditate for insight into all three aspects of the training. Meditation includes practices to:

• develop the capacity to sit still

• stay steady with the breath

• observe arising/passing of pleasant/unpleasant sensations in body

• witness feelings

• see through and let go of troublesome meditation states

• dissolve the arising of ego

• develop the power of meditative concentration

• go to subtle levels of experience

• open up the heart

• abide with a choice-less awareness with all phenomena.

Generally speaking, meditators, new and seasoned, love the challenge of facing themselves, or more precisely, what is not themselves but often perceived as themselves. The practices cultivate the capacity to develop a wholesome and sane way of living so practitioners can face existence directly. These benefits are truly immeasurable.

Relevant links:

Within Victoria BC

• Mindfulness Training

• Mindfulness Community of Victoria

More about Mindfulness or insight meditaiton

• Insight Meditation

• The Mindfulness Institute

• About Mindfulness

• Mindfulness Meditation: Guided Practices

• Inner peace meditation

• The Buddha of Mindfulness The Politics of Mindfulness

• Right Mindfulness by Rick Hanson (pdf)