Basics Of Buddhism: Establishing Mindfulness

Mindfulness meditation is the seminal teaching of the Buddha and an invaluable tool for becoming healthy, happy, and whole. The practice can sound like mind control, but here we take a less willful and more holistic approach. Using the Buddha’s Sutra on Establishing Mindfulness, the Sati Patthana Sutta, we experience all of the layers of our being: our body, feelings, mind and thoughts. We discover a relaxed, lucid awareness that is naturally accessible and requires a minimum of effort. As we establish ourselves here, we begin to release reactivity and find the ability to tend to our experience however it arises. The result is an orientation of relaxed care, the capacity to approach life aligned with our tend-and-befriend response instead of fight-or flight reactivity. Instead of needing to avoid things or fixate on things, to make things wrong or make them right, we find a way to be with what’s here in a spacious and comprehensive way. This approach engenders clarity: discrimination about the ways in which we make our lives unnecessarily challenging. We see that there is another way to be; such habits lose their appeal, and we form new, more wholesome patterns. As it becomes natural to approach and tend to our own experience, as we allow detrimental tendencies to fall away and beneficial behaviors to arise, this orientation spills out onto others. We find a way to be nourished by life and to nourish life. This course is for everyone; no experience is needed.