Pema Chödrön Inspired Intro To Meditation

This opening session will offer a snapshot of the entire course. We will discuss the effect of stress hormones on the body, the physical and emotional benefits of mindfulness, common misconceptions about meditation, and how a simple meditation practice can help you cope with life's storms, respond rather than react, cultivate a friendly attitude toward yourself, and gain reliable access your own wisdom and intuition.

Our thoughts feel powerful and real. It’s natural to feel controlled by them, but in this session, we explore ways to bring mindful, heartfelt presence to our thought patterns. By noticing our thoughts and the beliefs behind them, we free ourselves of emotional reactivity and learn to step into true agency in our lives.

This guided instruction begins with a meditative experiment taught by Loch Kelly that invites you to notice how your relationship to your thoughts impacts you emotionally. Specifically, you consider the following phrases: I am afraid. I'm feeling afraid. I'm aware of being afraid. I'm aware that others experience fear, too. Making this conscious shift is subtle but freeing. You are not your thoughts. Next you will explore possible anchors for meditative focus: the breath -- the body, or sounds -- and select one that appeals to you. The meditation ends with a short metta prayer offering good will to all.

In this session we will focus on healing and inner resourcing through cultivating the art of self-compassion. Buddhism offers the metaphor of "the second arrow." The first arrow is the pain that is inevitable in life. If you touch a hot stove, your hand will hurt. The second arrow is the narrative we build around the first arrow: "So-and-so shouldn't have turned the stove on. Poor me: I didn't deserve this." The first arrow is part of life. The second arrow, which is the more prevalent source of suffering, is optional. Through meditative self-compassion, we can liberate ourselves from the second arrow and experience greater happiness and wellbeing.

In this meditation you will learn the art of bringing loving attention to whatever part of you most needs love in this moment. You will call to mind an inner balm, the image of a beloved pet, a favorite place, or anything that nurtures you. The guided imagery will include a beautiful garden where you can rest in your own resiliency and connect with an inner wisdom figure.

This session offers a simple tool for bringing awareness into challenging circumstances, a method coined by Tara Brach: "RAIN." You will develop strategies for using mindfulness in the midst of difficulty. The exercise involves recalling a reactive moment, noticing where it was experienced in your body, and picturing how the moment might have played out differently. We will practice noticing what happens in your body just before the mind goes into zero to sixty reactivity. Catching that moment offers freedom and agency to respond rather than react. This session includes supportive quotes from psychoanalyst Carl Jung and author George Saunders.

Here we will embark on the RAIN meditation described in the previous session. RAIN is a 4-step process. You identify a challenging situation you wish to work with. "R" is for recognizing what you are feeling in a nonjudgmental way. "A" invites you to accept that the situation exists and to momentarily drop your resistance to it. "I" stands for investigating where and how the emotion manifests in your body, as well identifying the beliefs that gave rise to it. The "N" of RAIN encourages you to nurture your heart. If that hurt, angry or confused part of you could communicate, what would it express? What does it need from you? The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh would often give his heart a gentle pat and say, "It's okay, sweetheart." If this is your first time doing RAIN, I recommend starting with a small situation and working toward bigger ones as you become more stabilized in the practice. This is a gentle, effective, and healing practice that can be done on the meditation cushion or on the spot as challenging situations arise in your life.

This simple technique taught by Dr. Rick Hanson uses a fundamental principle of neuroscience to engender positive changes in your brain and your life. Evolutionary biology has formed our brains to be Teflon for the good and Velcro for the bad. But by savoring positive moments for 30 seconds six times a day you can consciously turn fleeting states into lasting traits. Neurons that fire together wire together, says neuroscientist Mark Lewis. Basking in the good is not a betrayal of life's sorrows, but a way to strengthen our resiliency to face them. This talk includes a poem by Mark Nepo and references a doctoral dissertation on Jane Austen by Dr. Jessica DeSanta. Let this simple practice enrich your life.

Building on the work of Dr. Rick Hanson described in the previous session, this lovingkindness meditation includes influences from Pema Chödrön, Adyashanti, and Jon Kabat-Zinn, as well as quotes from Albert Einstein and a Navajo prayer. By practicing lovingkindness, known as metta, we learn to make friends with ourselves and cultivate good will toward others. In Pali language, metta means benevolence and positive energy. The goal of lovingkindness meditation is to expand the inner landscape of your heart by cultivating kindness for all beings, including yourself, your loved ones, strangers, animals, plants, and ultimately the planet itself.

As the course progresses, we will be focusing more specifically on the work of Pema Chödrön. In the following, she shows us how to find stability when things fall apart. This meditation, inspired by one offered in her audiobook "Pure Meditation," helps you to stabilize your mind while fostering a friendly attitude toward yourself. She uses breath, posture, and mindful awareness to infuse strength and stability into life's most challenging moments.

An extension of Lovingkindness, Tonglen meditation is a hallmark practice taught by Pema Chödrön. A counter-intuitive method, it reverses our usual tendency to avoid suffering and seek pleasure. Instead, it teaches us the art of “sending and taking,” an ancient Buddhist practice to awaken compassion. With each in-breath, we take in others’ pain. With each out-breath, we send them relief. The key is not to hold onto the pain, (pity being the near enemy of compassion), but to let the alchemy of our hearts transform the pain into healing relief.

As your awareness deepens, you naturally become curious about your true identity. After a brief recap of what we've covered so far, this talk invites you to loosen your hold on your mental constructs of who you are, ideas that may cloud your true essence. We explore the question “Who am I?” Awakening to your own spacious awareness helps you remember who you are, resulting in better access to your intuition, more grounded-ness, and deeper trust in life. This talk includes quotes from Ramana Maharshi, Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach, and Adyashanti, as well as experiential exercises to demonstrate how it's possible to shift your point of consciousness.

Pema Chödrön writes, "Deep down in the human spirit, there is a reservoir of courage. It is always available, always waiting to be discovered." This guided visualization helps you gently peel away the outer trappings of life and lead you to this reservoir of courage. It invites you to drop your labels about yourself and to taste your true essence. We live on both a horizontal plane, what Eckhart Tolle calls “The Little Me,” and on a vertical plane, “The Deep I”. Tasting your own spacious awareness helps you remember who you are, resulting in better access to your intuition, more grounded-ness, and deeper trust in life. We end with a poem by Rumi.

Like most habits, the most challenging part of meditation is creating the time and space for daily practice. This session offers tips for integrating the techniques we've explored into daily life, and customizing them to suit your needs. If you have questions not answered here feel free to chat through the Course Classroom. I welcome hearing from you.

In this final day, the course recaps the tools you have assembled in your toolbox, techniques such as RAIN, anchoring, savoring, Tonglen, lovingkindness, and compassion practices. We will end with a Pema Chödrön Meditation, a shorter version of the stability meditation we did on Day 10. I highly recommenda all of Pema's books and teachings. As you weave these practices into daily life, please stay in touch. Let me know what's working and what you find challenging, and feel free to ask questions. Most importantly, trust yourself.