Led By: Padmadharini & Tamojyoti
Monday evenings, 8 weeks
6:30 p.m. to 8:15 p.m. EST
September 9th - October 28th, 2024
Online via Zoom
Course Description:
This eight-week course focuses on cultivating and refining somatic awareness as a means to skilfully acknowledge, work with, and resolve conflict within ourselves and in our lives. It draws on Buddhist and scientific paradigms.
At its core, the Buddha's teachings emphasize clear seeing. Yet our default is to return to the security of our fabricated, predictive story of the world we are encountering.
This course explores ways to center experience directly in the body's energy, aiding in navigating disharmony and conflict. It challenges the default narrative self, urging a somatic approach that involves radical re-orientation towards immediacy and unconditional acceptance.
The workshop is a hands-on, somatic adventure that bridges the gap between ancient Buddhist wisdom and modern neuroscience. It blends meditative inquiry with diverse pedagogical approaches — didactic presentations coupled with hands-on tools and exercises that actively restore harmony in the body/mind and can be applied to conflicts.
Course Structure:
Week 1: Getting to know the nervous system and creating a safe container.
Week 2: Feeling our way to inner resolution vs thinking our way to outer resolution.
Week 3: The science behind our addiction to thinking.
Week 4: Understanding narrative and conceptual translation of experience and its limitations.
Week 5: A trauma sensitive approach to finding harmony in the body/mind.
Week 6: The power of presence – Toolbox of practices.
The course draws on the following scientific concepts:
Nervous System Dynamics: Explores the delicate balance between parasympathetic and sympathetic activation, revealing insights into how physiological responses influence relaxation and harmony.
Default Mode Network (DMN): Examines the DMN's role in understanding mindlessness, offering valuable insights into wandering thoughts and its implications for discovering harmony.
Polyvagal Theory: Enhances comprehension of trauma's impact on body and mind, guiding effective trauma-informed practices.
Feeling Over Thinking: Recent studies emphasize the brain's default to thinking during ongoing painful experiences such as conflict, underscoring the need to engage feeling bodies for healing and equanimity.
Window of Tolerance: Explores emotional regulation within this optimal arousal zone, highlighting mindfulness's role in enhancing self-awareness and navigating challenges.
Narrative Identity: Examines how life stories shape emotional regulation, emphasizing the potential for re-storying narratives.
Predictive Processing: Illuminates how the brain constructs reality based on beliefs, often hindering genuine perception. Aligns with vipassana teachings on cultivating awareness to access a more unfiltered experience of reality.
Engaging sensations and feelings takes the focus away from the security of our narratives and views. This allows stored energy of conflict to be validated and released, creating space for new and creative emotional experiences.
The course also integrates the scientific with Buddhist wisdom:
Body-Based Meditation: Examining the Buddha's emphasis on somatic practices in the Satipatthana Sutta and Ānāpānasati Sutta, highlighting the importance of being deeply grounded in our direct, felt experience.
Conflict Resolution in Honeyball Sutta: The Honeyball Sutta is a direct teaching of the Buddha that is referenced for its insights into the origins of conflict, particularly the proliferation of concepts that contribute to discord.
Loving-kindness and Compassion: The course emphasizes the cultivation of a compassionate and accepting attitude towards oneself, and the power of saying yes to challenging emotional energies.
Samadhi and Harmony: Discussing the historical use of "samadhi" or concentration in the Pali Canon, the course explores its meanings of "agreement" and reconciliation. The Buddha's meditation instructions highlight states of harmony in the body, pointing to the liberating potential of trusting the body for inner and outer balance.
Typical Class Agenda:
Arriving meditation
Review of previous material
Small group discussion
Review of new material
Large group discussion
Meditation
Home practice review
About the Leaders:
Padmadharini is the author of this course and is a courageous and dedicated meditation practitioner. She has attended around 3 years of cumulative meditation retreats, during which she has practiced various approaches to insight. She is trained and educated in modalities that support deepening in meditation practice. This includes her training as a Chaplain, as a coach, as a mindfulness teacher, and in focusing and somatic work.
Tamojyoti is a longtime member of the Triratna Buddhist Community and was ordained in 2022. Tamojyoti is an experienced meditator, teacher, and facilitator. She is also a Vortex Energy Practitioner and is skilled in multiple healing modalities.
Course Registration:
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