This program will be held online via Zoom. All registrants will receive the link to join the program in their Order Confirmation email. Times are ET.
The Buddha taught that favorable and unfavorable circumstances are like winds, blowing through our lives, arising and passing away, beyond our control. When we cling to the favorable circumstances and want them to be always present, we suffer. When we experience the unfavorable, we often feel that something is wrong or that we’ve done something wrong, and we suffer. When we resist what is happening in the present moment, we create even more suffering.
The Buddha also gave us a powerful frame to explore and work skillfully with the inevitable ups and downs of life, what he called the “Eight Worldly Winds”: pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and disrepute, and gain and loss.
With mindfulness and compassion, we can begin to change our relationship to these forces and embrace them as a natural part of our daily living. With equanimity, we can see that no one in this world experiences only pleasure and no pain, and no one experiences only gain and no loss, etc. Rather than trying to control what can never be controlled, we can find a sense of security in being able to meet what is actually happening with clarity, calm and connectedness.
Over the course of our weeks together, we will systematically explore the Eight Worldly Winds, the four sets of opposing energies as they actually function in our lives. We will learn to touch awareness and create the conditions where equanimity can arise in relation to the different changing experiences that constitute our world and our lives.
This program is appropriate for both new and experienced meditators of all levels of experience. Sessions will include formal meditation practice, time for discussion, reflections, and questions. Everyone is welcome.
Full and partial scholarships are available up to 72 hours before the start of the program.
Note: The class will not meet on Monday, February 19th.
Matthew Daniell has been practicing Buddhist meditation since 1985. He studied Zen, Tibetan Buddhism in India, and Insight Meditation in India, Burma, Thailand, and the United States. His teachers include Munindra, Dipa Ma, Larry Rosenberg, Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, and Jack Kornfield. Matthew was a founder and the guiding teacher of the Insight Meditation Center of Newburyport, MA. He is a member of the Religious Services Department at Phillips Exeter Academy where he leads meditation groups for students and faculty.
(Closed Captions (CC) for CIMC Programs are generated through “livestreaming” via Rev.com. CIMC programs are not livestreamed to any other platform for any other use.)