How to Meditate in the Insight Tradition for Inner Peace and Wisdom

In this session, you’ll explore the concept of mindfulness and its importance in our lives. According to the Buddha, we cultivate true happiness and peace when we are mindful, when we are able to bring our full attention to the present moment.

Highlights:

• Discover insight meditation’s origins with the story of the Buddha
• Explore the Noble Eightfold Path and Five Precepts for ethical living
• Practice six breathing exercises and your first mindfulness meditation

Session Two explores the nature of inner awareness. You’ll discover powerful techniques for slowing down and becoming more present in every moment.

Highlights:

• Learn how to work with your thoughts during practice
• Practice a guided walking meditation exercise, along with variations for further exploration
• Discover the role of the courageous heart in being with what is

In Session Three, you’ll look closely at the emotions of desire and aversion—how they are widely misunderstood in Western culture, and how we can undo their influence in our everyday lives.

Highlights:

• Gain awareness of the five hindrances to mindfulness — desire, aversion, sleepiness, restlessness, and doubt
• Work with pain and physical sensations through a guided practice and additional exercises
• Learn how attachments to desire and aversion control your life, and how mindfulness can help you break free

In this session, you’ll continue your exploration of the five traditional hindrances to mindfulness, taking a closer look at the remaining three: sleepiness, restlessness, and doubt. You’ll also begin to bring more simplicity into your life.

Highlights:

• Access fundamental clarity of mind as you cultivate the balance between being tranquil and alert
• Explore a guided practice for being with and seeing through difficult emotions
• Support your work with each of the five hindrances with several additional exercises

What is the difference between our thoughts about the world and the world as it is? In this session, we’ll investigate this question and look at some practical actions we can take to free ourselves of limiting concepts that obscure our direct experience of reality.

Highlights:

• Explore the nature of mind, our mental “prisons,” and the myths we carry about time, place, and self
• Begin to unwind the difference between concept and reality to taste true freedom
• Practice mindful eating—how this routine activity can become a vehicle for greater awareness

Session Six explores the Four Noble Truths. Many people have negative reactions to the first noble truth: life involves suffering. Yet denying the existence of suffering doesn’t make it go away. By acknowledging this truth, we take the first step toward freedom.

Highlights:

• Understand the Four Noble Truths as you begin to transform suffering into an experience of freedom
• Learn the three categories of human suffering: painful experiences, change, and conditionality
• Work with suffering in your own life with a guided practice and additional exercises

In a sense, delusion can be seen as the opposite of vipassana, or insight. In this session, we’ll look at the various ways our minds create delusion and how we can recognize and transform those tendencies through awareness.

Highlights:

• Shed light on our shared illusions and how delusion traps us in “unreality”
• Nourish the “wise attention” necessary to free yourself from the bonds of illusion
• Identify and work with your own delusions with a guided practice and additional exercise

Session Eight explores the often misunderstood concept of karma. You’ll investigate the law of cause and effect, as well the importance of the intentions that precede our actions.

Highlights:

• What is karma? Understand how consequences are generated and compounded throughout our lives
• Learn the Four Brahma-Viharas: lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity
• Explore the six realms of existence, your intentions, and meditation as a path to purifying your karma

In order to stabilize the positive effects of wisdom, compassion, and mindfulness, it is crucial that we learn to develop equanimity. This spiritual force gives us the perspective we need to ride the changing tides of experience without getting washed away each time a wave rolls in.

Highlights:

• Gain tools to let go of your habitual responses as you chart a steady course forward
• The Eight Vicissitudes—learn the four joys and their respective opposites that we encounter again and again throughout our lives
• Engage with all of your senses as gateways to perception

In this session, we’ll take a closer look at faith as a quality of mind that leads to freedom from ignorance. We also explore the meaning of wisdom—a word that takes on specific nuances in the Buddhist tradition.

Highlights:

• The Five Spiritual Powers— the inner qualities that empower us on the path to freedom
• How faith and wisdom are available to us in each moment, and are of great importance on the spiritual path
• “Big Mind”—a guided practice to show us how, through choiceless awareness, we can begin to penetrate the nature of reality as it is

In this session, we unpack the power of metta, or lovingkindness, and its revolutionary potential in our lives. Lovingkindness practice provides a perspective of radical non-separation, and its skillful application plants the seeds of love in our lives.

Highlights:

• Clarify the obstacles to experiencing lovingkindness in our everyday lives
• Learn the four phases of lovingkindness—from loving ourselves and loved ones to strangers and the world
• Deepen your experience of lovingkindness with a complete guided metta meditation and exercises

Session Twelve brings us to the end of the course—and to the true beginning of the next chapter in your ongoing practice. You’ll explore practical ways to continue meditating on your own, as well as how to take your meditative awareness into every area of daily life.

Highlights:

• Revisit the basic techniques of mindfulness and integrate them into the formal sitting practice you’ve been cultivating
• Continue to explore how you can bring more wisdom and awareness into your practice
• Take your practice off the cushion and into the world with several exercises to help you