March mindfulness offering ~ Befriending the wild mind, and ourselves

For my March offering, I will invite us to explore how mindfulness teachings and practices can help us to befriend our often busy minds, which may be causing us as much suffering as illumination. I will share the basic neuroscience of mindfulness and practices for allowing and befriending. Are there ways in which you are a friend to yourself? Are there ways where you find it hard? Can we cultivate unconditional ~ or unstoppable ~ friendliness toward ourselves in the same way we do for beloved others? With gentle, warm friendliness, we’ll discover… There will be sitting meditation, teaching, walking meditation, journaling, and sharing (optional). This class is suitable for all levels of experience, including for those newer to meditation. I describe some elements of this offering in a video on my Instagram here.

Two-hour session on Zoom
Date: Saturday, March 23
Time: 7-9:00am PST / 9-11am CT / 10am-12pm EST / 3-5pm GMT / 4-6pm CET / 6-8pm EET
Price: $45; please register and pay at the Ticket link below

The mind is very wild. The human experience is full of unpredictability and paradox, joys and sorrows, successes and failures. We can’t escape any of these experiences in the vast terrain of our existence. It is part of what makes life grand—and it is also why our minds take us on such a crazy ride. If we can train ourselves through meditation to be more open and more accepting toward the wild arc of our experience, if we can lean into the difficulties of life and the ride of our minds, we can become more settled and relaxed amid whatever life brings us… In meditation, you develop this nurturing quality of loyalty and steadfastness and perseverance toward yourself. And as we learn to do this in meditation, we become more able to persevere through all kinds of situations outside of our meditation, or what we call postmeditation. ~ Pema Chödrön

An especially potent form of practice for these times is metta. Metta is a Pali word that has been translated as loving-kindness, universal goodwill, or loving-friendliness. My favorite translation is “unstoppable friendliness.”    ~ Melvin Escobar

We often meet feelings with strategies of escape, avoidance, suppression, indulgence, or self-judgment. The practice of befriending feelings provides us with another option. We gradually learn not only to tolerate what arises, but to welcome it and take it into our personal path. ~ Willa Blythe Baker

Appreciating your basic, underlying sense of goodness is the birth of unconditional friendliness toward yourself… Meditation cultivates unconditional friendliness through teaching you how to just be—without doing anything, without holding onto anything, and without trying to think good thoughts, get rid of bad thoughts, or achieve a pure state of mind. This is a radical practice… Allowing yourself the space to be as you are—letting whatever arises arise, without fixation on it, and coming back to simple presence—this is perhaps the most loving and compassionate way you can treat yourself. It helps you make friends with the whole range of your experience… Fortunately, unconditional friendliness does not mean having to like what is going on. Instead, it means allowing whatever is there to be there as it is, and inviting it to reveal itself more fully. In trying to help clients develop unconditional friendliness toward a difficult feeling, I often say, “You don’t have to like it. You can just let it be there, and make a place for your dislike of it as well.” ~ John Welwood