Beyond Mindfulness - Guided Meditations and Teachings

Pende

stephan

WEEK 1 MEDITATION: This is the core mindfulness meditation to use throughout throughout your intro to mindfulness and meditation course.  Choose either this track or another body scan track to listen to.  We recommend practising this meditation once per day.

Body Scan (12 mins)– Yvonne: WEEK 1 GUIDED MEDITATION

Former monk Stephan Pende leads a meditation on cultivating a loving gaze and explains how to find peace in the midst of intense experience. He explores how to work with the subconscious gossip, which is obstructing a direct relationship with our experience.  

1. Beyond Mindfulness - The Loving Gaze

There is a simple, obvious truth: there is no such entity as “me”. That is the main insight in all paths of liberation. There is no separate, solid entity called "me" or "self" anywhere to be found. The sense that there is something like that is the root cause for all suffering.  
Because of this mistake you feel you live in a prison, spending your life  protecting and trying to make happy something that was never there to begin with. Seeing through this illusion is simple and straightforward.

2. Beyond Mindfulness - Exploring Selflessness

Mindfulness supports you in your capacity to be present in moments of emotional turmoil, neither suppressing the feelings nor getting lost in them. Stephan Pende shares methods on how to be in an emotional tsunami.

4. Beyond Mindfulness - Being With An Emotional Tsunami

Stephan Pende & John Tavener - Presence Canticle

Stephan Pende explains and guides a meditation on how to recognize and rest as awareness or what sometimes is called the nature of your mind. 

5. Beyond Mindfulness - Resting As Awareness

Look again and again at what cannot be seen. At some point you see nothing - you really see nothing. You know, through your own experience, that there is no you in you, no fixed point, nothing. That experience makes all the difference. - Ken Mcleod

37 Practices - Verse 28-30

The whole point of meditation or prayer or whatever we are trying to do is to discover the fundamental principle of human nature, to go into this deep nature, to touch our mind, the fundamental principle of totality, nonduality. The moment we reach this experience there is no room for heavy concepts, heavy emotions or sentimentality. Just be! At the moment of this experience, there are no concepts labeled by the dualistic mind. At such a time there is no Buddha, no God, no heaven or hell. Just being - the great peace, the great satisfaction. - Lama Yeshe

Already home - part 1

No matter what kind of consciousness we might consider, the clear light of innermost awareness pervades it. Ice, even when it is solid and very hard, does not pass beyond the nature of water. In the same way, no matter how gross, tough, or coarse conceptions might be, the place from which they dawn and the place into which they vanish when we no longer think them does not pass beyond innermost awareness. - Dalai Lama

Already home - part 2

It is important to have a structure for your daily meditation practice which is inspiring and wholesome. Stephan Pende helps you to find your own style in your practice. Our meditation practice can be effortless and joyful.

Structure of a daily meditation practice

Chitta means “mind” and also “heart” or “attitude.” Bodhi means “awake,” “enlightened,” or “completely open.” Sometimes the completely open heart and mind of bodhichitta is called the soft spot, a place as vulnerable and tender as an open wound. It is equated, in part, with our ability to love. Even the cruelest people have this soft spot. Even the most vicious animals love their offspring. As Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche put it, “Everybody loves something, even if it’s only tortillas.” - Pema Chodron

Bodhicitta - The Essence of Awakening

Stephan Wormland, MA in clinical psychology and trained in Gestalt therapy. He has studied and practiced meditation in multiple Buddhist traditions for over 30 years and spent altogether 5 years in meditation retreats. Stephan was a monk in the Tibetan tradition for 11 years and teaches meditation in Buddhist centers in Europe.

Already home - part 1

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