Beyond Mindfulness - Guided Meditations and Teachings

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

Awakening begins by discovering the awareness which is already free, pure, connected and in the nature of love. It is discovering the natural peace, the deep stillness which is available to us in any moment regardless if we feel good or bad. Can you find the eye in the storm? Rest right there. 

3. Beyond Mindfulness - Unhooking

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

Meditation takes us just as we are, with our restlessness and our peace. This radical acceptance of ourselves as we are is called maitri, or unconditional friendliness. It is a simple, direct relationship with the present moment just as it is. 

Relaxed, Interested, Friendly

It is helpful is to become aware of the inner judge. The inner judge is an agency within us that criticizes, judges, compares, condemns, blames and attacks us and others mercilessly and constantly. Stephan Pende share insights and meditations on how to cultivate self-compassion. 

Self-Compassion

All Buddhist traditions consider it important to understand the selflessness of the individual in order to gain liberation from suffering. The reason for this is that all suffering comes from believing the self is truly existent. This results in taking the self and everything that affects it very seriously, and we become fixated on pursuing happiness and avoiding suffering. But in fact, the self does not exist in a separate, solid, independent way.  It is made up through the mental process of selfing, like the self that appears in a dream. 

Selflessness

You already have everything to be complete in this moment. There is nothing to do and nothing to understand for you to relax into the truth of peace. Stephan Pende is guiding you into the place which you never left. Home is here, there is no path. 

Awakening Is Already Happening

Bodhisattvas practice 'in the middle of the fire.' This means they enter into the suffering of the world; it also means they stay steady with the fire of their own painful emotions. They neither act them out nor repress them. They are willing to stay 'on the dot' and explore an emotion's ungraspable qualities and fluid energies - and to let that experience link them to the pain and courage of others. Compassionate abiding is a method which can help us to do this. 
- Pema Chodrön

Compassionate Abiding

According to the Tibetan tradition the emotional patterns that dictate our inner sense of balance or imbalance are functions of the subtle body. The subtle body is a kind of interface between the mind and the physical body, by means which these two aspects of being interact. The Tibetan word for the subtle body is lung, in sanskrit prana and in the chinese tradition it is called chi. Stephan Pende introduces how awareness of the subtle body can support you in times of challenging emotions. 

Challenging emotions and the energy body

Stephan Pende invites you to sense the tension or sensations in your body that are present. What happens if you really meet, greet, and welcome sensation without trying to get rid of it?. In natural meditation you are not trying to change. Instead, you learn to welcome yourselves as you are; to be with what is. Let’s start with who we are, as we are, and see who we become when we accept who we are, as we are, and stop trying to be somebody or something else. 

Be Quiet and Listen

Awareness has a natural sensitivity and the capacity to express warmth. This responsiveness is what is called tenderness. Our tenderness allows us to respond with compassion, love, and awe to whatever arises, in all its beauty and sorrow.

Awake, Open And Gentle

Recognize what is going on;
Allow the experience to be there, just as it is;
Investigate with kindness;
Natural awareness, which comes from not identifying
with the experience.

Recognize And Embrace

In the end, however, all you have is awareness, the quality of knowing that is present in every moment of experience - indefinable, indescribable, non-conceptual knowing. It seems to be nothing at all, yet it is there - clear and present - and experience just arises, without restriction. Can you trust that knowing? Can you trust that clarity? Can you trust your own experience? - Ken Mcleod

Rely On Awareness - Guided Meditation And Teaching

Anxiety is a necessary part of our path. As we move in the direction of waking up, increasing our tolerance of more and more awareness or open mind, we will inevitably experience anxiety. At some point or another, anybody committed to the spiritual path may find it important to commit to the experience of anxiety as an approximation of an open state of mind. - Bruce Tift

Transforming Anxiety

Committing to our anxiety is the difficult work of training ourselves not to try to escape our anxious feelings. It even means to appreciate them, feel them, and see for ourselves whether they are as much of a problem as we think they will be. If anxiety is not a problem and if we understand that it's actually an essential part of our path of waking up, then we might want to practice this attitude of commitment. - Bruce Tift

Committing to our Anxiety

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

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.

Beyond Mindfulness - Guided Meditations and Teachings

Natural Meditation podcast