When circumstances are challenging, how do you react? Stephan Pende offers methods to help you to develop greater inner strength and openness to life by changing how you react to what happens around and to you. You learn how to develop a happier and relaxed mind through different meditations from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and Mindfulness practices for daily life. .

Teachings in Malmö

Stephan Pende explores in this teaching the two basic levels of mind: the unconditioned and conditioned level. When we rest in unconditioned awareness, our dualistic fixations and with that our stressful thoughts are completely inactive.  There’s no attachment or aversion to anything that arises within our field of awareness and no attempt to prolong or escape what is happening. We discover a place of peace and wholeness which is always available to us.  Conditioned mind, on the other hand, is characterized by the presence of dualistic fixations – our likes and dislikes. Any sense of lack, judgment and dissatisfaction is a function of the conditioned mind.  

Two Levels Of Mind

According to the teaching of the Buddha we are like a wave on the ocean. A wave, forgetting, that she is part of the ocean. Identifying with this little part called our body, identifying with thoughts and memories, being fearful because we feel we are separated from the whole, separated from other people. It is my little „me‟ here, the most important person in the world, and then there is this „big outside‟, the other people and everything that happens, that is overwhelming and frightening. The wave forgets and misidentifies itself as this little thing coming out of the ocean  and is not in contact with a deeper reality, the vastness of the ocean.

Two Levels Of Mind 2

What you need to do is to neither reject nor indulge in your own emotional energy, but instead come to know it. Then you can transmute the energy of emotions into wisdom. You could gain the capacity to slow down, feel the energy in our body, drop the story line and let it pass trough your body and mind. Stephan Pende shares tools to transform anger into healthy, compassionate aggression. In that way your anger can become a contribution to inner and outer peace. 

Transforming Anger

We can suppress anger and aggression or act it out, either way making things worse for ourselves and others. Or we can practice patience: wait, experience the anger and investigate its nature.

Transforming Anger 2

Bodhichitta refers to a heart set on becoming a Buddha, a heart that has a firm determination: “I have to overcome all my limitations and realize all my potentials in order to be able to benefit everyone.” We are striving for enlightenment not just because it is the best and the highest, but in order to help everyone by attaining it. The starting point for this journey is with yourself, healing your own heart, discovering your own innate wholeness. Stephan Pende describes how misunderstanding the teachings on loving-kindness can lead to an increase of self-rejection. 

Opening Your Heart

The session starts with a guided meditation where you are invited to connect with the kindness and care you have received throughout your life. It follows a question and answer session. 

Opening Your Heart 2

My assumption is that, at this moment, you can open the door to peace without becoming someone else or being in another place. Just by looking inside, at what is and embracing it with a loving heart. Right now you could step into this place. This place is so close to you that you oversee it. There is stillness and peace in the background of the wanting, dissatisfied mind. There is underlying peace and stillness, beyond these words, in this room, wherever you are dear reader, right now! Could you allow yourself, just for a moment to find that place of rest?

Letting Go Means Letting Be

Being in a place in which you can rest and see more clearly, which holds and contains everything arising for you in the present. From here, it is possible to deconstruct, re-contextualize and reframe our original fear-based feelings and reactions, honoring and embracing them without being their victims.

Letting Go Means Letting Be 2

Former Buddhist monk Stephan Pende explores a liberating way to relate to our fears: not as something to try to get rid of or cast out, but as something we become very intimate with. In doing so we come to find that the journey of knowing fear is in fact the journey of courage. From this wisdom, we learn to embrace the fullness of our experience in life.

Smile at Fear

Finding a place of courage in midst of your fear through the method of the RAIN - model. Neither suppressing the fear nor being controlled by it but rather learning to give space and learning from the energy of fear.

Smile at Fear 2

How does your meditation practice benefit your relationships? Stephan Pende explores how the qualities you cultivate in meditation like equanimity, stability and self-kindness support you in your relationships.

Meditation And Relationships

How does your meditation practice benefits your relationships? Stephan Pende explores how the qualities you cultivate in meditation like equanimity, stability and self-kindness support you in your relationships.

Meditation And Relationships 2

All of us are caught up in addictive patterns. Stephan Pende presents how meditation can  release us from the grip of negative habits and addictions that block a full and meaningful life. We can learn how to undo our habits and addictions and find true contentment.  Stephan Pende also leads two meditations to develop familiarity with states of mind that can release us from addictive patterns. 

Enough! Working with addictive patterns Part 1

All of us are caught up in addictive patterns. Stephan Pende presents how meditation can release us from the grip of negative habits and addictions that block a full and meaningful life. We can learn how to undo our habits and addictions and find true contentment. Stephan Pende also leads two meditations to develop familiarity with states of mind that can release us from addictive patterns.

Enough! Working with addictive patterns Part 2

Your physical posture affects your mental state. If you assume a posture that is too relaxed, chances are that your meditation will stray into drowsiness. Too rigid and tense a posture, on the other hand, might lead to mental agitation. Thus it is appropriate to take a balanced posture that is neither too tight nor too loose. Stephan Pende points to the keys of a healthy posture: alignment, relaxation and resilience.

Meditation Posture

What you’re looking for, is what is doing the looking. That which sees and looks is what is looked for! And that can’t be found. Because it’s not been lost. It’s been looking all along. At the deepest level, you’re holding the answer you’ve been looking for. The answer is in your hands. It’s in your own being. You ARE what you’re looking for. You ARE What you’ve always longed for.

You Are Already What You Seek

When it comes to the true nature of mind, this isn't something that we get from a spiritual tradition or religion. It's not something that we need to seek from a guru or that we need to find by going to a sacred place, but it's a matter of recognizing who we are, whatever that it is. When we see this completely clearly, when who we actually are becomes completely evident and obvious to us, and we recognize it and appreciate it in a completely perfect way, then that I think is what is called recognizing the true nature of mind. Then we fully make this a reality for ourselves.
– 17th Karmapa


You Are Already Home

Self-Denigration is one of the biggest obstacles to bring forth Bodhicitta, the awakened heart. Stephan Pende shares methods to break through the trance of unworthiness and connect with your inner beauty and peace. The teachings and experience of Buddha-Nature are fundamental for us because we are coming from a culture of guilt and shame.

There Is Nothing Wrong With You

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

We suffer because we want life to be different from what it is. We suffer because we try to make pleasurable what is painful, to make solid what is fluid, to make permanent what is always changing. We try to make ourselves into something real and unchanging when our fundamental state of being is unconditionally open and ungraspable.

Impermanence is good news

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.

Teachings in Malmö

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