Current Class

"Noble Heart:" Exploring the Four Immeasurables
A 12-week series beginning Friday, October 23, 2009

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Following on the heels of our special event with Dr. Mario Martinez, our next series will focus on embodying the Four Immeasurables in our direct experience.

Our study will center around audio teachings by Pema Chodron in her series, "Noble Heart: A self-guided retreat on befriending your obstacles." This is the best teaching on awakening bodhichitta that I've ever heard and has been a life-changer for me. Bodhichitta means "awakened mind" and is often referred to as that soft spot in the heart of all beings that allows us to express love, compassion, and joy.

We will listen to the teaching, discuss it together, and integrate the practice through meditation, with relevant books available for reference. Dr. Martinez will stay in touch to help us with any questions of how to integrate the practice using biocognitive techniques. Handouts will be available every week, also posted here.

This series gives practical methods for integrating love, compassion, joy, and equanimity in our immediate experience. It is appropriate for anyone, no matter what spiritual path or lack thereof.

Description of Noble Heart by Pema Chodron

You can’t get away from suffering. That’s the good news, teaches Pema Chodron. For at the core of your most painful experiences – perhaps more than anywhere else – you will find the seeds of your awakening. On Noble Heart, this bestselling author and Tibetan Buddhist shows you how vulnerability is our greatest spiritual resource on the path through life’s difficulties. Using special meditations and teachings, she shows how to cultivate your own noble heart – one that sheds its armor, and opens fearlessly to both heartache and delight. Recorded live as it happened within the peaceful shrine room of Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia, Noble Heart is structured so that you can create your retreat at home or at your meditation center. Here are treasured teachings from this beloved acharya (master teacher) – a full 12 session curriculum of meditations, practices, teaching stories, and real-life examples presented in clear, easy-to-follow language. Noble Heart invites you to! discover for yourself the compassion and wisdom that have established Pema Chodron as a leading voice in American Buddhism.

Highlights:

The four great catalysts of awakening, and how to begin integrating them into your life today
The basic goodness that nothing can take away from you
Authentic Tibetan Buddhist chants for generating gratitude and compassion
Where to find and how to build your inner strength and trust
The maitri meditation that multiplies love
How the Three Noble Principles can enrich everything you do
Why you need your soft spot to awaken spiritually
When "don't know" mind is wiser than all the teachings in the world
The Three Lords of Materialism—and how to diffuse their power
The antidote to aggression
A melting practice you can use to undo isolation and anxiety

The 12 weeks of classes:

1. The ground of Bodhichitta Practice – ego, 3 noble principles

2. Cultivating unconditional friendliness through meditation – posture, calm abiding (shamatha), working with thoughts, non-grasping mind

3. Developing inner strength and trust – Experiencing reality, the Four Immeasurables (loving kindness, compassion, joy, & equanimity), spiritual materialism

4. The Practice of Maitri (Loving kindness) – The roots of suffering and happiness, ignorance

5. The Aspiration Practice of Compassion – Your "soft spot," ego's weaknesses, addiction and obsession, dualistic thinking, far & near enemies of practice, pity/overwhelm/forgiveness

6. Unlimited Joy & Equanimity – Stages of practice, openness, melting practice, big sky mind

7. The Practice of Tonglen (sending & receiving) – Shunyata--openness of being, awakening Bodhichitta, stages of tonglen practice, dissolving the armor of self-protection

8. Meditation & Wisdom – Post-meditation, purity, categories of meditation, prajna (wisdom/understanding)

9. Generosity, Discipline, & Patience – Categories of them, undoing deep-seated patterns, antidote to aggression

10. Joyful exertion – The nondual paramitas ("perfections"), contemplation, exertion, nonduality

11. Shunyata Meditation –Groundlessness, nature of mind, opening mind, contemplating equanimity, nongrasping

12. Bodhichitta to the world – Connectedness, limitless compassion, dissolving barriers, the Dharmic habit, Bodhichitta slogans

Can't be here in person?

Order the series and follow along from home. Updates will be available in the Blog each week. Click icon to order from Amazon.com.