Bill Gayner provides an update on Touching the Earth, a non-teacher-centric, democratic self-help community for cultivating mindfulness as an embodied social practice. Practices include meditation, journaling, sharing and exploring meditation experience in triads or dyads, and then gathering back in the larger group to reflect on the process.
Upcoming courses, workshops, and retreats led by Stephen Batchelor and other teachers which focus on issues essential to developing a secular dharma.
The coronavirus reveals just how uncertain things can become. Health news changes daily, hourly. New cases are being diagnosed. New routes of transmission are being considered. This is destabilizing and scary. LInda Modaro and Nelly Kaufer offer some guidelines on how we can respond skillfully and compassionately to this crisis.
Pine Street Sangha is now 8 years old. Located in Portland, Oregon, USA, the sangha is a community of dharma friends and teachers offering a reflective meditation approach based on early Buddhist teaching in support of spiritual development and healing.
This unconventional glossary provides us with grounded, experienced-based definitions of qualities, attitudes, skills, and concepts which are relevant to all meditators.
In leading meditation retreats based on a reflective meditation approach Linda Modaro and Moline Whitson aim to create a middle path between a strict adherence to an intensive schedule and completely doing away with the structures and guidelines that have been considered worthwhile on vipassana retreats.
Almost everything that has changed in how we have developed and teach reflective meditation over the past several years, arises from our experience reclaiming our practice and moving forward from a deeply painful split in our community. Like many Buddhist communities torn apart by failures of leadership, we continue to examine our ideals and assumptions about teaching and leadership and search for a middle path.
Linda Modaro and Nelly Kaufer teach an open awareness, secular meditation and dharma practice which they call reflective meditation. While it is based upon the Buddha’s teaching, this approach also includes principles of western psychology and neuroscience that help support teachers and their students in leading ethical and internally congruent lives.
Reflective meditation is a relatively new, non-formulaic and flexible meditation approach which many secular Buddhists have found to be very helpful in developing their practice.
Winton Higgins argues that taking a reflective approach to meditation is consistent with a secular Buddhist approach. He contends that ‘insight meditation practised in reflective mode is a quintessential dharma practice’.
