Mindful Living Path Winter/Spring 2016 Intensive
Foundational Practices for Healing and Transforming Emotional Afflictions
February 22 - May 16, 2016
A core focus of The Mindful Living Path is stabilizing our mind’s emotionality and healing the psycho-emotional wounds that we may have carried for many years. Buddhist teachings include concrete practices for understanding and transforming our deep-seated emotional afflictions and reactivity so that we can live our daily lives with greater ease, well-being and equanimity.
This Intensive will focus on the foundational mindfulness practices of awareness of the body and its sensations, awareness of thoughts, and awareness of feelings. Grounded in mindfulness we can learn to be present and open to strong emotions (such as anger, fear and sadness) instead of our habitual patterns of pushing them away or being swept away by them. Holding these feelings in awareness we can look deeply into their origins in our past conditioning, identify the misperceptions that feed them, and see clearly their true nature of impermanence and insubstantiality.
The readings (to be assigned) and other supports of this Intensive will present a clear and systematic path for developing the skills and competencies that enable us to take care of our emotional suffering, and lead to self-healing and personal transformation.
Persons new to these teachings will benefit from this opportunity to incorporate these life-changing practices into their lives. Persons already familiar with this tradition will benefit from this opportunity to go more deeply into these practices with increased familiarity.
In this Intensive phone consultations with participants will be provided by senior (seasoned) members of the FCM community. Fred has chosen these persons based on the stability of their practice and their capacity to intelligently and compassionately support and guide the practice of others, including their peers. During the Intensive, Fred will be offering Dharma talks on a conference call open to all participants that will clearly explain the practices and be available to answer questions.
Commitments for each Intensive participant:
1) The commitment to a minimum of thirty minutes of daily formal mindfulness practice.
2) The commitment to attend all the practice periods of their sangha during the twelve weeks, as possible.
3) The commitment to attend a bi-weekly support/discussion gathering of other sangha members participating in the Intensive (if some are living in your area) or by phone conferencing.
4) The commitment to have phone consultations during the Intensive with an assigned peer mentor.
5) The commitment to read any texts that will be recommended to participants.
6) The commitment to be present for group Dharma talk calls with Fred.
For this practice Intensive, there is a suggested donation of $100. This is a suggested donation and participants are free to donate more or less, depending on their individual practice of Dana and their financial situation. Please note that participation in this Intensive is only open to members of the Florida Community of Mindfulness (FCM). For information about membership, please access our website at www.floridamindfulness.org/
This intensive will begin February 22, 2016 and end on May 16. Dharma texts to be read will be announced once registration has been completed. The final date for registration is January 25.
