Cambridge Insight Meditation Community
presents a 5-week program
This program will be held online via Zoom. All registrants will receive the link to join the program in their Order Confirmation email. Times are ET.
In this course, we will practice with Buddhism’s Four Foundations of Mindfulness as a practical way to enhance our path of recovery from addictions. The first foundation is mindfulness of the body. The Buddha encouraged us to “contemplate the body, diligent, clearly knowing, and mindful, free from desires and discontent in regard to the world.” Practicing in this way can help us stay more present with whatever is arising in each moment, which helps us show up for our recovery and our lives in fresh and responsive ways that could help us set new, healthier habit patterns and even prevent relapse into old addictive patterns.
The Buddha said we should also contemplate in the same way feeling tone, the mind, and categories of phenomena or dhammas. This last area for contemplation includes a number of important Buddhist lists, including the Five Hindrances, the Seven Factors of Awakening, and the Four Noble Truths. Better understanding each of these can help us work more skillfully with recovery issues like lack of motivation, stress, shame, grief, sadness, craving, delusion, self-doubt, anger, resentment, and more.
Over the course of five weeks, we will explore each of the foundations of mindfulness and look at how they can help us cope with difficulties in our life and on the cushion. We will also look at how they build on each other and lead onward to a deeper understanding of how to stop the clinging which causes suffering. First, we’ll start with mindfulness and clear comprehension, which is the key to our practice and useful in every situation. In week two, we will look at several practices associated with mindfulness of the body. During week three, we'll explore feeling tone, how we automatically see sense experiences as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Week four will focus on working with the mind, which includes emotions. In the last class, we will delve into several of the Buddhist lists, especially the Five Hindrances and Seven Factors of Awakening.
There will be short readings, guided meditations, talks, question and response periods, as well as time for discussion. This program is appropriate for meditators of all ages and all levels of experience who self-identify as being in recovery from addictions of any kind, whether a dependence on substances or on behaviors.
Full and partial scholarships are available.
(Closed Captions (CC) for CIMC Programs are generated through “livestreaming” via Rev.com. CIMC programs are not livestreamed to any other platform for any other use.)