Detta är en upprepande händelse

Foundations of Selflessness, 8 week course

19aug18:0020:15Foundations of Selflessness, 8 week courseWhy is seeing our minds clearly so important? Because our distorted view of reality leads to mental afflictions & suffering, and because insight into reality leads to overcoming suffering & achieving genuine happiness?

Tid

(Måndag) 18:00 - 20:15 CET

Information om evenemang

This is the second course in the Foundations of Mind Training series (the first being Foundations of Mindfulness, and the following being Foundations of Compassion).

To attend the course you should either have attended the Foundations of Mindfulness course or have prior experience of mindfulness or shamatha meditation. This course is designed to create a clear framework for how mindfulness can be applied to gain insights into our world of experience and thereby improve the quality of our life. In Buddhism this is called vipashyana (vipassana in Pali) or insight practice.

Why is seeing our minds clearly so important? Because our distorted view of reality leads to mental afflictions & suffering, and because insight into reality leads to overcoming suffering & achieving genuine happiness. One example of what we get wrong is thinking that things are permanent when in fact they are constantly changing. This leads us to hold on to things and inevitably suffer when those things change. Another example of what we get wrong is thinking that genuine happiness comes from external causes, when in fact genuine, stable happiness comes from cultivating inner causes such as contentment, gratitude or loving-kindness. In each session we will begin with an explanation of the topic and how to practice the corresponding meditation. There will then be a guided meditation on this particular practice. Following the meditation, there will be an opportunity to discuss and ask questions regarding the practice. Finally we will end with another meditation session.

The Buddhist assertion is that it is our distorted view of reality that is the underlying source of our mental afflictions and suffering. In this Session we will be investigating four common distorted views that tend to pervade our life. The four distorted views are:

  1. changing as unchanging
  2. pleasure as happiness
  3. no self as self
  4. dependent as independent

And in the process we will explore how to overcome them through gaining four insights. The four insights are:

  1. impermanence (session 1 & 2)
  2. suffering (session 3)
  3. no self (session 4)
  4. emptiness (session 5, 6 & 7)

Finally in the last session we will look at how to integrate these insights into daily life.

For full details of each sessions, see the course schedule below.

We offer 20% discount for students, unemployed, and retired. To use this discount, please add the course to the cart, click on Checkout, and in the box “Coupon code” type in “Reduced Course Fee“.

 

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Biljetter

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Kurslängd

8 weeks

Talare på detta event

  • Martin Ström

    Martin Ström

    Martin is the Director of Yeshin Norbu. For almost 20 years he’s been on a mission to understand more about the mind, both from a western neuro scientific and an eastern contemplative perspective. Martin is a licensed CBT Psychologist and has practiced meditation for almost two decades. He is a graduate of the two-year program Foundation of Buddhist Thought. Martin teaches mindfulness in the corporate world as an accredited trainer of Corporate Based Mindfulness Training. He is also the co-author of three books: Fokus på jobbet, I’m Sorry You Were Saying and The Mind of The Leader.

    This semester Martin is leading our Foundations of Mindfulness courses and half day retreats, the lunch time drop-in mindfulness meditation (on Mondays and Fridays) and the introduction to mindfulness and meditation evenings.

Schema

    • Dag 1
    • Dag 2
    • Dag 3
    • Dag 4
    • Dag 5
    • Dag 6
    • Dag 7
    • Dag 8
    • August 19, 2019
    • 18:00 Session 1: Change – Body18:00- 20:15
      We think we suffer because things change but in fact we suffer because we don’t accept the law of change. Of course we all intellectually understand that everything we experience is constantly changing. However, our behaviour is not driven by our intellectual understanding. It is driven by our instinctive habits. In this particular case instinctively seeing things around us as not really changing from one moment to the next. If we want to change those instinctive habits we need to bring our intellectual understanding into experience through vipashyana practice. In this first session we will do this by focussing on the body. Coming to experientially see that the body is constantly changing. And thus coming to see that the world we experience is a constant flow of change. And by so doing we can be more experientially in harmony with the flow of life and use it to our advantage to improve our lives instead fighting against that flow of life and thereby inducing mental afflictions and suffering.
      Talare: Martin Ström
    • August 26, 2019
    • 18:00 Session 2: Change – Mind18:00- 20:15
      In this second session we will focus on the mind. Coming to experientially see that the mind is constantly changing. And thus coming to see that we, the experiencer of the world, are a constant flow of change. And by so doing we can be more experientially in harmony with the flow of life and use it to our advantage to improve our lives instead fighting against that flow of life and thereby inducing mental afflictions and suffering.
      Talare: Martin Ström
    • September 2, 2019
    • 18:00 Session 3: Dissatisfaction18:00- 20:15
      We tend to believe that the source of our happiness is out there in the external world and as a result one of the main methods we use to try to find happiness is that we try to manipulate the things around us. We try to attract people, places and things that seem to be the source of our happiness. However no matter how hard we try to get those things we still seem to encounter suffering and we’re still chasing after that elusive happiness. And even if we get the things we want they never really fully satisfy us and hence remain stuck in this state of dissatisfaction. In this session we will introduce a simple practice that can help us to realize that there is no genuine happiness to be found out there in the world. And as a result come to realize that the real underlying source of happiness is to be found within our own mind.
      Talare: Martin Ström
    • September 9, 2019
    • 18:00 Session 4: No Self18:00- 20:15
      Does a self exist or not? The short answer is that it depends on how we define the word ‘self’. In this session we will be looking at a number of different ways we conceive the self. And in the process focus in particular on our sense of being an ‘autonomous self’. We will then engage in the vipashyana practice of looking for this autonomous self that seems to be here. Also discussing some of the most common ways in which we tend to go astray in this practice.
      Talare: Martin Ström
    • September 16, 2019
    • 18:00 Session 5: Emptiness18:00- 20:15
      Is there an independent objective world out there? Is there an independent subjective me here? We will begin this session by briefly presenting the view of emptiness. The view that nothing exists independently, that everything is a dependent-arising. And in particular how we grasp onto the ‘me’ seeing ourselves as completely independent of the world that we experience. We will then engage in the vipashyana practice of looking for this independent me.
      Talare: Martin Ström
    • September 23, 2019
    • 18:00 Session 6: Potential – Mere ‘I’ 18:00- 20:15
      If there is no ‘me’ to be found does that mean that we don’t exist at all? In this session we present in more detail the flipside of emptiness – the view of dependent-arising. And come to see that like everything else we exist depending on other factors, in particular as something merely labelled on the basis of the body & mind. We will once again engage in the vipashyana practice of looking for the independent me, this time also placing some emphasis on dependent-arising. And through understanding that emptiness and dependent-arising are like two sides of a coin how we can avoid the two extremes of existence and non-existence.
      Talare: Martin Ström
    • September 30, 2019
    • 18:00 Session 7: Potential – Mind18:00- 20:15
      If there is no independent object world and the world exists in dependence on our mind does that mean that the mind is the only ‘real’ thing and everything else is like an illusion? In this session we turn our attention to the mind. How does the mind exist? What is the nature of the mind? We will first begin be defining the mind and what we mean by the nature of mind. We will then engage in a simple nature of mind practice looking directly at our own mind to come to realize how the mind exists.
      Talare: Martin Ström
    • October 7, 2019
    • 18:00 Session 8: Selflessness in Daily Life18:00- 20:15
      How can we bring these insights into daily life? In particular how to bring the insight into emptiness into daily life. We will begin by first explaining the process of how grasping onto an independent me and an independent objective world is the underlying source of our mental afflictions and suffering. How through this grasping we turn lines and boundaries and then briefly present both short-term and long-term strategies to help reduce and finally eliminate this grasping. We will then engage in the vipashyana practice of seeing everything as like an illusion.
      Talare: Martin Ström