Meditation
Feb 3rd, 2008 by Kulaprabha
As well as having accumuated quite a library of Dharma study notes, I have also accumulated a similiar set of notes about meditation. Not that these two categories are really separate categories, but for the sake of ease of finding your way through the website, I’ll be make meditation notes available from this page.
In the Western Buddhist order, WBO, we have a framework called “the System of Meditation” within which we teach and reflect on the various kinds of Buddhist sitting meditation practices. At Taraloka, where I live and lead retreats, we have evolved a set of intensive meditation retreats based around this system. These retreats are for women who are in training to be ordained into the WBO.
The system of meditation consists of four aspects to meditative practice ~
integration …. mindful awareness
positive emotion …. especially the Brahma Vihara practices
spiritual death …. including reflections on impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and insubstantiality
spiritual rebirth …. including the tong-len practice
I run retreats based on each of these four meditation themes and a fifth retreat where all four themes, the complete mandala of the system, are covered in one retreat.
The notes that I will upload here are mostly concerned with this system of meditation. Some of them are about the system generally. Some of them deal with specific aspects of the system.
Find more in the following sections...