Royal Road of Breath Awareness

We will explore and deepen our experience of the breath. We learn to:

• rest in mindfulness of breath
• taste the support of breath more intimately
• find flow by becoming absorbed in breath
• catch glimpses of awakening to breath without a breather

We will explore how breath can not only calm, soothe and center us, but also connect us with a wider all-inclusive awareness. By coming at our experience of breath from the four perspectives of Original Love, we learn how to turn to breath in the course of daily life in ways appropriate to where we’re at. Sometimes we need to steady and ground ourselves through breath awareness, and sometimes breath can open us directly to boundlessness.

Clouds, Rivers, Lakes and Sea

Here we will explore how our heartaches and heartbreaks can be turned into nourishment for our practice and life, in a way that opens us to new loving perspectives. 

We learn to:

• be mindfully, patiently aware of difficult emotions
• open to a vulnerability that helps us find an intrinsic support 
• find expansive awareness that can embrace our pain 
• experience tastes of the boundlessness in which experience arises

As we explore this territory of the heart by moving through all four of the Original Love perspectives, we shift away from self-defensive reactivity toward open-hearted compassionate engagement.

As much as meditation is about developing and uncovering positive states of mind, a critical part of practice is learning to be with challenging emotions. Actually the deepest value of our personal practice  may found in coming to terms with all aspects of our psyches, including ones we “don’t like,” and finding the healing power of a radical allowing. This turns our negative feelings and mind-states into gateways to ease and expansiveness.

In the Midst of All Things

By becoming mindful of the full range of sense-experiences going on in any moment, we start to rest into a sense of being held by all experience, then into becoming absorbed in it, and finally dissolving into a selfless space in which all things are present. 

In this course we learn to:

• get grounded in outward sense experience
• become absorbed in the soundscape
• rest in awareness that recognizes all outward sense experience
• diminish, dissolve and lose the sense of a self in the middle of sense experience

As we become more intimately mindful of the full range of outward sense-experience, we tend to sink more deeply into a whole experience of now. At the same time, we start to discover the rest that comes with being held by all experience. This can morph into becoming absorbed by the whole field of awareness and experience, and even at times into dissolving into selfless space in which all things are present.

Presence: the Heart of Stillness

In this course we learn to open to a sense of presence that is always here, and to rest in it. This presence helps us to be aware of sense-experience here and now, offers its own sense of intrinsic support, and relieves us of the burden of effort in meditation. It can also expand into a sense of infinite space.

This course will help us:

• become anchored in presence through the body’s experience
• enjoy a sense of presence flowing into our awareness and carrying us
• allow ourselves to dissolve into presence
• awaken to the boundless nondual nature of presence

We go deep into resting in a sense of presence that is always here. Key gateways to it are our sense of time, and of effort. When we learn to recognize the sense of time and effort at work in us, we release our hold on them, and naturally open into a timeless, effortless, selfless, all-pervasive presence.

One Bright Pearl

Here we explore sitting directly with the wisdom of Zen, in which all dimensions of the Original Love program are manifest. We will taste the hidden beauty of some koans, and explore how they can illuminate different dimensions of our practice.

• learn how to take a koan deep into your meditation 
• allow a koan to sustain and hold you in your practice
• surrender to the shifts in experience and perception that koans can trigger
• awaken to the wonder and miracle of ordinary, everyday activities and things

This course will introduce us to the wild territory that koans inhabit.  We will explore how they point us directly to our experience right now, and can encourage and enliven our practice on and off the seat. We’ll also begin to harness the powerful ease they offer, and taste some of the glimpses of boundless openness they.can initiate us into, where the whole Original Love curriculum finds its fulfillment.