There's some big changes happening with Mettagroup's intensive classes. Instead of single ten-month programs, we are dividing The Meaningful Life and Meditation Interventions for the Addiction Process into five levels of six-month classes. This expands and deepens the training, while simultaneously making it more digestible for students. We're very excited about it!
The first level, beginning this August, will offer instruction in Buddhist theory, Attachment Theory, relapse prevention strategies, and in-depth meditation techniques. Subsequent levels will focus on developing secure relationships, uprooting past attachment conditioning, working through conflict resolution strategies, and will draw more deeply on Daniel P. Brown's attachment protocols. If you have any questions about the courses, please feel free to contact Tyson in our office at 213-378-0489 or admin@mettagroup.org to set up a phone conversation with me to discuss further.
For those of you who take part in our Morning Meditation, we will be exploring the third and fourth stages of Insight during July’s sessions.
The third stage is the examination of the Ananta, Anicca and Dukkha (aka Non-Self, Impermanence and Unsatisfactoriness), in which our focus becomes "Nothing Lasts." In watching all sensory experience arise and pass on its own without a self causing it, we experience non-self with no permanent, ongoing, continuous author, creator, doer, maker. In nothing lasting, including ourselves, we experience the unsatisfactoriness of the human condition. This puts us at a crossroads: in one direction is nihilism - nothing lasts, nothing matters, there's no need to participate in life. In the other direction is full engagement - nothing lasts, the moment ends either way, what we miss if we don’t engage every moment is the engagement itself. Franz Kafka says it best: “You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid."
The fourth stage is the investigation of impermanence. Wherever we turn our attention, the sensory experience arises and passes. Join me on our daily call to hear more about that!
I hope you are happy and well,
George Haas