Mettagroup is changing the way we will offer The Meaningful Life teaching, our meditation-based attachment disturbance repair. Until now, we centered the teaching on ten or nine-month classes, repeating the same level of instruction once per year. Responding to the requests of our students, we have developed five levels of training, each for a six-month period, each with a different emphasis.
Level One training (beginning August 2nd) will focus on teaching the meditation techniques used in information on Attachment Theory, attachment disturbance repair, emotional regulation, and the development of mind states associated with secure attachment and spiritual maturity. Level One training is a required prerequisite for the additional trainings.
Level Two training (beginning in March of 2018) will focus on developing the skill set of secure attachment in relationships, shifting your current relationships from the native attachment strategy you developed in your family system to earned secure dynamics. This training will incorporate meditation mentoring, the mindfulness-based strategies, adapted from Shinzen Young’s teaching, for the development of the basic mind states and emotional regulation, and group Idealized Parent Figure protocol developed by Dan Brown at Harvard. The IPF protocol is based on the Tibetan Maha Mudra practice, where you replace the model of how relationships work you developed in your actual system with a working secure model.
Level Three training will focus on doing the deep work of uprooting the original conditioning that caused the attachment disturbance using the mindfulness-based strategies, and a personalized IPF protocol based on the outcome of your Adult Attachment Interview.
Level Four training will focus on who you pick to be in relationship with, shifting who you find attractive from the native attachment strategy of your childhood conditioning to an earned secure strategy using mindfulness-based strategies for the development of intermediate and advanced level mind states, and Dan Brown’s Idealized Partner Figure protocol.
Level Five training will focus on developing interpersonal conflict resolution strategies that work in harmony using mindfulness-based strategies and Dan Brown’s Conflict Resolution Inventory.
We are very excited to expand The Meaningful Life teachings. Each level can be repeated as often as required for the insights offered to be deeply integrated. If you have any questions, please feel free to call us at 213-378-0489, and we will be happy to ask any of your questions.
I hope you are happy and well,
George
A Note From George (July 2017)
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
A Note From George (May 2017)
I am very excited to begin our adventure as Mettagroup moves to our new location in Echo Park. We will be offering more day long retreats, more weekly series, and the intensive series in both The Meaningful Life and Meditation Interventions for the Addiction Process curriculums.
The Intensives will now be offered in three six-month modules. The first module will be on the informational side of attachment-focused meditation, and second and third modules on the practice side with mentoring and optional attachment-focused psychotherapy.
We will offer four Metta/Vipassana retreats a year, Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall in New York and California.
The weekly Deepening Your Practice classes for intermediate and advanced meditators continue in Santa Monica and Echo Park. We will be adding beginners’ classes in both secular Buddhism and Mindfulness, and a monthly alumni class for people who have taken the intensives.
Here we go, here we go!
Love to you,
George