The Meditation Course

The classes consist of a 10/15 minute talk on the subject and 30 minutes of meditation and mindfulness-based resilience practices.

This class is extracted from The Meditation Course which you can learn more about or subscribe to here:

https://www.meditationcourse.live/

"Beauty is the purgation of superfluities."

- Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475 - 1564). An Italian sculptor, painter, architect, poet, and engineer of the High Renaissance. He exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art. From a letter to Rene Lui Descartes XIV (6 March 1540)

Michelangelo clarifies here how he believes that art, rather than adding beauty, removes that which is not beautiful.

A sculptor chisels away the waste to reveal the form that lies within a block of marble.

A meditator builds their skill to release layers of psychological waste. All of the unhelpful beliefs and fears that form over a lifetime and undermine our happiness.

We build our skills through continuous practice. Skill with the mind allows us to explore the nature of our minds. Over time we become familiar and comfortable with the mind. Our quirks, and the quirks of others, become clear and lose their intensity.

In time we identify with a sense of self that isn't dependent on anything anyone else believes. It isn't a product of our cultural narrative. We can finally discover our personal truth.

This week's meditation explores our boundaries. These are boundaries of touch, sensation, emotion, and feeling. In the process, we also can more aware of the very process of awareness.

This helps to reveal a sense of self rooted in the Present Moment and grounded in Presence. Free from the endless perambulations of the mind as it searches endlessly for future suffering.

From a training session in the Loving Awareness Meditation Course.

https://lovingawareness.fm

This class is extracted from The Meditation Course which you can learn more about or subscribe to here:

https://www.meditationcourse.live/

When I first began meditating seriously, I found that over time, I became more and more connected to my body. I became more aware of how I felt. Once I had became more familiar with my physical sensations I found it easier to identify my emotions.

This connection has a scientific name which is Interoception. Interoception is the source of a great deal of scientific study at the moment, much of it in connection with mindfulness. I found that when I sat and meditated, once I silenced my thoughts, I could experience my predominant emotion directly as a sensation in my body. This was uncomfortable, but not immensely so. I discovered a number of emotional resilience techniques which caused my negative emotions to subside and finally to dissolve completely.

These techniques became valuable life tools and the process of releasing my negative emotions became, and remains, part of my daily experience. When I began teaching meditation, I discovered that many of my students were meditating to help them understand their inner experiences and learn how to find happiness despite the painful complexity of thoughts, emotions and behaviours. I have since learned that this connection to the emotions into the body is one of the foundations of meditation and in fact it is the first element of meditation that we experience when we sit and do a body scan or focus on the breath or any other body-based meditation.

I taught this meditation to experience this connection...

This class is extracted from The Meditation Course which you can learn more about or subscribe to here: https://www.meditationcourse.live/

Meditating in nature elevates the experience of meditation.

Even better if we can find a place where we are completely comfortable.

If we are visual people, we can visualise being in nature.

If we are not visual thinkers, we can still experience the sense of being in nature.

This brings with it the stillness and calmness that we experience when we are in nature. There is nothing special about the experience. We don’t need to do anything. We only need to bring the most evocative natural experiences to mind.

For this meditation, Robert uses the mountain stream and the tree. Meditating on a tree is a wonderful experience in itself. You don’t need to do anything other than watch a tree for 20 minutes. Try it. Notice how it makes you feel and then connect with that feeling when you meditate.

This class is from The Meditation Course which you can learn more about or subscribe to here:

https://www.meditationcourse.live/

In 2009, I picked up a book called The Power of Now. It taught me three things that I already knew but had not realised. In other words, it was knowledge but they had not become deep intuitive realisations that formed my model of my reality and on which I acted and made choices.

These three things were: The Present Moment is all there is, I Am Not My Thoughts, and I Am Not My Emotions.

Realising this was transformative.

Over time, I learned that these were not the concepts of the author, Eckhart Tolle, but deep-rooted concepts that reside in the great Eastern wisdom traditions.

I teach many meditations and practices but essentially these are foundational concepts.

In this meditation from a recent YouTube Live Stream, I focus on the Present Moment.

In open awareness meditations, we allow ourselves to experience our present moment experience and everything that arises in it

Open awareness meditation is distinct from focused attention meditations like following the breath where we are focusing on a single element of our experience

If the mind is busy, we can move from focused attention to open awareness until the open awareness becomes more comfortable.

In this session taken from The Meditation Course, Robert teaches three open awareness meditations:

The Just Gone Meditation

The Presence Meditation

A Pure Open Awareness Meditation.

This class is extracted from The Meditation Course which you can learn more about or subscribe to here:

https://www.meditationcourse.live/

Clarity meditation is a mandala meditation where are we focus our attention on an object.

This isn't like Trataka meditation however, where we focus on a single point. Instead, we are resting our awareness on the entire object patiently, and noticing what arises as part of this experience.

To practice this, it is best to use an object that has some meaning to you and is either shiny or translucent. This isn't essential, but it is helpful.

As we rest our awareness on the object, thoughts and memories and sensations and the sense of the object itself, or whatever your mind associates with it, arises in your experience.

These associations will, as you continue to patiently observe the object, arise and subside.

Eventually, the essential visual elements of the object come more clearly into focus and the mental noise subsides.

Finally, the mind will select a visual element of the object and all of the mental noise will diminish and finally subside entirely.

What this exercise does, is to help us to become aware of how our minds project onto our environment almost all of the attributes of any object or person or experience or phenomena of any kind.

Clarity meditation separates the common observable reality of colours, textures, shapes, contrasts, reflections and patterns from all the attributes that our minds project into our experience such as memories, thoughts, and sensory experience that is brought to the experience by our memory and programming.

Clarity in meditation is the realization of the actual reality and what we personally bring to our experiences.

This class is extracted from The Meditation Course which you can learn more about or subscribe to here:

https://www.meditationcourse.live/

I taught the forest lake meditation in this class on The Loving Awareness Meditation Course on 21 April 2021.

This class is structured around a set of practices and concepts that we have been working with for some time in the courses.

Recognition of the internal reality of thoughts, emotions and awareness is important to making progress in meditation and to build resilience.

This practice works with focus, awareness, thoughts, and emotions. It is a practice that is useful in releasing anxiety for instance.

Visit the course site to learn more.

The Meditation Course

https://www.meditationcourse.live/

Sitting in meditation, what arises most commonly in our experience is sound, physical sensations, thoughts and emotions.

In this meditation, Robert guides the student through the process of allowing ourselves to be aware of these phenomena (As they are called) while they arise in our awareness, to acknowledge them, to note them, and to witness them passing out of our awareness to be replaced by another phenomena.

Noting, or labelling, is one of the most frictionless ways to deal with these experiences that we encounter during meditation and which are most likely to intervene in our practice, draw us out of our awareness of the present moment and into the inner narrative, which of course, is fed directly from the external narrative that is so divisive and fear-driven.

By connecting to the present moment and allowing the thoughts and emotions and sensations and sounds to pass we train ourselves to let go of the fear and anxiety that this narrative brings.

Learn about the online meditation courses here:

https://www.meditationcourse.live/

This meditation is a favourite among my student base and has evolved over the time that I've been teaching it.

It originally began as the typical and famous mountain meditation and developed over time because I needed a metaphorical illustration to contrast the experience of focused awareness of something that is static and seemingly unchanging in nature against the experience of the awareness of the continuous flow of time past the seemingly static observer.

The sense of the static nature of the observer and the rock and the space between the eyes helps to illustrate a continuous flow of life and change through time and past the awareness.

Each element highlights the other.

This meditation was taught in a livestream video I broadcast on the 16th of May 2020 in the Mindfulness-Based Resilience Course Group.

Learn about the courses here;

https://www.meditationcourse.live/