Insight (Vipassana) Meditation

Insight Meditation deepens our potential for kindness and understanding through developing our capacity to be present in each moment with an open-hearted attention to our experience. From this quality of presence, our heart and mind can awaken to a depth of peace and clarity that liberates us from the power of greed, hatred and confusion.

The practice tends to begin with a steadying of attention on the sensations of breathing and the body. From there, one can open to include more and more of one’s experience within the field of Mindfulness (present-moment awareness). This enables insight into the true nature of what causes suffering and the path to its ending. Such clear-seeing fosters both wisdom and compassion.

Also known as Vipassana, Insight Meditation derives from a 2500 year-old Buddhist tradition with deep and immediate relevance to life today. It is accessible and appropriate for people of any religious affiliation or none.

Loving-kindness (Metta) Meditation

Loving-kindness meditation can be brought in to support the practice of 'bare attention' to help keep the mind open and sweet. It provides the essential balance to support your insight meditation practice.

It is a fact of life that many people are troubled by difficult emotional states in the pressured societies we live in, but do little in terms of developing skills to deal with them. Yet even when the mind goes sour it is within most people's capacity to arouse positive feelings to sweeten it. Loving-kindness is a meditation practice taught by the Buddha to develop the mental habit of selfless or altruistic love. In the Dhammapada can be found the saying: "Hatred cannot coexist with loving-kindness, and dissipates if supplanted with thoughts based on loving-kindness."