The meditation in Everyday life course [MIEL] is designed to provide participants with the introductory tools and teachings for working with meditation in daily life. With simple instructions and support, mindfulness meditation practice can become part of our lives, bringing greater stability, strength, and clarity.

This is the first course in the “Everyday Life” series of the Way of Shambhala path of training. This course includes guided meditation, talks, and open discussion on the challenges that meditators face in their practice.

Prerequisites: None-everyone is welcome.

Dates and times: 4 consecutive Thursdays from 7-9pm starting January 16 until February 6th 2025.

Suggested Readings:

Mindfulness in Action: making Friends with yourself through Meditation and Everyday Awareness by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Peaceful Abiding Meditation

The purpose of the first in the IEL series, Meditation in Everyday Life, is to help people connect to meditation as the foundation for a spiritual path and as a means to a sane life. MIEL cultivates participants’ relationship with basic goodness in parallel with the theme of Level I of Shambhala Training, but it draws overtly from Buddhism.

Each class explores an aspect of peaceful abiding meditation: the four foundations of mindfulness, awareness, gathering the mind, obstacles and antidotes, working with emotions, and more. MIEL ends in sharing the Shambhala vision of enlightened society, suggesting the ways in which meditation can impact our daily lives and our whole society.

Peaceful abiding meditation seeks to tame the everyday, habitual, conceptual mind by placing it on the breathing. However, meditation can feel far from peaceful. Self-aggression, judgment, and physical discomfort often arise. MIEL encourages gentleness and friendliness to oneself as the key to working with self-aggression: this is maitri, loving-kindness. Being with our breathing in the present, we cultivate

openness to our experience. Rather than trying to fight thoughts, suppress emotions, or silence the mind, we can learn to be as we are. We come back to this point in every class.

And at the end of each class, we remind people to apply mindfulness in each moment of their lives.