Mindfulness Skills For Challenging Times
Teacher: Choden
Cost: 2 day's accommodation + R350 surcharge
Dates: Friday 20 August 2021 - Sunday 22 August 2021
Choden, a South African born Buddhist monk, will offer some mindfulness skills to help us navigate these times of insecurity, turbulence and uncertainty. He will draw on the Tibetan Mahamudra teachings as a context for his teachings.
There will be a three-fold focus:
Embodiment: learning to drop our centre of gravity from the ‘butterfly mind’ in our head to the wisdom awareness of our body.
Acceptance: learning to accept and allow what arises in our embodied experience rather than resisting it and pushing it away.
Self-kindness: learning to step out of toxic self-criticism and befriend ourselves by bringing kindness and warmth to our unfolding experience.
This weekend retreat will be strongly experiential. Choden will introduce some simple yet profound methods; we will practice them together and share any insights. He will strike a balance between teaching, guided practice, sharing and inquiry, along with some periods of silent sitting and walking meditation.
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Choden: A monk within the Karma Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, Choden (aka Sean Mc Govern) completed a three-year, three-month retreat in 1997 and has been a practicing Buddhist since 1985. He is originally from South Africa where he trained as a lawyer and learned meditation under the guidance of Rob Nairn, an internationally renowned Buddhist teacher. He is now involved in developing secular mindfulness and compassion programmes drawing upon the wisdom and methods of the Buddhist tradition, as well as contemporary insights from psychology and neuroscience. He is an honorary fellow of the University of Aberdeen and teaches on their Postgraduate Study Programme in Mindfulness (MSc) that is the first of its kind to include compassion in its curriculum. He co-wrote a book with Paul Gilbert in 2013, entitled Mindful Compassion that explores the interface between Buddhist and Evolutionary approaches to compassion training. He is also the co-author of two other books: Mindfulness Based Living Course (2018) and From Mindfulness to Insight (2019). In 2016 he completed a one-year retreat focused on the foundation practices of Tibetan Buddhism.