Feb 8
Tibetan Buddhist Meditation
Led by Roger Jackson, John W. Nason Professor of Asian Studies and Religion, Emeritus
Week 2: Meditation on Purifying Light
This session focuses on meditations aimed at concentrating the mind, with a special focus on breath-related practices ranging from observing or counting breaths to visualizing the purification of one's negative emotions through the inhalation of light from a luminous sphere.
Week 4: Meditation in Search of the Self
This session is concerned primarily with an analytical search through one's body-mind complex for any trace of a permanent, partless, independent, self-sufficient self and resting in the contemplative state that results from such a search.
Week 6: Meditation on Compassion
This session is mostly given over to a range of meditative techniques for generating loving kindness and compassion toward ourselves and other beings, for instance, through equalizing ourselves with others or visualizing taking on the sufferings of beings and sending them all our happiness.
Week 8: Meditation on the Nature of Mind
This session focuses on concentrating upon, analyzing, and resting within the nature of the mind – which is understood to be clear, knowing, and blissful.
Week 10: Meditation on Green Tara
The final session combines many features of the previous sessions, through the lens of a practice focused on the female Buddha, Tara, who purifies us, absorbs into us, and becomes inseparable from us physically, verbally, and mentally.