About Insight Meditation
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Insight Meditation Tradition
Vipassana, Insight, Mindfulness or "clear seeing" is a simple, direct and powerful practice that can be used to help us open to clear consciousness and to develop calm, focused, and balanced awareness. As we learn to make direct contact with our experience, we open the door to self-knowledge and create the possibilities for conscious choice, for change, for freedom and for deep understanding. 2500-year-old meditation teachings rooted in Theravada Buddhism. These teachings are a component of all Buddhist traditions and compatible with any spiritual practice, whatever the tradition.
Intention
Our intention is to open to innate compassion and wisdom, to come to self-knowledge through exploration and direct contact with experience, to bring arising wisdom into all life experience. We invite everyone to journey with us in learning a few basic practices that help us plunge deeply into silence and to discover in the stillness:
- Truth, accessible through our own experience and through our own hearts
- Awareness and connectedness with all of life
- Potential of radical freedom in every moment
Terminology:
Citta:(a Pali word for mind,"c" pronounced [ch]; sanskrit "chitta"), used here because of limitations in the English word mind. Citta suggests a much more inclusive and basic understanding of mind. It may include mind, heart and consciousness.
Dana or generosity: The teachings are considered priceless, a gift that comes only due to auspicious circumstances or good karma. Dana, a practice of generosity for both students and teachers, is an important practice in itself and manifests uniquely for each individual.
In Dana courses there is no charge for dharma teachings, only for expenses. Free will offerings are requested, accepted and greatly appreciated for the teachings. Sometimes a modest amount is suggested. Please help save this unique and precious practice, develop your own spiritual quality of generosity.