This four session course will cover the basics of analytical meditation, provide guided meditation sessions, and answer questions.

Prerequisite: at least six months of daily shamatha practice

The two main types of Buddhist meditation are resting meditation and analytical meditation. Through resting meditation, our minds can settle and become more workable in various situations. Through analytical meditation, we gain certainty and confidence in the true nature of ourselves and our world and, in this way, plant seeds to truly reverse our most confused habitual patterns.

“Clear insight” or vipashyana meditation involves the practice of analytical meditation: relying on the foundation of a calm and settled mind, you begin to investigate or analyze the true nature of your mind and how it creates its world.

By practicing analytical meditation, you harness and further develop the more active, inquisitive, and penetrating qualities of the mind. This allows you to identify and gradually transform mistaken beliefs about the nature of experience by alternating calm abiding with clear insight, you gain a new certainty and confidence in emptiness (Sanskrit: shunyata), the spacious and open, ultimate nature of reality. You also gain certainty and confidence in “dependent arising,” or the direct connection between the actions we perform and the quality of life we experience. Through this certainty, you gain the ability to lead a life that is of genuine and increasing benefit to yourself and others.