Introduction to Meditation 2025

Five Thursdays
August 14–September 11, 2025
6:00–7:30 pm

We can make friends with our minds and become present to our lives through working with our breath.

In meditation we begin to discover how our minds work. Becoming familiar with our minds and our habitual patterns, we can  begin to free ourselves from painful struggles and confusion.

The  process of meditation enables us to find fundamental openness, ease, and compassion, aspects of our minds that are sometimes buried beneath layers of thinking. We begin to be able to embrace all aspects of experience in daily life.

Who: beginners to meditation and those who can benefit from a review of the basics of calm abiding (shamatha) meditation.  

Since the course has only five classes which are designed to build on one another, we recommend that new students only join during the first and second classes.

When: Thursday evenings, 6:00–7:30 pm, August 14 through September 11, 2025

What: This course is designed to help beginners establish an ongoing meditation practice, and will include meditation instruction, guided meditations and discussion. We will be using Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche’s book, Rebel Buddha as a guideline for the study of some basic Buddhist tenets and the practice of meditation.

Rebel Buddha can be purchased  at the Nalanda Store at Nalanda West.

Where: onsite at Nalanda West in the Mahabodhi shrine room

Facilitator Bios

Karunika Nadine Selden has been a student of Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche since 2011 and serves as co-director for the Nalandabodhi Seattle sangha.  She is a mother of two and a grandmother of five children.  She is retired after 30+ years as a researcher for three newspapers and missions with the international Red Cross in Cambodia, the Balkans and Turkey.

Karunika Karen de Luna has been practicing meditation for over 20 years. In 2015 she became a student of Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche. Currently the co-director of Nalandabodhi Seattle, she enjoys helping others improve their flexibility so that they can sit with an inward smile, just like the Buddha.

The “Karunika” title: In 2021, Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, with the support of the Nalandabodhi Acharyas, Lamas, and Mitras (the most senior group of designated teachers in Nalandabodhi), appointed over eighty long-time students to serve in a newly created supporting teacher’s role to assist in guiding our sangha members and to help share with the general public Nalandabodhi’s unique approach to spirituality. The Sanskrit term “Karunika” means “one who has compassion.” Possessing a wide range of backgrounds and sets of individual expertise, as well as formidable experience in the study and practice of the Buddhadharma, the Karunikas offer programs on themes connected to the paths of study, meditation, and mindful activity and on the “five fields of knowledge”: healing, the arts, language and communication, logic and epistemology, and the inner science of mind.