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The Four Foundations of Mindfulness:
The Buddha’s Path to an Awakened Life
with Frank Jude Boccio
March 28 & April 4
Two Saturdays, 1-4pm and 5-8pm
Lecture * Discussion * Asana * Meditation
The Buddha taught that mindfulness of the body, feelings, mind and objects of mind (The Four Foundations of Mindfulness) can lead to full awakening within the realm of our daily lived experience. Through the insight garnered through a consistent mindfulness practice, you can free yourself from limiting beliefs and patterns of behavior, and live an authentic life of freedom and joy. In this series of four workshops, Poep Sa Frank Jude Boccio provides instruction and clarification of the Four Foundations as applied to your formal practice of meditation and asana, as well as to the activities of daily life.
Each session will include Lecture and Discussion, asana and meditation. All levels are welcome. Each of the four parts is a stand-alone workshop, independent of the others. Cost is $30 per individual 3-hour workshop or $100 for all four. Please register online below.
| Saturday, March 28 |
| 1:00-4:00pm |
Part One: Body in the Body
The Buddha taught that within the ‘fathom-long’ body lies the arising and passing away of the whole cosmos. This means we needn’t travel anywhere in order to find peace and freedom. Through mindful contemplation of the breath, the body and its movements and postures, we become intimate with our lived experience and paradoxically break our misidentification with body as “self.”
Mindfulness of the Body – its position, movements, and elements – allows for a deeper intimacy and appreciation of the body, while at the same time freeing us of identifying body as ‘self.’ The greater ease such embodiment brings allows for a fuller sense of our interdependence with all phenomena.
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| 5:00-8:00pm |
Part Two: Feelings in the Feelings
Various “feelings” pass through our bodymind, conditioning how we relate to the world we perceive. Both the Buddha and Patanjali teach that feelings condition our relationship with the world of experience. They point out that we react by clinging and grasping after the pleasant, resisting and aggressively moving against the unpleasant and becoming confused and bewildered by the neutral feelings we experience.
With mindfulness, we can bring awareness to our reactivity and by breaking the chain of our conditioned reactivity, find the freedom to respond skillfully and creatively. Mindfulness empowers us to stop the hamster wheel of conditioned thought and behavior, to break the compelling push and pull of reactivity and touch freedom here and now. |
| 8:30-9:30pm |
Earth Hour Candlelight Satsang Open to the Public - More Info |
| Saturday, April 4 |
| 1:00-4:00pm |
Part Three: Mind in the Mind
Thoughts continue to arise and pass away, and without mindfulness, we tend to identify with them, believing every story they create. Whole identities and stories are woven. and like a spider’s net, entrap us in a false sense of self.
Mindfulness allows us to see thoughts, perceptions and conceptions as passing phenomena, and cultivates the ability to change our relation to them so that we no longer find ourselves, and our actions, dictated by them. Freedom comes through the clarity we discover when we bring mindfulness to the activities and contents of the mind.
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| 5:00-8:00pm |
Part Four: Mindfulness of the Dharma
The Buddha taught that we can contemplate all the mental and physical experience of daily life through the categories of Dharma. These categories, which include The Four Noble Truths, the Five Hindrances and the Seven Factors of Awakening are not in themselves the objects of mindfulness, but categories with which we can analyze our everyday experiences.
When we do so, we grow in the wisdom and compassion that can open our heart to our lives and the lives of others. Seeing how we create suffering, that indeed suffering arises upon causes and conditions, we can make the creative changes necessary to end it and prevent its arising in the future. By developing insight and understanding into the causes of suffering, we can end those causes and cultivate the conditions for joy and peace of mind. |
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