Meditation

Discovering What and Who We Are

The practice of mindfulness/awareness meditation is common to, inherent in, all human beings.  In meditation, we are continuously discovering who and what we are.  Often we think about meditation as some kind of unusual, holy, or spiritual activity.  However, meditation is completely normal: it is the mindful quality present in everything we do.  This is a straightforward principle, but we are continuously distracted from coming to our natural state, our natural being. Throughout our day, everything pulls us away from natural mindfulness, from being on the spot.

The Practice of Mindfulness

This is what we call the journey or the path of meditation: continuously trying to recognize that we can actually relax and be who we are.   Life is difficult, we have tremendous responsibilities, but the odd thing, the twisted logic, is that the way we relate to the basic flow of our life is to sit completely still.  It might seem more logical to speed up, but here we are reducing everything to a very basic level.  Thus we are able to experience our life fully.  We might feel that thinking about the past or future makes our life richer, but by not paying attention to the immediate situation we are actually missing our life..  So the practice of mindfulness is the practice of being alive.  It is important to understand that were not talking about trying to get into some kind of higher level or higher state of mind.  We're not saying that our immediate situation is unworthy.  What we're saying is that the present situation is completely availab le and unbiased, and we can see it that way through the practice of mindfulness.

Opportunities in Baltimore

The Baltimore Shambhala Meditation Center provides many opportunities for people to learn meditation.  We offer brief meditation instruction at our Open House every Thursday evening at 7 p.m..  We also offer brief meditation instruction every Sunday morning at 10 a.m..  Finally, our Center provides comprehensive meditation instruction within a nonreligious, non-sectarian format called Shambhala Training.  In Shambhala Training, people learn how to meditate progressively through a series of weekend workshops, which gradually deepen the practice of meditation and integrate it into everyday experience.  These workshops provide group and individual instruction, along with the opportunity to practice sitting and walking meditation in a supportive environment.