What Is "MINDFUL AWARENESS MEDITATION ?" by Akasa Levi

What Is
"MINDFUL
AWARENESS
MEDITATION ?" 
by Akasa Levi



"There's an Art to becoming
a 'realized human being' ~
Training exists. And it works."    

Sri Ananda Maitreya ( Maha Nayake Thera )
    1895-1998 Balangoda, Sri Lanka

What do you want for yourself? --- A Simple Approach.
Buddhist Style Meditation and Self-Inquiry is an Invitation to Be Willing to Sit within Your Very Own Mind. It is a uniquely sane approach to mental Clarity, which can offer you vital access to Human Kindness and Self Transformation. You want that for yourself? What do you want for yourself?
By means of meditation we can teach our mind to be calm and balanced: Calm. Then, within this calmness itself is found an already resident richness and a potent potential, an innate creativity, a ready-to-go inner-knowledge which can gift our lives to be boundlessly satisfying and meaningful.


Then we can tap the true healing qualities of our mind. While the mind may be what traps us in unhealthy patterns of stress and imbalance, it is also the mind which can free us.
The practice of a Buddhist-style Awareness Meditation uncovers the awakened state of mind. That's what it does. In order to understand what is meant by "awakened", it is necessary to understand what is meant by the opposite of awakened.


The opposite of awake is "asleep". Being asleep refers to the joyless cycle of conflict and hassle which pervades so much of our daily lives. We shuttle between feeling that things are terrific or that things are terrible, and we become wrapped up in continuous anxiety trying to establish some sort of solid ground. This suffering produces fear, anger, frustration and confusion - that blocks and shuts down our true ongoing experience of ourselves. What a loss!


In meditation -- for a little while (in the beginning). In meditation, by seeing, by softening, by giving up and letting go of this habitual knee-jerk struggle, we are able to fully appreciate each "experience" and the exquisite power, the"in-the-moment" richness of what it means to just be alive. With clarified awareness, we no longer see our "experiences" just in marketable terms of what it can get or do for us or how it can hurt us. This grand appreciation is the first glimpse of what it means to be awake.


Meditation is the heart of the practice. Although it starts with specific techniques, Awareness Meditation is ultimately a path of very clear seeing and a wholesomely spontaneous way of being. No spiritual contortions, contrivances or gimmicks. Meditation is a process of slicing through the views, opinions, commentary and judgments which normally cloud our experience of life. No, the intellect or feelings are not rejected -- they are liberated from the bondage of both hope and fear, becoming less confused and more enhanced and vivid to awareness. Meditation is, quite simply, just being in the present moment, clear -- between the "this" & the "that" - Media. Right here in the "middle". The middle of the moment. That's what "meditation" means.


In an Awareness Meditation Class or Retreat, you work with silence, stillness and inquiry, to train the mind to come back again and again to the here and now. Here and Now. Directly experiencing just "what is" - and just what "isn't". The practice of meditation and the goal of meditation are the same: to be Awake.


So, are you sincerely interested in giving up your notions of self-protection, the need to be "right", the need to be in"control"-- and in letting go of out-dated thought patterns, heavy programmed agenda, naive belief systems and confusing attachment-avoidance tendencies -- and taking up a self-perpetuating process by which you can wake yourself up? Then you will be treated to a constantly expanding spacious clarity of life based on non-clinging and non-confusion. You'll know what's what! And you'll be free!


Complete awakening has been achieved by ordinary human beings. Enlightened awakening is not a promise, a heaven, a dream or an idea. It is actually possible to seek out our own liberation and to attain a completely awakened state of mind. Just as sleep belongs to us, is inside us, so a meditatively clear wakefulness is inside us. Wakefulness is happening all the time, and the meditation practice consists of merely training ourselves to become aware of it. That makes sense, doesn't it. Sure it does.


We say "Buddhist-style meditation", not "Buddhist". We are not at all interested in you having a relationship with Buddha (he's dead) or in you becoming a "Buddhist," (you can't, there is no such thing). These meditation approaches are merely human developments in evolving human consciousness over the course of time. We offer no salvation and there is nothing to save.  The LAUGHING BUDDHA SANGHA offers a very eclectic "Inquiry into Self" practice combining the calm observation approach of traditional Vipassana Mindfulness with the crazy wisdom irrationality of Zen Non-Duality which short-circuits the obsessive self-absorbed, self-identified mind.


Newcomers: Beginners very welcome! You will be very patiently guided. Newcomers are asked to please inquire first by phone to see if this group is possibly even for you. This sitting group encourages highly inquisitive, unflappable people with a natural, deep love of    learning who relish the abstract, and even the           absurd - with a genuine taste for the indefinable existential stuff.


Experienced Meditators who are seeking a much deeper questioning into Self - and a de-mystifying, open-minded, caring conversation into Wisdom, Empathy and Spiritual Reality in our Western life-style + some poetry and laughing! Our practice is informed by traditional Theravada Buddha Dharma for clarity of view.

"BUDDHA: The JOYOUS ICONOCLAST" Study Series – offers a much more outside-the-box-Buddhism! Heart filled 'heresy' for a more maverick spirited inner-quest – for nourishing an iconoclast intelligence and compassionate critical thinking with a caring heart thru some refreshing, risky, even radical spiritual considerations of Reality by developing a Dharma informed mind.


http://buddhistcounselingmindfulnesstherapy.blogspot.com/
http://www.artofliving.com/blog/home.php?&a=5




The Laughing Buddha Sangha
From Dhamma Wiki
The Laughing Buddha Sangha:
 Address: 2046 Fourteenth Street Santa Monica CA 90405
 Tradition: Theravada, Sri Lanka Amarapura Nikaya
 Affiliation: Dharma Vijaya Vihara Los Angeles
 Phone: 310 450 2268
 Website: http://buddhistcounselingmindfulnesstherapy.blogspot.com/
 Spiritual Director: Akasa Levi (Phone: 310 450 2268)
 Notes and Events: