Meditation for Life
experiential groups
To establish, re-establish and
deepen your meditation practice
Mondays 6 - 7:30 PM
This group will focus on developing and deepening your meditation practice.
There will be teachings concerning meditation and its applications to life challenges,
guided meditation in which you practice specific tools and techniques of inner work, and
discussion and q&a related to the experiences. We will focus on the practical and
experiential and not delve much into theoretical and metaphysical discussions.
The focus will be on learning through the experiences in the group sessions and
studying how the practice works at home. Participants are expected to make a
commitment to themselves to apply the teachings during the course. We will look into
the physical and psychological roots of resistance to maintaining your practice and learn
approaches to moving through them.
Some key elements of the course:
- Establishing clear intentions: Understanding and acknowledging what
moves and motivates you to meditate. Many people have a sense that they
want or need to meditate, but donʼt have a clear idea of what they are
seeking. Often, the intentions change in the process of learning and
practicing. Whether it is to feel less stressed or to experience union with the
divine, having clear and strong intentions energizes the process.
- Choosing a place and time. This is often a great obstacle and needs to
be addressed with clarity. Depending on your daily schedule and your work
and home environment, there are a number of practical guidelines that we will
explore for supporting your intention to practice meditation.
- Sangha is the term used to describe a community of like-minded
seekers. Our group will be a seed for developing this kind of support system
for your spiritual practice.
- Navigating in consciousness. Once you begin the process of closing
off the external stimuli and focus of attention and turn inward, you will begin a
journey of encountering an inner landscape that rises in your experience.
Navigating involves learning to move inside and employ the different aspects
of awareness available to us in finding our way; sensory, emotional, mental
and imagistic.
- There are many different forms of meditation and tools and techniques
available to us. We will explore a number of methods, helping you to find
what is best for you at this time in your life.
- Meditation is meant to benefit your life, to have a positive effect on your
daily experience. You will be encouraged to pay attention to how it is helping
to change your mind, your reactivity, your patterns of perceiving the world,
your behavior.
- It is not easy to maintain a meditation practice. Everyone experiences
resistance. After 40 years of practice and teaching, I know it firsthand.
Meditation teaches us to not avoid resistance, but grow from the experience.
Cost for attendance at one session is $15. If you plan to continue to attend, you can pay $40 for four sessions, regardless of whether you attend in any frequency or any month. Further, if the above fee schedule is not affordable, I don't want anyone who wants to attend to not be able to because of financial reasons.
Alan Levin, M.A., LMFT, is a licensed psychotherapist in Nyack, NY and has been
teaching meditation and other spiritual disciplines for over 35 year.
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