Overview
Program structure
Dates, times & location

What was begun in the introductory program will be deepened, expanded upon, and approached from a different angle. We will bring mindfulness more deeply and extensively to each single element of experience. This includes the elements of our bodyscape, such as breathing, hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, posture and other deep body sensations (proprioception), and body-as-a-whole sensations (enteroception); elements of our mindscape, such as emotions, feelings, thoughts and images, mental states and consciousness; and elements of the nowscape, such as change and timelessness, death before we die, and awareness as pure knowing, as we encounter it in choiceless awareness. We explore the processes by which these elements interact and perpetuate suffering in our experience of life. We put particular emphasis on the exploration and development of awareness: How awareness adds a further dimension to our experience of living that is unimaginable without mindfulness; a dimension that deeply changes everything in a radical way while also leaving everything be as it is in its ordinariness; a dimension that reveals what we all yearn to see yet never see, the extraordinariness of the ordinary. We learn to appreciate the freedom awareness bestows on us, and the way awareness releases us from the bondage of duality. Through insight into ignorance, which is the way we obstruct clear view through habitual reflexes, we open the possibility of freedom from suffering.

The work in this program proceeds in the same systematic fashion as in the introductory program. We continue to explore experience and reality as it is, rather than as we wish it to be. However, the discoveries that we can make as we deepen our experience of mindfulness in this program, can be more surprising and for a time disturbing than what we were used to, because they are more deeply counterintuitive. Untrained awareness constructs a permanent and compact view of one’s self and the reality we live in, which mindfulness reveals as illusory. The impermanence and non-substantiality of all that exists is a surprising experience we stumble upon through deep mindfulness, a reality that is fundamentally opposed to everything we thought we knew or have experienced so far. In other words, through the enlightened eye of deep mindfulness reality reveals itself as utterly impermanent and non-substantial as we break through existential defenses that make us forget our transience and mortality on a day-to-day basis.

A whole new set of challenges presents itself to us when we penetrate levels of experience-processing before stable structures, enduring things, concepts or any other tangible entities such as our sense of self emerge. Conventional reality is a product of the dualistic mind that lacks the necessary tools to deal with suffering. When suffering becomes unmanageable, gaps and inconsistencies in the conventional reality we construct become apparent, and we are challenged to explore these gaps. This leads to investigating the nature of our sense of self, which is based on habitual patterns of grasping. We then discover the emptiness of self and of an independently existing world. This discovery brings pain at first, a stage often referred to as nihilism, as we become familiar with a sense of not being able to hold on to anything. Since that, too, requires to be let go, an eventual breakthrough occurs towards the realization that emptiness is the essence of everything. This insight is accompanied by a deep experience of liberation, ultimately the liberation from all suffering. On the way to realizing emptiness as the essence of health, freedom, non-suffering and compassion, we discover the interdependence and interbeing of everything. The task in this program is to intensify the practice of freedom, which will constitute the longest and most difficult part of the mindfulness journey.

Program structure
Overview
Dates, times & location
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