North Bay Sangha
Smiling Awareness Meditation
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Classes and Workshops

These programs are ideal for beginners or experienced meditators seeking to deepen their practice. This approach to mental development easily cultivates agile awareness along with uplifted relaxed moods and mental composure. Sessions are results oriented. They and balance equal part information, instruction, and group practice. The content is based on the earliest known Buddhist texts and presented in easy to understand terminology. This approach accelerates leaning and is highly effective. Sessions are progressive with each building on the previous. 

Instruction places emphasis is on developing ease and lightness with wholesome — healthy feeling-tones in balance with relaxed-awarenes. As wholesome awareness becomes steady, urgency and anxiety melt away. Composure. and contentment become home base in each mind moment. With modest practice, an inter-happiness becomes a dominant state of mind and body. Gradually, there is less reliance on external sources for stimulation. Meditative experience smoothly evolves into a sustainable and rewarding pleasure accompanied by a clear-bright mind and uplifted attitude. Smiling awareness is portable: once learned it can be practiced anywhere and with any lifestyle.
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The Core Practice

Smiling awareness meditation classes guides beginners and experienced meditators to cultivate skill sets that engage four primary guiding principles of meditation:
1. Recognize the presence of an unharmonious feeling, mood or state of mind
2. Let go mentally and physically of an unharmonious, feeling, mood or states of mind
3. Invite and awaken a new-harmonious feeling, mood or state of mind
​4. Fully experience the harmoniousness feeling as long as possible

Learn and Experience Smiling Awareness
Classes guide beginners and experienced meditators to cultivate skill sets that engage four primary guiding principles of meditation that lead to sustained contentment and awakening wisdom.

These meditative principles originate with the earliest forms of Raja yoga and original Buddhist mindfulness practises. They are easy to learned using a method that is consise and immediatly effective. This approach to mental development evenly cultivates heightened awareness balanced with tranquility and relaxed physical comfort. Distractions and negative moods dissolve and naturally replaced with uplifted mood tones and clear thoughts. 
 
In broad terms, this practice deconditions habitual stress reactions such as anxiety, fear, and worry. it restores composed awareness that helps us see how we unconsciously react to situations. We learn to consciously let go of dark moods and thought loops without getting caught up in them. Conflicted thoughts and moods gradually melt away in favor of responsiveness and harmonious-balance. It’s like learning to change mental channels to conscious selective responses. With practice, we consciously reset our neuropahtways in brain and body to optional clarity that results if grater contentment. 

This practice is ideal for beginners and helpful to experienced meditators stalled in their current practice. Sustained practice in tranquil awareness mediation leads to deepening wisdom with experience in jhana or dhyāna and Samadhi.
Benefits
  • Experience how your attention gets high jacked by habitual negative feelings, moods, and mental states
  • Recognize and decondition the root causes of anxiety, stress, worry, anger and addictions.
  • Learn to use a mindful response rather then to react to compulsions and emotional urges.
  • Cultivate the essential building blocks that transform toxic emotions to contentment and ease.
  • Develop selective thinking to rebalance and relax with a fluid responsive awareness and clear communication
  • Enjoy rewarding and sustainable meditative exercises that improve quality of life for busy people with active life-styles.
Sessions / Classes

​Session 1
  
Learn to create a meditative home base of ease and tranquility. Learn how "feeling good in mind and body" makes meditation fun and interesting. Learn how meditation states produce positive personality traits. Experience contentment by applying an uplifted wholesome feeling after disengaging from compulsive urges.
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Session 2  
Learn to enjoy meditation. Learn how a small smile relieves stress while promoting mental ease and physical comfort. Learn how to engage moment -to-moment awareness and let go and disengage mental activity in four stages: 1. Settling, 2. Steadying, 3. Composing, 4. Stilling.
 
Session 3  
Learn why recurring distractions are your best teachers. By recognizing toxic feeling and painful thoughts, we learn where and when to disentangle from them as they occur by actively letting go. Learn how disengagement, relaxation, and a little smile results in relief and ease.

Session  4
Learn the basics of how to influence the bodily nervous system and neurology for greater happiness. Learn about flight or fight and other central nervous system impulses and how the parasympathetic system activates rebalancing. Learn how to quickly recognize and dissolve the unconscious nervous reactive and how to consciously respond.
 
Session 5 
Learn build seven universal wholesome and harmonious qualities. Practice to grow them for extended periods of deep contentment and comfort. Learn to and balance mental and physical qualities will having fun doing it.

5 Week Series

The 5-week introductory class series teaches a specific focus on  understanding what to do and how to do it combined with skill development through practice. Together they rapidly cultivate rich and rewarding meditative experiences to enhance daily life.  

The series is ideal for beginners or experienced meditators who wish to deepen their practice. Smiling awareness meditation is based on the original meditation instructions taught by the Buddha and rarely practiced in the world today.

This practice cultivates agile awareness along with uplifted relaxed moods and overall well-being. With greater clarity, beginners quickly experience the stages of mediation—insights and bases of self-knowledge.  Smiling awareness interesting to learn, fun to do and is immediately effective.​

Mill Valley
Tuesdays, 7:00 - 8:30 PM, by donation
​5-week Series, Starts Tuesday, April 21
​
45 Camino Alto
#204 (​Echo Rock Neurotherapy)
Mill Valley CA 94941
Above Starbucks next to Safeway
Call or text 415.250.5294

San Rafael
Monday 7:00 - 8:30 PM, by donation
​4-week Series, Starts Monday, June 1

OpenEye Mindful Space | 875 4th Street | San Rafael CA | 94901 | www.openeyemeditationgroup.org
Questions? Call or text 415.250.5294
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Hawaii 
March 2020
Near Pahoa Hawaii,

Call or text for time and dates: 415.250.5294
Picture
  Call or text 415.250.5294
​   if you have any 
questions.   
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   See my bio >>

tranquil_awareness_medative_training.pdf
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Learn meditation training  that is interesting and enjoyable understand and practice:
  • Classes blend information and detailed instructions along with short practice sessions.
  • Provides relief from habitual anxiety, distress, and toxic thoughts.
  • Acquire practical skills and knowledge that result in positive change with increased happiness, tranquility, and heightened awareness.
  • The hour and one half classes focus on developing an expanded capacity by refining meditative techniques and skills. 
  • Daylong workshops include four one and and one half hour classes with a twenty minute morning and afternoon break and a one hour lunch break.

These trainings broaden analytical understanding of exactly how we inadvertently and unknowingly create anxiety, aversion, addiction, stress, regret, sadness that result in unhappiness. 

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