The Five Fundamental Understandings

Focus, observation, and balance are the three foundational skills in this training. They compliment each other, like the three legs of a stool.

In plain language with clear instruction, you will understand what each of these skills are, what benefits they provide, and how you can develop them.

You will learn there is nothing mystical or magical about these skills. They are straightforward and trainable with simple meditation techniques. Just like lifting weights will help you build muscles, practicing these skills will help them develop.

Sitting down to practice meditation is like showing up at the gym. It’s the place where you develop your technique and improve your skills. Through this training you will design your practice, build it, strengthen it, and take control of it so you can grow it in a way that works for you.

We will work through:

• Building up a daily practice from 5 - 30 minutes.

The primary benefit of this training course is to help you successfully develop a consistent practice. If you already have a practice, then we will be expanding and deepening.

• Integrating short practices throughout your day.

We help you break the boundary between ‘normal life’ and ‘meditation’. Learn to recognize moments throughout your day as opportunities to integrate practice and further develop your skills.

We give a simple but broad definition of the purpose of this practice:

To recognize and improve the quality of your attention.

Regardless of who we are, where we are, or what we are doing, our base level attention determines how we experience the world.  When we understand how to recognize and improve the quality of our attention we gain a key to unlocking a different way of experiencing life.

By gaining the ability to recognize and improve the quality of our attention, we have the potential to transform how we experience our lives.

You may already have some idea of how the quality of attention impacts your life. Throughout the course we will expand on this and open up some of the greater implications for how we use our attention and the way we look at our experiences.

The benefits we experience through meditation are unique to each of us. They are dependent on our background, context, and the level of skills we develop. Common benefits people experience are:

• Increased ability to focus for longer periods of time.
• More relaxed states of mind.
• Less affected by uncertainty and stress.
• Less affected by distractions and challenges.
• Increased capacity for empathy and compassion for others.
• Less energy spent reacting and suffering from reactions to negative experiences.

For some people these benefits may be experienced as profound changes that help them overcome challenges that have been affecting them for their whole lives.

For some people these benefits may be experienced as small incremental improvements that make life just that little bit better and easier.

For some these small benefits may add up over time to dramatically shift their ideas of who they are and what they can accomplish in the world.

Through practice you will develop your own sense of how these skills benefit your life and how to guide your practice to maximize those benefits.

Why is meditation getting so popular all of a sudden? Is there a difference between meditation and mindfulness? Where did all these ideas and practices actually come from? How did they develop? Are they spiritual? Religious? Scientific? How do I make sense of all the meditation, mindfulness teachers, books, apps and courses?

There are lifetimes of knowledge to navigate to understand the full context of meditation, where it came from, how it has developed, how it fits into our modern world and what impact it can have.

Through this training course, you’ll build your understanding of meditation through experience so you can navigate your own learning journey. Think of it as developing your internal compass.