EXPLORING THE METTA BHAVANA | A COURSE IN EMOTIONAL STRENGTH

(online or face-to-face)

We find ourselves living in an era marked by increasing uncertainty and challenges. Faced with global events, it is all too easy to succumb to anxiety or overwhelm. What we truly need is to consolidate, strengthen, and cultivate our capacity to respond in a creative rather than reactive manner, with compassion rather than moral indignation, and with courage rather than timidity. What the world needs is people with strong positive emotion, not sentimentality but genuine positive emotion.

Buddhism has always known this, it’s always seen transforming our emotional life as a key working ground if we want to change. To make a meaningful difference, we need to start by improving our relationship with ourselves. We need to become more optimistic, emotionally positive, and healthy if we are to effectively help those around us.

• Who is the course for?
  The course is suitable for  anyone interested in Meditation or Buddhism, for new people or those who have a regular practice. The course was created to support anyone who wants to live their life with greater possitivity and meaning.
• What you will do on the course?
  On this six week course, devised and led by Jnanavaca – one of the London Buddhist Center’s (Triratna’s main London centre) senior-most teachers – you’ll learn to cultivate emotional strength. And not in a theoretical way, but as an actual practice. The course aims to help you work with the Metta Bhavana practice intelligently and subtly so that it yields results for your sense of yourself and for your relationship with colleagues, friends, family and others. At each class, we will introduce the aspect of the Metta Bhavana you’ll be putting into practice over the following week, and you’ll get together with a small group of course participants each week to report back about how that’s gone. This course is largely meditation based.

What is the structure of the course?

• Week 1: Forget what we know. Learning how to cultivate beginners mind.
• Week 2: Staying with sensations. Learning how to tune-in to the body and notice a whole world of feeling and sensations. This is the doorway into practice.
• Week 3: Facing difficult emotions. As we become more aware of the body, we start to become more aware of the mind. It is our states of mind that make life interesting or boring, enjoyable, meaningful or futile. Understanding our mind, cultivating our mind, is therefore the key to happiness.’ In order to do this we need to learn how to be receptive to deeper experience.
• Week 4: Activating loving kindness. Once we learn the art of receptivity we can more effectively cultivate loving kindness, we can bring it to bear consciously in our experience, to parts of our inner world.
• Week 5: Discover a more subtle experience. Meditation is in itself another world. As we deepen into practice on the course we see that the quality of metta or loving kindness has many different facets which help deepen our inner life.
• Week 6: Surrendering to something bigger. The Metta Bhavana practice presents us with a radical vision, a life based on a courageous possitivity.

Course resources

Each week you will be supported by teachings, group discussion, and weekly emails with videos and guided meditations.

What we’ll be asking from you

• Come every week – whether you feel like it or not. Mostly you only want to do something when you’re actually doing it.
• Come early – so that you are ontime and we are not holding up other people waiting for you.
• If are going to miss a class – email so we know and can let others know. And do come back the following week, come back and start again.
• Do your ‘home practice’ every day – then each week you’ll be in a small group to check in about how that went.

The course will be led by Sugarbha and Dhiyampati, experienced members of the Triratna Buddhist Order based in Barcelona.

Price: 70€

*note on our pricing*

Place: Centro Budista Triratna de Barcelona or online using Zoom

Dates: Each Tuesday night for 6 weeks starting on the 7th of May

Times: 19:30 to 21:30 CET