Programs

Joy of Living

The Joy of Living retreats provide a course of meditation training for people of all faiths and backgrounds.

The program contains three levels:

• Calming the Mind: The Practice of Awareness Meditation
• Opening the Heart: Cultivating Love and Compassion
• Awakening Wisdom: Opening the Eye of Wisdom

Level I: Calming the Mind
In the first level of the Joy of Living, Mingyur Rinpoche teaches how awareness meditation can be used to create a peaceful mind and joyful heart. Awareness meditation allows us to use any situation or experience, even difficult emotions and physical pain, as a gateway to inner peace.

In this retreat, you will learn:

• How to rest in open awareness, a state of spacious and alert presence
• How to cultivate focused awareness by using visual objects, sounds, tastes, and other sense objects as a support for meditation
• How to transform physical pain, difficult emotions, and destructive thought patterns using the practice of awareness meditation
• How to deal with distractions and obstacles in meditation, such as excessive thought activity, sleepiness, and discouragement
• How to start a daily meditation practice, including the correct meditation posture and the ideal length of a meditation session

Level II: Opening the Heart
In the second level of the Joy of Living, Mingyur Rinpoche teaches how meditating on love, compassion, joy and equanimity can open our hearts to the world around us and decrease the self-fixation that lies at the root of suffering.

In this retreat, you will learn:

• How our tendency to fixate on our own wellbeing creates anxiety and suffering
• How positive mental states like love and compassion erode the causes of dissatisfaction
• How these positive mental states can be cultivated through meditation
• How ordinary experiences, and even “negative” factors like difficult emotions and physical pain, can be transformed into sources of empathy and compassion using the practice of meditation

Level III: Awakening Wisdom

In the third level of the Joy of Living, Mingyur Rinpoche offers guidance on the practice of insight meditation, a profound form of meditation that uproots the causes of anxiety and suffering.

In this retreat, you will learn:

• How to use insight meditation to break through the distorted ideas that create confusion and suffering
• How to see beyond superficial thoughts and emotions to the basic goodness that lies within
• How our rigid beliefs about ourselves and the world around us keep us locked in a cycle of dissatisfaction and anxiety
• How to see things as they actually are, rather than the mistaken version of reality that we project onto the world