Finding Tools that Awaken our Good Hearts:
The Six Paramitas
Meditators! Join (Rev.) Andrew Blake for this powerful 10 week study series to strengthen your your meditation practice and integrate the profound impacts of mindfulness with your daily life.
Practicing Dharma is a path of discovering wisdom and compassion or transformative actions. To get there we sit and meditate weekly together.
Meditation practice is built on a foundation of skillful methods of insight, and feeds the development of compassion as the means to meet suffering and transform our life into meaning and joy.
Buddha first taught about this path through the teachings on Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. As a community in this fall series, we will look more closely at how we actualize our compassionate heart, or the Bodhisattva’s intentions, by reflecting on the Six Paramitas. In particular, we will touch into the roots of attachment and embrace the means to transform our suffering into freedom from unhealthy patterns.
While the Six Paramitas or Perfections—generosity, ethical discipline, patience, joyful endeavors, meditative concentration, and wisdom awareness—reflect over-arching principles or approaches within our lives, they also express skillful methods that transform our character and our way of approaching the world at large. Our Tuesday Night Meditation series is made of up of those new to practice, alongside many long-time students of Buddhism; together as a sangha, we find a hopeful vision of how to be better humans together.
Please note this series is aimed to support current meditation practitioners. If you are new to the practice of meditation please contact us before registration.
Tuesdays,
October 6 – December 8
7 – 9 pm
Via Zoom
Fee Structure:
We want to accommodate all who have clear intention to join to do so. Our Fee structure has 2 options:
full $200, base $150 *
*Please pay the highest fee you can, to allow others who need to pay less the ability to do so. No one will be turned away due to funds. Please contact us if you need further support.
(Rev.) Andrew Blake, Co-Founder, RP
Andrew is the Director of Program Development at Sarana Institute and along with his wife, Angie, is a co-founder. In 2010, Andrew was ordained as Buddhist Chaplain by Roshi Joan Halifax, a leader in the fields of compassion, caregiving and end-of-life. His thesis, Mindful Listening at End-of-Life, was recently published and explores the roles of mindfulness, empathy and compassion, from both neuroscience and Buddhist psychology perspectives, as skills to prevent caregiver “empathy fatigue.”
A teacher and educator of mindfulness meditation, Buddhism, End-of-Life caregiving, and his Mindful Listening work, Andrew has created training and curriculums at University of Toronto through the Applied Mindfulness Mediation Program, at Sick Kids Hospital through The Mindfulness Project, at Hincks Dellcrest Centre, as well as numerous conferences, hospitals, hospices and organizations involved in service, healthcare, end-of-life care, volunteer caregiving. In addition to his teaching, he guides individual and families at end of life and serves as an officiant at memorials and funerals. www.andrewblake.ca