Introduction to Calm Abiding Meditation Course

• 10-week course in Calm-Abiding (Shamatha) Meditation
• Wednesday evenings, 6:30-8:00 PM, September 25 to December 4 (skip one week October 16)
• At Center Space, in St Andrews Center, 1918 Union Avenue, Chattanooga TN 37405
• IN-PERSON and ONLINE 
• Tuition $95 + $25 book purchase with postage included is also required
• NOTE: partial and full scholarships for tuition are available if needed – please email contact@paramitacentersoutheast.org

Would you like to find more peace and well-being in your life? Join us to learn Calm-Abiding (Concentration) Meditation in a 10-week course, in-person and online. Find calm in an uncalm world.

It is well known that the primary purpose of the Buddha’s teaching is to end suffering and attain the happiness of enlightenment by practicing two forms of meditation: concentration meditation and analytical meditation. The first aims at achieving calm-abiding (shamatha), while the second aims to gaining special insight (vipashyana). In our current times, perhaps more than ever, meditation can be a path to calming the mind and lessening afflictive emotions; a way to finding calm in an uncalm world.

The class is meant for beginners as well as for more advanced meditators. Our groups are often made up of first-time meditators, but there are many who have already practiced meditation and are seeking another method or who wish to learn in a different tradition, or who wish to return to basics to re-examine their practice from a “beginners-mind” perspective. We teach from the perspective of the Tibetan Buddhist Gelug lineage – the lineage of the Dalai Lama. However, it is not necessary to be a Buddhist and the teachings are applicable in any path.

Over the 10 weeks of the course, we will first explore the origins of the Buddhist teachings on meditation, the advantages of calm-abiding and special insight, and preparing our minds for hearing the teachings. We will train in the preliminaries – how to prepare a space for meditation and how to develop the motivation for practice – and the conditions for developing calm-abiding and deep mental focus. Then the main focus will be to explore in depth the path to attaining calm-abiding by understanding the obstacles to calm-abiding and the antidotes to those obstacles, and in so doing to progress along the 9 stages to calm-abiding. 

Classes will be a combination of teachings, discussion with question and answer, and practice. As is typical of our tradition, initial practice will be more brief, extending over the duration of the class. Classes will be available in-person and online. Also, classes will be recorded so you can have access if you must miss a class. The course is lead by Les Kertay (Lobsang Tharchin).