Wednesday Night Talks - Livestream

Over four Wednesday nights Patrick will explore the project of insight meditation as understood and practised in the lineage of Mahāsi Sayādaw. The teaching that animates our practice originates in ancient India, while the practice itself comes to us from a very different culture with its own assumptions and ways of communicating. These talks represent an attempt to understand mindfulness meditation and the insight that emerges from it in terms of our own time and culture. The talks are experimental and tentative, and far from a finished project.

Please register to receive the Zoom link to the live talks and access to the recordings

A synopsis of subsequent talks will be sent out at the start of each week.

There is no charge to register but donations are greatly appreciated

Talk 04: Awareness of Insight (Wednesday 21 February) 

In our practice we move from this perception of this or that experience changing; from this or that experience being painful; from this or that experience appearing selfless; to the universal characteristics of impermanence, pain and not-self. How does this happen? One direction to explore concerns the nature of awareness, the fact that awareness cannot be confined to simply being aware of this or that event. Awareness opens to awareness itself, and it is in the expansion of awareness that insight emerges. Tonight we will explore this aspect of the arising of insight.

Talk 03: The World of Insight (Wednesday 14 February) 

Talk 02: Seeing and Understanding (Wednesday 7 February) 

Insight is characterised by universality. “Noting,” or directly awareing this-now, is characterised by particularity. The movement from the particular to the universal is the movement from mindfulness practice as a discipline to insight or understanding. Tonight we will explore this movement using the Buddha’s template of dependent arising (paṭiccasamuppāda). How can we recognise the universal through the lens of the particular, the unique, the individual? We begin with the Buddha’s understanding of the structures of experience itself and see where that takes us.

Talk 01: Practising for Insight (Wednesday 31 January) 

In this talk we look at the basics of Mahāsi Sayādaw’s way of “insight meditation.” What are we doing when we take up the practice? And why are we structuring our practice in the way we do? Mindfulness practice is meant to bring us to “insight.” What does this even mean? And how does the practice we are doing move us along the insight trajectory?