MEDITATION COURSES

MEDITATION COURSES

Live or online meditation courses can be useful means to learn the skills required to practice meditation. They can offer support for starting or further developing a daily meditation practice. SIM offers a beginning meditation course that is very popular and has graduated over 700 meditators in 9 years. The course consists of weekly evening sessions for 6 weeks and a daylong meditation retreat. Over the course, each of the 4 foundations of mindfulness are introduced and practiced with successively. During each class there is an opportunity for group meditation practice, a question and answer session, a lecture of the week‟s topic, and an introduction to the daily meditation practice homework. A course syllabus is provided and the course instructors share their meditation experiences in a frank and helpful way. Lovingkindness (metta) meditation and practice supports such as the 5 precepts are introduced as well. Most find the daylong retreat to be particularly valuable. Many students have found the SIM introduction to meditation course to be worthwhile and some, including the author, have taken the course multiple times. In addition to taking a meditation course in person, there are increasing opportunities to learn meditation through online meditation courses. This form of practice allows the student to have support for beginning a meditation practice from the convenience of their own home and on their own schedule. Online courses offer the student a correspondence with an experienced meditation instructor or an option to “audit” the course by following the didactic materials and practicing meditation on one‟s own. See “Online/Correspondence Courses,” page 117 for a list of courses.