We contextualize our conditioning in relationship to the different “parts” of our experience—related to our thinking, emotions, and body—by examining some the social and cultural history of the last few hundred years, in which thinking has been increasingly differentiated from emotions and the body. We then examine further the nature of our ordinary, habitual experience of the body. The main focus is on a number of “body practices,” including mindfulness of the body in both formal meditation and daily life, ways to self-regulate when there is high activation, using the body in investigation of experience, and the body as a key to presence in speech and interaction.

This talk celebrates the revealing of mystery through this practice.

Insight Meditation, also known as Vipassana Meditation, is the 2,600-year-old practice of cultivating wise presence by bringing a caring, curious, and discerning attention to what is happening moment-to-moment. Conditioned to go after what we want and avoid what we don’t want, we often act from habit and reactivity instead of our deeper held values and beliefs. With mindful presence, we can learn to cut through habitual reactivity and access innate states of well-being, creativity, courage, and liberating personal and collective insight.