(1 credit) Insight Dialogue is an interpersonal meditation practice that brings together meditative awareness, the wisdom teachings of the Buddha, and relationship. It is a contemporary practice with the same purposes and traditional roots as silent meditation: developing mindfulness, compassion and liberating insight, while investigating present moment experience.
The six guidelines at the core of the practice help establish the meditative qualities of the mind and to sustain these qualities while participants reflect on topics that encourage a direct and intimate inquiry into the human experience. In this way, relational contact and meditative qualities of the mind help bring root wisdom teachings into lived experience, here and now. The foundational elements of Buddhist paths to liberation include morality, tranquility, and wisdom; in Insight Dialogue these support relationships of mutuality as instrumental to the spiritual path, particularly in cultivating loving-kindness, right speech, right action, concentration, and insight. The Buddha’s teachings praising Spiritual Friendships and relational practice are also antidotes to overemphasis upon the individualistic forms of practice in dominant cultures of modernity and opportunity to awaken together.
Although Insight Dialogue is grounded in the Buddha’s early teachings (Pāli Canon) and the practice of Insight or Vipassanā meditation, people of all faiths and backgrounds are welcome and find benefit in the practice. This course will offer Buddhist texts and teachings from multiple traditions, including the Pali, Sanskrit, and Tibetan Buddhist sources, in guided, interpersonal dialogue-based meditation practices.
