Friendliness Training: Finding Equanimity in a Polarized World
with Daron Larson
Saturday, March 28, 2020, from 10am – 4:30pm
Inner Way LA, 6512 Arizona Ave., Playa Vista, CA 90045
Google map and directions
| To register for Friendliness Training with Daron Larson on March 28, 2020 |
No one is ever turned away for lack of funds. Call or text Carol 310-927-1025 for scholarships or volunteer opportunities.
Description
The world feels like a split-screen reality show right now. We’re gravitating toward our tribal impulses in ways that are intensifying our perceptions of what divides us. We’re so focused on our surface-level differences that we’re losing sight of our core similarities.
The good news? You can strengthen your ability to recognize our shared humanity. A felt sense of our shared humanity gets stronger when you exercise it.
This workshop explores some specific obstacles to imagining the well-being of others and uses tools from Shinzen Young’s Unified Mindfulness system to navigate them, with a customizable see-hear-feel approach to loving-kindness practice.
Neuroscience research findings suggest that imagining the well-being of yourself and others develops a greater capacity for emotional regulation, resilience, and altruism.
However, some meditators say they run into a lot of resistance to doing it.
We can use concentration, clarity, and equanimity to convert the resistance we have to imagining the well-being of ourselves and others. When we practice relating to our emotional reactions without trying to force them to be pleasant, we strengthen our capacity for empathy.
Objectives
- Practice a customizable see-hear-feel approach to loving-kindness practice
- Practice clarity and equanimity with emotional reactions to imagining the wellbeing of yourself and others
- Generate personal ways to apply friendliness training to practice in life
- Explore emotional expression and suppression
- Discuss the challenges and potential benefits inherent to the categories of people used in traditional loving-kindness work
Daron Larson
Daron Larson helps people feel more at home in their lives by training their attention. By comparing mindfulness to physical exercise, he helps people develop a sustainable practice.
Stress steered him into a silent meditation retreat in October 2002, and he’s been practicing daily ever since. He continues to be surprised by how many aspects of training the body also apply to training attention.
He has attended retreats led by Shinzen Young regularly since 2003, and has participated in neuroscience research projects at Harvard Medical School and the University of Vermont related to the Unified Mindfulness framework.
Shinzen’s multi-sensory approach to investigating the components of subjectivity with greater objectivity continues to fascinate Daron, providing a rich variety of ways to cross-train attentional skills and cultivate emotional warmth.
He’s discovered – in his own life and the lives of his students – that exercising these capacities can lead to feeling more at home in the messiness of real life.
| To register for Friendliness Training with Daron Larson on March 28, 2020 |
No one is ever turned away for lack of funds. Call or text Carol 310-927-1025 for scholarships or volunteer opportunities.