Amita Schmidt is a licensed clinical social worker with a focus on trauma and meditation. She was the resident teacher at Insight Meditation Society from 2000-2006. She is the author of "Dipa Ma: The Life and Legacy of a Buddhist Master." She also has practiced with Adyashanti, a teacher of non-dual awareness.
This talk offers some basic tools and reflections to help meditation students with Depression and Anxiety. You will learn to recognize the optical illusions of mind, label distorted thinking patterns, and unblend from difficult mindstates.
If you have incessant or debilitating doubts here are a few strategies, including how to see/work with it as a part, and help update this part. Also includes a brief description about what Dipa Ma did for students.
It's important to have an orienting principle for Artificial Intelligence or AI. This talk will help you find an orienting principle, as well as give you tools and practices to use during times of great change.
The no self strategy of the Buddha is a tool for awakening. This talk includes a reflection on the 5 aggregates (5 characteristics that create the illusion of a self), as well as some daily micro practices/reflections to decrease the attachment to a separate self.
This talk explains the difference between horizontal verses vertical dharma practice. The talk also explores "The Four Reflections," or lojong teachings to inspire your sitting and daily life practice. These include reflections on precious human birth, impermanence/death, suffering, and karma.
A unique vertical, guided meditation for dropping below your thinking, to the body breathing, and then to awareness itself. This meditation is unique in that it doesn't try to stop thinking, but includes it as part of a vertical awareness of your whole being, here now.
Questions and Answers: 1)Why meditation can make your memory worse.
2) Why does practice create sadness sometimes? 3) Dementia and true nature. 4) Some reflections on chronic illness
Thinking itself is actually just a part, a protector part, and this meditation will help you have compassion for this part. The meditation will also give you insight into your thinking and what it's true purpose is. Knowing this will help you on the meditation cushion and in your daily life practice.
Instead of trying to bring mindfulness to emotions from the inside out, this meditation will help you develop awareness of the calm outside of emotions (eg. the outside of the storm). Some people have found this tool to be very useful in decreasing anxiety, overwhelm, and fear.
