London Buddhist Centre

Life With Full Attention

A Practical Course in Mindfulness

Eight Wednesdays from Wed 15 Feb | 7.15–9.45pm (in person) 7.45–9.45 (online)| In person or online

The point of life is to live – to live as fully, richly and meaningfully as possible. The point is to really do something with your life, instead of merely scrolling through Instagram, binge-watching Netflix, or rehearsing arguments in your head. Often we don’t realise how much potential we have, how large our life can be. The Buddhist practice of mindfulness is to do with becoming more alive, and with living out our full potential.

This eight-week course, based on Maitreyabandhu’s book Life with Full Attention, is an ideal way to learn mindfulness in a systematic way, in all its breadth and depth:

From a Buddhist – who understands the true significance of mindfulness in its original context.
From an experienced teacher – who has been practicing mindfulness for over 25 years.
As part of a vibrant community – not from an App, a book, or a YouTube clip.
On an eight-week intensive course – that takes the challenges of your life seriously and looks at how to apply the teachings to your experience here and now.

The course covers:

Day-to-day mindfulness – the mindfulness of small, everyday things, and how setting up positive routines can make a real difference.
Awareness of the body.
Awareness of how our experiences feel.
Awareness of our states of mind, the impact that they have, and how we can work with them.
Appreciating art and nature.
Awareness of other people.
Awareness of the true nature of reality.

You’ll be guided in a range of practices to try at home, including different meditations and exercises to help you bring more moments of mindfulness into day-to-day life. We'll send weekly emails with a summary of each session and some home practice.

As part of the course, Maitreyabandhu is hosting two live Q&A sessions where you can bring any questions arising. The first will be held on 16th March, find out more here. The second on 6th April, find out more here.

Maitreyabandhu rarely teaches the course these days, so this is an ideal chance to benefit directly from his many years of experience. Do book your place!

Course outline

As well as meeting online each week for teaching and discussion, the course includes guided meditations and other online resources for you to use at home. This is what we will be covering week by week:

Week 1: Setting up the conditions for metta to arise.

‍We will explore what loving kindness really is (and what it isn’t!), and the positive habits we can create for it to arise in our lives.

Week 2: Start from where you are

We will look at ways of engaging with the practice and explore how to relate to ourselves in with openness, clarity and empathy.

Week 3: Being a friend and awakening joy

We will look at how to bring every-day joy into our lives and how we can respond to our friends with curiosity and appreciation.

Week 4: The heart of the practice and the relative stranger

Most people we encounter are relative strangers to us – in this week we will explore how to meet the world with confidence, letting go off fear, anxiety and judgement.

Week 5: Cultivating courage and dealing with difficult feelings

How we respond to pain and discomfort can either lead us to further suffering or to courage and compassion. In this week we will discover the moments of awareness where we can make a conscious choice for freedom.

Week 6: The metta revolution

Practice of loving-kindness can radically transform our own lives and the world around us in very practical ways. In the final week we will look at the wisdom and poetry contained in the last stage of the practice.

‍

“I've always found the Metta Bhavana harder to engage with than the Mindfulness of Breathing but doing this course was a way of really delving into the richness of the practice and I quickly started to feel the effects, on and off the cushion. I loved the grounding effect of sharing our insights and experience within groups each week. I'm looking forward to doing the course again.”
Colette - Previous course participant

“I did the course in the midst of Covid and all the lockdowns. I was in a difficult place and struggling with lots of unwanted feelings. The course provided me with lots of practical meditative tools for navigating painful states and the course leaders' way of teaching and the wisdom they shared also provided lots of inspiration for what I could become if I practiced metta regularly.
‍
Although I still experience anger and other painful emotions, I now have a solid metta practice to lean on and that provides me with a beacon of light in difficult times.”
Astrid - Previous course participant