There are many forms of meditation, in the different traditions of Buddhism, and even similar practices from other traditions.

 

Meditation is a training that develops two main aspects:

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• To calm down the mind: be able to concentrate the mind on a single object (samatha).

• To open the mind to everything that is happening inside and outside ourselves, moment by moment, which is also called mindfulness, or vipassana.

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To meditate is to train to develop both aspects, which are complementary, through different exercises. Each of us has specific mental and physical habits, more or less aptitude for one or the other of these two aspects. The different exercises allow us to overcome these habits, to develop our capacities that are less developed and to reinforce the others.

 

Meditation has been widely developed in the West for a few decades, and nowadays it has pervaded almost every sector of the society: personal development of course, but also workplace, medical practice, health, the police, prisons etc. The development of the mindfulness movement led to many therapy programs and scientific studies that show positive effects of mindfulness meditation on depression and anxiety, stress, quality of sleep, drug addiction, emotions, cognitive impairment, blood pressure etc. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness)

 

For us, meditation is a way to be aware of how we function, how the human mind and the human body, that we all share, function, and how we can transform this. We have been using this mind and this body since we were born, but we were never given the user’s manual. We use them, but mostly we only have a very faint idea (or even often false ideas) about how it works: what makes us sometimes happy and full of energy, and sometimes so depressed and exhausted.

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Meditation allows us to discover all this wonderful machinery, and how to use it for the well-being of ourselves and the world. How, whatever happens to us, we can find this peace, well-being, confidence, that allow us to be open and loving towards ourselves and others, and contribute to the global peace and harmony.

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Viewing this on a larger scale includes taking care of the mind and the body (and the world around us), by all means available to us. And all traditions from different countries and continents have developed many techniques that can be used to achieve this goal. That is what we would like to share with all the people visiting and participating in our activities.

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