Tag: insight

Meditation Workshop: Liberating Feeling

~ A full-day Dharma Deep Dive ~

Event details

9:00 – 5:00 pm AEDT (Sydney time)
Sunday 5 July 2026
Online via Zoom

Description

After some time in dedicated practice, you’ve seen first-hand that formal meditation and the content of your life cannot be cleanly separated. You sit and realise how dysregulated you are. Or you find yourself still stuck after many silent retreats — the practice hasn’t yet integrated into life. The general instructions — follow your breath, return to the body — don’t quite bridge the gap to the rich and complex specifics of your thoughts and feelings.

To find this integration, you can work directly with feeling as the nexus of life and meditation. There are two primary practices for working with feeling: contacting and being with, and seeing through with insight. In contacting, you offer loving attunement to all parts of yourself. In insight practice, you see feeling as impermanent, flowing energy. Each opens space for the other to deepen.

By practising feeling in different ways, the felt experience of meditation and the felt experience of daily life begin to integrate. Emotions and felt senses become the practice itself as you move toward being fully free and fully feeling.

The foundation of the workshop is awareness of the body — grounding, attuning to felt senses, and creating space to hold the complexity of feeling in awareness. To work with emotions and patterns of mind, we’ll use parts work, drawing on Aletheia and Internal Family Systems. You’ll learn to recognise parts, disidentify from these patterns, and acknowledge their good intentions. Through offering yourself a kind, loving presence, these patterns soften and relax.

Once emotions are allowed to be present, we use insight meditation to open to emptiness and experience emotion as energy, allowing the experience to transform. Contacting and insight deepen each other, like two strands of practice that need each other to spiral open.

About this format

This workshop is taught through embodied experience: guided meditations that point out key insights, supported by talks, Q&A, grounding movement and breathwork, and group exercises.

You are asked to participate by engaging in the practice for first-hand, direct experience. You are also asked to bring your questions and practice experiences to group activities and to listen generously as part of the community.

The event is structured as a full day to provide the opportunity for deep focus, while you temporarily put aside other concerns.

Please attend for the whole day. It can be highly beneficial to be in silence for the day, and especially to minimise technology usage. However, full silence is not a requirement. We encourage you to do what you can to create a supportive environment for your practice.

This is an online event. You will need a device with Zoom installed. Please ensure you have a stable internet connection.

This workshop is suitable for practitioners with some experience of meditation. This work can open up some challenging territory — please consider your own situation in terms of feeling grounded and stable.

Meditation Workshop: Exploring Imaginal Practice

~ A full-day Dharma Deep Dive ~

Event details

9:00 – 5:00 pm AEDT (Sydney time)
Sunday 3 May 2026
Online via Zoom

Description

Why does practice come alive for some people and not for others? Often this has to do with the sense of the path itself. When practice is alive and full of fire, there is a rich sense of the possibility and vision of the teachings, and a sense of the capability of the practitioner. This is the guiding image of practice that can be sensed into, played with, and reignited through imaginal practice.

This workshop will open up possibilities of Imaginal Meditation Practice. More than just imagination or visualisation, this is the exploration of how images (seen, felt, heard, and known in the mind) arise in meditation. When we move towards images rather than passing them off as distractions, spontaneous experiences of meaning and depth arise. Opening to the imaginal also opens to resource and creativity, even becoming a source for novel ideas and drawing connections that can be taken into art, work, and relationships.

We begin our exploration by tuning into the felt sense of the body and then bringing in different images of the body that can shift perception. Sitting as a mountain brings grounding and stabilising, seeing the body as filled with light is often energising, or seeing all experiences as waves in an ocean of awareness opens up spaciousness. Practising with images reveals that experience is more fluid and constructed than we tend to assume. This also makes Imaginal Practice a way to open up insight and to understand emptiness.

The power of images comes from embodied experience — a kind of poetic perception. They reveal more than just the physical world or the mind, opening to unexpected resonance. These practices draw from the work of Rob Burbea, who taught extensively on extending insight meditation into other dimensions of experience to open more freedom and meaningfulness.

About this format

This workshop curriculum will be taught through a method of embodied experience delivered through guided meditations that point out key insights, supported by talks, Q&A, and group discussion. The day will include grounding, breathwork, and anchoring practices to support your exploration.

You are asked to participate by engaging in the practice during the session so that you get first-hand experience. You are also asked to bring your questions and practice experiences to the whole group and to your practice pod, as well as to listen generously as part of the community.

The event is structured as a full day to provide the opportunity for deep focus, while you temporarily put aside other concerns.

Please attend for the whole day. It can be highly beneficial to be in silence for the day, and especially to minimise technology usage. However, you are not required to be in full silence. We encourage you to do what you can to create a supportive environment for your practice.

This is an online event. You will need a device with Zoom installed. Please ensure you have a consistent internet connection.

A background meditation practice is recommended. You do not need prior experience with imaginal practices or a strong capacity for detailed visual imagination. This workshop is geared primarily towards practitioners with an established practice, but open to those who sense possibility here. This work can open unexpected territory — please consider your own situation in terms of feeling grounded and stable. After registration you will receive further information and resources.

Finding a Path Forward

I’m sitting on the beige, scratchy carpet in the spare room of my unit in Maylands, a quaint-yet-growing suburb of Boorloo (Perth). I’m trying to meditate and have a growing sense of failure. I gaze at the light slowly crawling across the carpet. Restless and bored, I get up and do something else. Maybe meditation just isn’t for me.

Much earlier, I’m sitting on another carpet. This time I’m young, maybe nine years old, and Dad has offered to teach me to meditate. I’m thrilled, it’s all so mysterious to me. What happens when Dad goes off and sits quietly in the evenings? It could be anything! We sit on the floor in the front room of the house with the lights dim. Dad guides me to notice the sensations of my breath. I picture it like I’m watching an animation: breath coming into my body like flowing coloured lines moving through my nose, filling my lungs, then releasing on the exhale to rejoin the atmosphere. I enjoy the feeling of being calm, but I get sleepy straight away. I also feel like I’m somehow doing it wrong —  I’m picturing something but it feels like I’m making it up, using my highly active imagination instead of doing it “properly.” Is this what meditation is meant to be? In the ensuing years I only meditate when in bed as something to do while waiting for my mind to drift off. I don’t recall us sitting together again.

I’m in a chair gazing over a busy Sydney street on a cloudy weekday afternoon. The recent move has been challenging and I’m in the middle of a spell of depression and anxiety. I can’t seem to break out of feeling this way through my usual methods and I’m starting to feel desperate. I come across a book: “The Mindful Way Through Depression.” While it sounds like it’s just what I need, I’m short of spoons and can’t summon the energy to get further than the title. Instead I read a short article online, remember yoga teachers talking about mindfulness, and try to do a practice. I bring my mind to the present moment sensations. I watch myself from a more objective viewpoint. I see myself drinking tea, walking up the stairs, feeling sad, obsessing about a stressful event. I watch a thought arise and pass and suddenly feel a freedom and relief I haven’t felt in ages: I don’t need to be so caught up. But this is only fleeting, fading away mere moments later. After I stop practising I’m right back to rumination. I know that if I could continue this mindfulness it would help but have no idea how to make it stick. It feels like I opened a doorway to a vast beautiful view that closed again in the blink of an eye. I have no idea what the key is to get the door open again, or to keep it open.

In each of these scenes, I felt like I had started school without books, anything to write with, or language to communicate with others. Without a framework and map, I got lost at every turn.

//

Once I got my head above water from the period of depression, anxiety, and burnout, I had a moment of insight. I realised that I needed to find some way of working with the mind. It was suddenly clear that my mind was turning an objectively good life situation into something miserable. I felt like I was stuck playing a cursed game that I had invented; I was trapped in a prison of my own creation. Something in how I was relating to experiences wasn’t working. I knew I needed something that would help me learn from these experiences. 

A friend happened to give me a copy of the book The Mind Illuminated and I began practising consistently. I moved up and down the stages of The Elephant Path. The guidance I received in that book, combined with a few chats with more experienced practitioners, brought the practice to life. As I sat, I felt more calm and clear. I learned how my mind could so easily shift into criticism and place blame on myself, or feel responsible for things I couldn’t control, such as a moment of distraction. I saw, moment-by-moment, how my mind constructed this prison.

One morning a few months later I’m sitting on a cushion, this time on parquet flooring. I observe the sensations of the body and the breath. I watch thoughts about my unfinished thesis chapter, what to cook for dinner, an idea for an artwork. There’s a gentle sense of calm and comfort. The bell goes off after 45 minutes and I open my eyes to a soft light angled in through the apartment window. I take a moment to appreciate the warmth of the rays in the cool air. I realise that I’m just…fine. It’s another day and my mind isn’t a bad place to be.

Over the months that followed, I knew that I’d never experience the same difficulty with anxiety and depression. Each day, each week, I noticed the patterns of the mind and saw how intention and attention shaped my world.

//

Looking back, it became clear that I was lucky to find a foundational practice that helped make meditation not only function, but also to feel good. The Buddha said that practice should be “good at the beginning, good in the middle, good at the end.” That on its own is a vast beautiful view and a doorway worth opening.

I’m delighted to go back to my roots and to bring this practice to life through a full-day of exploration on the 8th of March. Come join me : )

With mettā,
Kynan

What do you yearn for?

In this practice you will be invited to consider deep questions about your practice, what you love about the path, what it is you yearn for, and what the next step you can take is. This can be a welcome refresh of intentions or provide an antidote for when practice feels stuck or lacking inspiration. Importantly, these answers don’t need to be final and also don’t come from a place of thinking, but instead are felt as arising from deeper in the being. In this practice you are guided to do this through a gradual relaxing and focusing, coming into the body and tuning into the felt-sense of the whole body space. The self-guidance compass is the sense of trust and confidence that the practice is unfolding in the way it needs to, being cared for appropriately and leading you in the direction you would like to go.

Roomy Awareness

This is an equanimity practice accessed via resting as spacious awareness. While awareness is sometimes felt as spacious, it is other times felt as roomy, meaning that it has enough room to hold whatever arises. This roominess is about allowing whatever is present to be there, held within this field, rather than getting contracted or stuck with a particular sensation, thought, emotion, or sense of self. You can also take a universal view, tuning into the vast expanse of the universe that is all-encompassing, and noticing that the universe itself doesn’t reject anything — everything is accepted and welcomed in the universe. Eventually this acceptance allows everything to be like rain drops falling into the ocean, everything is held and melts into awareness.

Thinking as Flow of Sensation

Thinking is a gift. Thinking enables us to live in this world and to act compassionately. We don’t want to stop thinking. However, we do want to make sure that thinking doesn’t obscure, that it doesn’t get in the way of us practising and contacting deeper levels of experience. One way to do this is to try and calm the mind. Another is to see through the thoughts, so that even the act of thinking doesn’t get in the way. Here we tune in to the sensory aspect of thinking, examining how thoughts can be parsed into mental image, mental sound, and feeling. You’ll use imagination to kickstart this process and get familiar with how you experience thought. Then you can observe thought like watching a mental TV — observing what is happening without getting attached or treating it as fixed and solid. Finally you can rest as the knowing awareness in which thinking arises, tuning into the field of pre-thought knowing as the ground of being.

The Insubstantial Self (Guided Meditation)

The ordinary, lower case “s”, relative self is vividly appearing, yet empty. This emptiness is a lack of inherent, substantial, permanent existence. Seeing through the self means to notice that it isn’t fixed, solid, or permanent and doesn’t have to be where you are coming from. This practice investigates the ways in which you feel the self — body sensation, sense of location, thoughts, inner coach/critic, dialogue, or self image. Then you will look closely and see that there isn’t any substantiality to this, that the mind is gluing together sensations and treating them as solid. You’ll find that the self is ultimately unfindable. Once you reach a sense of conviction here there will be a lightness and relief.

You will also explore how the sensations, thoughts, and emotions don’t encapsulate your being and instead notice how when you put all these aside you are left with either a Presence or Absence, which points to a knowing awareness — an awareness that knows itself by itself, without having to be coming from the small self.

Note: these practices can be somewhat destabilising or lead to a sense of disconnection. If you are feeling under-resourced or unbalanced, please be cautious. If you find the practice leads to disconnection then re-ground yourself by noticing present moment sensations and doing normal activities. Reach out or speak with a qualified teacher if you experience continued difficulty.

There is a short talk at the beginning. Guided meditation begins at 3:15.

Sounds as Waves in an Ocean of Awareness

Take the view that all sounds are like waves emerging out of an ocean of awareness. Each sound is known the moment it arises, by this awareness — the sensation and the knowing are inseparable. By tuning in to this quality of sound, you can take the view that all sounds are washing over you, known as expressions of this spacious awareness. Then you will turn towards internal experience and see that thoughts, emotions, and the sense of self also all arise within spacious awareness. Seeing this allows all internal experiences to be there, held within this bright ocean of awareness. This leads to a sense of being deeply connected with everything that arises, fully allowing all of these expressions to be there, while not having to be the self that it is happening to. Instead, you can simply be the spacious ocean of awareness.

Attuning to Emotions (Guided Meditation)

Emotions are essential to being human, yet we often aren’t taught emotional literacy or provided models for feeling into and skilfully respond to our emotions. This practice works through different levels of experience — sensations, mind states, and emotions — in order to understand internal experience. Beginning with sensations, you will notice where there is body sensation in terms of warmth, coolness, pressure, texture, tingling, or vibration. Then you will look at mind states: boredom, curiosity, focus, clarity, dullness, sleepiness, etc. You’ll then tune into emotions and see where hearing the words of certain emotions resonates with you — feeling into anger, sadness, happiness, calm, strength, or fear, and the many variations and flavours of these feeling states.

Liberating Positive Emotions

Note: This practice invites you to bring up positive emotions, which can at times also have the effect of bringing up anything that is not that emotion. Be gentle and cautious.

Positive emotions, when freed, become boundless and unconditional. In meditation practice, we can intentionally bring to mind love, compassion, joy, peacefulness, trust, gratitude, kindness, friendliness, humour etc. by intentionally recalling a situation when we felt that way. Through feeling into the felt experience of that emotion, we can notice that the sensations felt in the body, such as warmth, openness, uplifting, groundedness, or connection, don’t have a solid, inherent existence but rather are insubstantial and changing. We can also sense that the self that feels the emotion is insubstantial. The emotion is vividly expressing, without needing to have a solid core, or a separately existing self that is feeling it. This frees up the emotion to be fully expressed and fully felt. The emotions then transform and become boundless and unconditional — compassion for the suffering of all beings, including yourself equally; boundless love for all others; or a deep gratitude for being able to be part of this complex dance of life.