Meditation Using Mantra, Image and Breath - Rigpa San Diego

Deepening your meditation through Mantra, Image and Breath to transform your mind.

This course takes place on five Saturdays for 2 1/2 hours each session, starting May 30th. It is part of the What Meditation Really Is is series that has been specially developed by Sogyal Rinpoche after many years of teaching in the West. It brings together over 2,000 years of Buddhist wisdom and experience in a way that is authentic, accessible and completely relevant to modern life.

The Unifying Practice looks in detail at three key methods—each of them a complete method of meditation in itself—which are brought together into one practice. As with all the other methods of meditation that have been presented in What Meditation Really Is, their purpose is to help the mind rest, undistracted, and discover your true nature.. 

The Unifying Practice brings together the three aspects of body, speech and mind, and is a way of bringing our body, speech and mind into the environment of meditation and the state of of non-distraction.

—First, using the support of looking at an image of Buddha transforms our outer environment and acts on the level of the body.
—Second, chanting or reciting a mantra is related to the speech and purifies our inner world of sound, emotion and energy.
—Third, watching the breath pacifies the mind. This may gradually lead to the higher meditation of the innermost nature of mind.

As we practice these methods in a gradual sequence, it enables us slowly to transform our thoughts, emotions and energy, and become steadily more peaceful and more present. When we practice them together in what we call ‘The Unifying Practice’, it brings the three methods together, and ‘unifies’ them, so that we can see their connectedness, and how each one supports the other. This accelerates the process of meditation and deepens the experience, with the result that meditation can happen effortlessly.