What is Your Vision?
To support your path of discovery, we have recently started to highlight a set of advanced vipaśyanā practices in the articles A Path of Insight and The Union of Stillness and Motion. The aim is to invite you to dive into a deeper investigation of the mind.
A Sense Of Direction
Whether you are a beginner or a more advanced practitioner, it is a good time to clarify your motivation. For it is our motivation that gives a sense of direction to our journey and influences its results. When progressing in the practice, and as when effecting any real change, there will be challenges and obstacles. Every training requires effort and any change may naturally lead to resistance. Obstacles should not discourage us but be viewed as a catalyst for further progress. They are part of the journey to inner freedom and unchanging inner peace.
We cannot just wish for our minds to be full of joy, happiness, inner peace and altruism. That is no more than wishful thinking and will not translate into real change. It is important to generate strong intentions and recalibrate one's motivation, and we definitely need to put our hope into practice. It is essential to have a sense of direction to nourish enthusiasm for our daily lives. Perhaps the anxiety that some people feel comes from a lack of direction or have failed to grasp their own inner potential for change.
—Matthieu Ricard in the Why Meditate session
What's Your Vision?
In the coming weeks, we will be inviting you to explore and reflect on your own motivation and vision of the path. This will be done with the help of the four-fold vision quest practices. In the Conative Intelligence and Flourishing course by Dr Alan Wallace, you will find helpful information and practices to support your reflections. The course lets us consider the intentions and volitions conducive to our own and others' well-being and happiness.
In the course's first two practices, you are asked to reflect on your vision of a good life. How would you connect the dots between where you are today and what would truly bring you a sense of fulfillment and meaning?
In other words, you are asked to reflect on: What is your heart's true desire? What would make you truly happy? It is good to take some time to carefully consider that.
This is approached through loving-kindness. First, you develop loving-kindness for yourself, and then your very loved ones, your cherished friends, your more casual friends, and expand outwards, breaking down all barriers—which is in line with classic Buddhist teachings.
The practices can help you to clarify how your vision can be realized. As the practice and days proceed, you develop the conscious awareness and the ongoing flow of motivation that this is the right direction even though the path can be long.
Please see here the Conative Intelligence and Flourishing course.
If you have any questions regarding your practice or the Imagine Clarity app, please do not hesitate to contact us.
With kind wishes,
The Imagine Clarity team
Photo: Raimond Klavins
In the course's first two practices, you are asked to reflect on your vision of a good life. How would you connect the dots between where you are today and what would truly bring you a sense of fulfillment and meaning?
In other words, you are asked to reflect on: What is your heart's true desire? What would make you truly happy? It is good to take some time to carefully consider that.
This is approached through loving-kindness. First, you develop loving-kindness for yourself, and then your very loved ones, your cherished friends, your more casual friends, and expand outwards, breaking down all barriers—which is in line with classic Buddhist teachings.
The practices can help you to clarify how your vision can be realized. As the practice and days proceed, you develop the conscious awareness and the ongoing flow of motivation that this is the right direction even though the path can be long.
Please see here the Conative Intelligence and Flourishing course.
If you have any questions regarding your practice or the Imagine Clarity app, please do not hesitate to contact us.
With kind wishes,
The Imagine Clarity team
Photo: Raimond Klavins
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