Recovery Is Now, Awareness Is the Key

BRN Academy

Joan has had personal experience with alcohol addiction, a fingerbiting compulsion (classified as an impulse-control disorder), compulsive thinking, and depression. She does not believe there is one recovery model that fits everyone, and she encourages people to find what works for them. What she offers is an approach rooted in open awareness – giving nonjudgmental...

Noticing Tracking and Shifting Perception

BRN Academy

There is a correlation between our inner state of being and our outer circumstances. By noticing our inner sensations and thoughts, tracking them to witness their changes, we make the unconscious conscious and can hold the inner and the outer experiences in an attitude of expanded focus. Observing our own continuously evolving experience centers us...

Breaking Free of Habits

BRN Academy

During this talk Martine will look at the habits that bind us and stop our potential for wisdom and compassion manifesting fully. She will explore the meditative tools found in the Vipassana tradition like mindfulness of the breath, sounds and feeling tones to show how we can engage creatively with our habits and transform them...

Generosity: Transforming the Heart

BRN Academy

As we embark into a new year, we will explore the importance of cultivating generosity (d?na) and gratitude (kataññuta) and turning our intentions toward the interrelationship of the two. The practice of generosity is at the foundation of Buddhist teachings. At its essence, dana is radical because it is the practice of giving freely without...

Concrete Beds and Wooden Pillows… Waking Up the Hard Way (or Finding Insight but not Serenity)

BRN Academy

Sixteen years ago, I sat my first 10-day silent ‘Anapansati’ retreat at Wat Suan Mokkh monastery in southern Thailand.  Wat Suan Mokkh has a separate retreat centre famous for its basic accommodation which includes concrete beds and wooden pillows. There, from a seeming inability to meditate came a small but ultimately profound and eventually life-changing...

Perfect As We Are: A Self Compassion Practice

BRN Academy

In this session we will release self-doubt and/or self-blame, and engage in a practice of self-love and self-forgiveness.  Fresh “Lev” White is a love and compassionate activist. He offers mindfulness, coaching, mediation, and diversity trainings as tools for shifting towards more authentic, conscious and passionate living. He teaches and writes about how love and self-compassion...

Effortless Mindfulness for Addiction Recovery: One Glimpse at a Time

BRN Academy

The Effortless Mindfulness approach to addiction draws on Buddhist meditation from Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhism. Effortless Mindfulness is a direct approach that considered an advanced, yet simple way to access our true nature and treat suffering at its root. The 2 main premises are: craving is caused by living from our small separate sense of...

Grounding in Uncertainty

BRN Academy

"Nothing in the whole universe is comparable to the mind or can take its place.  Everything is mind-made." _Ayya KhemeI will guide our meditation on the cultivation of kindness and establishing your place of refuge during meditation so that you may begin to train the mind in stillness and peace.  Now more than ever, the...

Meditation | Practice for Challenging Times

BRN Academy

We will offer a meditation and an opportunity to be together in Sangha, with an emphasis on sustaining practice in these challenging times. Please join us this Sunday, June 7th, led by Robin Smith.

Reflection on Recovery

BRN Academy

Having just passed the milestone of 35 years sober, exactly half his life, Kevin looks back on his own path and the lessons he has learned as a clean and sober Buddhist.  Kevin Griffin is a Buddhist teacher and author in the Theravada tradition. He is a co-founder of the Buddhist Recovery Network and teaches...