Are we free to choose what we pay attention to? How to be able to choose? Can we increase our mental balance? How to live a healthy emotional life?

The Journey

The course “Transforming the mind to cultivate lasting happiness” explores what meditation is and focuses on calming the mind and refining attention with the breath, a healthy emotional life, and enhancing wholesome emotions and mental states as first foundations for cultivating lasting happiness. It is complemented by references to current scientific understanding on attention training, wellbeing, empathy, and emotions.

The course gradually unfolds as a journey along different topics:

• Settling the mind and focusing attention with the breath explains breathing meditation to settle the mind and focus our attention, as a way to choose where we pay attention to and balance the mind.

• Stabilizing and analytical meditation challenges some common notions about meditation and explores how to use our capacity to observe and analyze to enhance wholesome mental states and attitudes.

• Working with emotions explores emotions, how some of them can be challenging or disturbing, and strategies to work with them.

• Emotions and afflictions further deepens into it by presenting the Buddhist perspective on emotions and afflictions.

• A healthy emotional life explores how regulating emotions is not only about dealing with the challenging ones, but also about gaining perspective over our own views and enhancing wholesome emotions and mental states.

• Bringing the practice to daily life concludes with bringing more awareness to our emotions and to activities in daily life.

Buddhist Mind Science

This course belongs to the series of courses “Buddhist Mind Science: Activating Your Potential”, that offers practical knowledge and techniques about meditation, the mechanisms of suffering and happiness, how to find inner balance and how to discover and develop our potential as a person. The presentation includes references to scientific research. The different courses in the series can be taken separately. Read more.

Structure

The course will combine theoretical sessions, exercises and meditations. The format will be eminently practical.

Language

The course will be conducted in English with simultaneous translation into Spanish.

Co-Hosting Centers

Centre de meditació Tushita

Shantideva, New York
Land of Joy, UK

See an introduction to the series in the video above

Marina Brucet Vinyals was born in Barcelona, Spain. She has completed a six-year full-time study program Masters Program of Advanced Buddhist Studies of Sutra and Tantra at Lama Tzong Khapa Institute, Italy. She studied with great Tibetan lamas such as His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Lama Jampa Monlam and Khensur Jampa Tegchok, amongst others. She has also completed a one-year individual meditation retreat, amongst others.

She holds a BA and a MA in Biochemistry and a PhD in Molecular Biology in Immunology from the University of Barcelona, where she also performed postdoctoral studies.

Presently, she combines continual development and meditation retreats with teaching meditation and Buddhist philosophy, at both general and specialized levels, with an approach that always takes into account the context and circumstances of Western life.