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Tina describes what she means by the terms “embodiment” and “off-the-cushion” and gives a context for doing this type of practice as an extension of our sitting meditation practice.
Tina describes her journey with embodiment, including her birth trauma, working with leaders in humanistic organizations, and learning to live her realization in daily life.
Tina describes how embodiment work fits with the categories of sitting practice, including: heart-based, focused attention, open monitoring, and self-transcending practices. She also talks about sila, the practice of cultivating a worldly life that is in integrity with our realizations on-the-cushion.
Tina describes how one of two things is always happening in our practice on-the-cushion—either transformation of personality material, or contact with the transcendent when our meditation is going smoothly. This also applies to our daily life, and working with both aspects leads to a “thinning of the ‘me’” which is a thinning of our identification with the ego-self.
Tina describes how we can put our daily life to good use, by working with our patterns off-the-cushion in our ongoing life circumstances. She discusses how this relates to therapy, as well as the phenomenon of “spiritual bypassing,” in which a person pushes their patterns down to the unconscious or ignores them, instead of working to digest them permanently. Spiritual bypassing is seen in spiritual teachers and practitioners who may have genuine realization, but act in ways that are clearly ego-driven to the point that they do harm to others.
Tina describes her method of encouraging people to notice their “Top 10 Hits,” which are the most frequent patterns that take a person off their meditation object over and over. These are the building blocks of the ego-self, which are so compulsive that when we try to meditation we can’t stay with our object. Rather than judging ourselves for this, or just pushing them down into the unconscious, by working with them skillfully they can thin our permanently and even dissolve completely.
Tina provides a guided meditation helping us to notice our patterns while meditating, so that we can begin to identify and understand them, as well as work with them off-the-cushion.
Tina describes how working with our patterns is like giving ourselves a “software upgrade” through our on and off-the-cushion work. Our patterns were our original “software program” that was instilled in us in childhood as the ego formed. Fortunately, we can work with this “program” to update so that we suffer less and are more free to know our deeper nature that is obscured by the patterns.
Tina discussed how to “work a thread” of our patterns off-the-cushion in everyday life, making the most of those 15 hours a day that we are not on the cushion.
Tina gives an overview of the instinctual drives (that all mammals have, including humans) that are part of what make the patterns so compelling and hard to let go of. She also describes how these patterns can ultimately support the “Enlightenment Drive” that compels us to practice and ultimately leads us back to our True Nature and the Ground of Being, that we are at our most fundamental.
Tina describes the Enlightenment Drive in more detail, and discusses how to cultivate and work with it. She also details how this relates to the practice of Bodhicitta, and how to use the Bodhicitta practice to fan the flame of our Enlightenment Drive.
Tina provides a guided meditation helping us work with the Instinctual Drives and Centers on-the-cushion, which can provide insights into our patterning and how it linked to these powerful drives.
Tina Rasmussen is a meditation teacher who leads retreats and offers spiritual guidance and mentoring to practitioners worldwide. Her mission as a teacher is to foster awakening and its embodiment in worldly life through the application of authentic, rigorous Buddhist and modern practices.
In this second part of the course, Tina provides practices and a context for using the many hours a day that we are “off the cushion” to deepen our practice, and truly embody and live our practice in everyday life. Doing this can moves us forward in our journey and the “thinning of the me,” while allowing the transcendent aspect of our practice to be more present in our ongoing experience.
In this course, Tina gives an overview of the “Self-transcending” category of meditation, in particular the Dzogchen practice as it is taught in Tibetan Buddhism. The Self-Transcending practice of Dzogchen uses the other three categories of practice as building blocks, culminating in the possibility of transcending the sense of the ego-self through the Rigpa practice of Dzogchen. The Dzogchen teachings are rarely given, and are extremely hard to find other than in book format, so access to these teachings is a rare opportunity.
In this course, Tina gives an overview of the “Open Monitoring” category of meditation, in particular, the Vipassana practice as it is taught in Theravada and Tibetan Buddhism. Vipassana is also known as Insight Meditation and utilizes our capacity to investigate, to more deeply understand phenomena so that we can develop equanimity in being with things as they are. Investigating our experience can also potentially lead to perceiving phenomena at their ultimate level.
In this course, Meido Roshi discusses various aspects of lay initiation, also known as jukai (“receiving precepts”). After introducing the Three Refuges, Five Lay Precepts, and Four Vows, he then actually conducts the jukai ritual for the viewers. By participating in the course, you therefore have the opportunity to formally enter the Buddhist path.
