Learn how to meditate

Aro’s free meditation course is a series of weekly emails that are sent to you automatically from this web site. It teaches primarily two methods:

• ‘Superior vision’, also known as insight meditation, vipassana, vipashyana, or lhatong. This form of meditation allows us to see reality as it is, rather than colored by our preconceptions and emotional thinking. It leads to reduced anxiety, stress, and emotional conflict. It produces greater self-acceptance, self-understanding, and self-confidence – and so increased creativity and spontaneity.

• ‘Peaceful remaining’, also called mindfulness meditation, shamatha, or shi-nè. Peaceful remaining calms the wildness of thoughts and feelings and thereby allows you to see clearly the working of your mind. It teaches you to recognize counter-productive habitual patterns of thought and to let go of them. It produces focus, concentration, and patience.

The course takes a practical, down-to-earth approach. The first week’s email provides all the instructions you need to get started.

In the following weeks, you will learn refinements in technique and additional meditation exercises. The course also explains ways of dealing with any problems that may come up, shows how to apply the insights of meditation to the rest of life, and recommends other resources and further steps.

If you already know that you want to learn how to meditate, you can sign up for the course now. The first email will come immediately. We will not share your email address with anyone else. You can unsubscribe at any time if the course turns out not to be for you.

What the course covers

Some of the course’s topics are:

• Breath meditation – several methods
• Posture and physical supports: how to be comfortable, relaxed, alert, and still
• When and how much to meditate
• How not to meditate
• Meditating with strong emotions: anger, fear, desire, depression, sadness, and joy
• Formless meditation in emptiness
• Presence and awareness; thought and reality
• Walking meditation
• How to take the insights of meditation into everyday life

Some details come from the Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen approach. However, the methods of peaceful remaining and superior vision are common to all Buddhist meditation traditions.

Obstacles and antidotes

It is important to acknowledge that meditation can be boring, frustrating, uncomfortable, and confusing. This is particularly true in the beginning. These are perhaps the reasons not everyone meditates, despite the extraordinary benefits meditation can provide.

There is a tendency in some quarters to gloss over these difficulties. Some advocates seem to pretend that meditation is an easy and quick path to inner peace, if not eternal bliss. We do not think this is helpful. Meditation takes some determination. If you begin with the expectation that everything will go smoothly, you are likely to give up as soon as you see a difficulty.

Instead, much of this course is devoted to frank discussion of the obstacles all meditators encounter. None of these obstacles needs to stop you. The course provides ‘antidotes’ to each of the problems, including:

• boredom
• restlessness
• sleepiness
• physical discomfort (aches and pains)
• self-judgement and self-doubt
• fear
• confusion
• procrastination

Learn more

If you would like to know more about meditation in general, and Aro’s Buddhist approach in particular, you may want to read our meditation FAQ (answers to frequently asked questions) and other resources.

Or, you may just want to sign up for the course.