Mark Coleman has been engaged in meditation practice since 1981, primarily within the Insight meditation tradition. He has been teaching meditation retreats since 1997. His teaching is also influenced by his studies with Advaita Vedanta and Tibetan teachers in Asia and the West, and through his teacher training with Jack Kornfield. Mark primarily teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California, though he also teaches nationally, in Europe and India.
He leads backpacking retreats, nature-based retreats, and teaches retreats for environmental activists in the wilderness at Vallecitos Mountain Refuge in New Mexico, and at Knoll Farm in Vermont. In the Bay Area, Mark has a counseling practice, where he integrates his studies of psychotherapy and meditative work. He is the author of “Awake in the Wild - Mindfulness in Nature as a path of Self-Discovery." Mark has been an avid hiker, and backpacker for most of his life and spends much of his time in the outdoors. He lives in the woods in Marin County, Northern California.
What are the joys and fruits of the practice of Vipassana/mindfulness?
This talk elaborates the peace, joy, freedom that arises from meditation; especially in regard to seeing clearly the nature of thought, papanca and disengaging from the delusions of mind.
This talk points to how human beings straddle both mundane and divine realities. How we live dominated by left brain conceptual mind and how we have the potential to know dimensions of peace and freedom more characterized by the right brain hemisphere.
What is the experience of compassion, how does it arise, what are it’s obstacles. This talk also discusses the Bhrama Vihara of mudita, appreciative joy and how we cultivate this rare and beautiful quality of gladness and celebrating the joys of others.
This talk explores the unity of mindfulness and the qualities of loving kindness, how they support each other and how this leads to living with wisdom and compassion in the world.
This talk discusses the qualities of metta, and the unity of mindfulness and metta -- and how compassion arises as a natural turning of the loving heart.
What is the nature of the self? What did the Buddha teach about the self - the suffering that arises from our misperceptions about who we are and the freedom that comes from understanding our true nature.
