Beyond Comparison

A 4-week online course working with distinction making, dualisms, and shared frequencies of experience in meditation.

NOTE: Due to unforeseen circumstances this course will be rescheduled for early 2025. Please sign up for my mailing list to receive notice when it’s re-scheduled.

Meeting Dates: Sundays Sept. 29th – Oct. 20th 2004
Meeting Time: 9:00am to 10:45am Pacific time (which is 5:00pm to 6:45pm UK time)
An optional mid-week guided meditation will be offered Wed. at 10:00am Pacific.
Cost: This course is offered on a dāna or donation basis (see below)

This four week insight/emptiness meditation course will explore strategies for softening the mind’s habitual activities of comparison and distinction making.  These activities of mind shape and fixate the ways we habitually perceive experience, and therefore learning to lessen them can open the door to a range of beautiful meditative perceptions.  As well, comparison and distinction making are necessary components of clinging and attachment – paying attention to and working with these activities of mind allows insight into the way experience is fabricated. 

Although this course will be presented as an insight/emptiness course, the practices may serve to reveal different mysical shadings within perception, which can be useful within samadhi practice (cultivating states of calm and collectedness).  All of the practices will provide ways of looking that challenge the habitual, self-oriented perspective that enforces a sense of separateness.

Mostly we will be working within a subtle, perceptual range of dualistic conceiving: inner and outer, things and not things, presence and absence. The practices should be of interest to mediators looking for strategies to release subtle clinging and moving in the direction of less fabrication of experience. This course is not so much about working with dualistic thinking on the level of personality and relationship (though that will be touched upon, and the principles can be applied there).  This offering is a part of my sharing what I received from my teachers that I love the most: the chance to explore the radical, wordless art of skillfully directing attention in ways that open up our sense of who we are and our relationship to our experience. 

Some of the practice directions we’ll explore (tentative):

Session Info: The main Sunday sessions will be one-hour and forty-five minutes long.  They will always include guided practice, teaching, and time for questions or sharing.  There will be an optional group meditation session offered on Wednesdays at 10:00am California time / 6pm UK time. This will be recorded and made available the same day. which will be recorded and made available the same day to support your weekly practice. 

This course is offered on a dāna basis. While there is no fixed fee for this course you are asked to offer monetary support for Susy’s teachings as you are able, given your own life’s circumstances. I am happy to offer these courses in such a way that everyone is able to attend, while trusting in the group’s generosity to allow me to set aside time for leading sessions, developing guided meditations and course materials.

More about this Course: This course is most suitable for experienced meditators who already have good experience with mindfulness or insight practice.  This course is short and will move along at a fairly fast clip, and so having the ability to cultivate calm and steadiness of mind for oneself will be necessary.  While the course will offer new practice options weekly, meditators will be encouraged to work with the practice(s) offered that feel most alive to them.  Each practice will be led within the main teaching sessions, and recordings of guided practices with an annotated guide will be given to each participant to practice with and refer to in the future.

This is an emptiness/insight meditation course. The practices and teaching elements are grounded in the Buddhist meditative tradition, and so it will be helpful if participants have some understanding of Buddhist teachings.  Rob Burbea’s framing of emptiness practice and the “Ways of Looking” approach will provide the basis for exploration, so if you are familiar with this it is helpful, but not necessary for participation.