Elements of Wisdom Practice: A Range of Means

A five-week practiced-based survey of key insight/emptiness methods.

Meeting Dates: Sundays, September 7th – October 8th 2025
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

REGISTER HERE: https://forms.gle/8uas6UhivjMSXGbC8

Buddhist wisdom practice offers the radical possibility of dissolving constraints and fixations within our hearts and minds, enabling us to meet our lives and our world with more ease, freedom, and capacity for selfless action.

All Buddhist wisdom practices have at least one thing in common: they offer instructions to take a stance towards experience (the sense of self, the sense of world) in some way that is different than the ways we are habituated to meet experience (a self-oriented perspective that reinforces separation and reifies experience). This course will present a range of insight/emptiness practices that each work in particular ways to open and free how we perceive. The inclusion of a broad range of practices within this course will support a space for clarifying and delineating some of the primary mechanisms of “letting go” that comprise Buddhist wisdom practices.

The practices explored within the course support the exploration that Rob Burbea described as “a gradually deepening inquiry into fabrication – of the self and of all experience”, and they will be presented in the context of his presentation of Buddhist wisdom practice. Through releasing degrees of clinging and fixation, they engender liberating insight into the relationship between the way the mind is meeting experience and way phenomena appear.

Who is this course for: This course may be of interest for those who are moving into a focus on insight meditation from other areas of practice (samadhi, metta, jhana). It may also be helpful for those practicing insight meditation as a primary focus who wish to expand the range of how they practice, or make supportive connections between different ways they’ve applied insight/emptiness approaches. It will also provide context around the particular ways Rob Burbea framed Buddhist wisdom practice (“ways of looking” and offering insight meditation practices in the context of Buddhist emptiness teachings).

Some Teaching Themes:

• The variety approaches to releasing clinging/letting go available to meditators
• The relationship between insight practice and emptiness teachings
• The place of insight/emptiness practice in the wider context of a balanced practice
• Skill and balance applying insight/emptiness approaches within different strata of experience (including the interpersonal and emotional as well as perceptual).

Practices

• Three Characteristics as ways of looking (Impermanence, Dukkha – method 2, Anattā)
• Working with the sense of space as a field of awareness,
• Noticing gaps in experience (on both the perceptual and interpersonal levels)
• Absorption practice as insight practice.

Each practice will be explored in part as a means to illustrate different methods of releasing clinging, and we only be spending a week with each (this is far less time than these practices deserve, as each are powerful methods of revealing wisdom on their own). That being said, instructions, guided meditations, and time for clarification around application of specific practices will be offered in ways that will hopefully be supportive of one’s longer term practice.

Course elements:

• The main weekly course meeting will include practice instructions, time for sharing/questions/reports and a talk. 
• A mid-week 45-minute group practice session will be offered live, and recorded for those unable to attend.

Experience level: Intermediate or experienced. This is not an introductory meditation or mindfulness course. Applicants should have some familiarity and experience with Buddhist wisdom teachings and practice. Although the course is designed as a kind of orientation to a particular framing of wisdom practice, it will not include basic meditation instruction. Different practices will be explored each week, and so the pace will be quite fast.   It will be assumed that you have the capacity to cultivate stability of attention on your own (i.e. some kind of samadhi practice), the ability to apply mindfulness well, and be comfortable sitting 45 min on a regular basis.  I ask that you also have had a regular meditation practice for at least one year. It’s great if you have done meditation retreats, but there will be space in the course for those who are unable to do retreats but show commitment to practice in other ways.  Please feel really free to ask me any questions regarding whether this course may be a good fit for you .

There will be a space on the application form to ask any questions about experience level or issues around attendance.

About me: Susy has practiced Buddhist meditation since 2001, and began practicing insight meditation five years later.  In 2015 she began studying and training with Rob Burbea, and completed her teacher-training with him in 2020.  She teaches meditation in Los Angeles, California, and is an artist and a parent.  She is passionate about exploring the intersection between creative energies and contemplative practice, and supporting meditators wishing to pursue deep practice in the midst of daily life.

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 hold session and develop guided meditations / course materials.