Summer Meditation Challenges

Transform yourself from the inside out with these 7-Day Meditation Challenges!

Each of these 7-Day Meditation Challenges gives you the opportunity to gain experience in a particular Buddhist meditation topic. You can explore the power of different breathing meditation techniques, try out seven inspiring and heart-warming meditations on love, or explore how to purify your mind.

As part of our 2022 Summer Program, we are offering these 7-Day Meditation Challenges for a limited time, from July 1 to August 31.

Each Challenge includes seven 45-minute on-demand sessions, so you can easily fit these into your busy schedule. You can use these to kick-start a daily meditation practice by doing one session each day, or you can use them to have your own private one/two day retreat by watching multiple sessions in a day.

These Summer Challenges are guided by our Resident Teacher Trina Gunther and are suitable for both new and experienced meditators.

7 Sessions per Challenge, $35

Sessions are approximately 45-minutes, and include a short talk followed by the guided meditation.

When you register for a Challenge, you receive all 7 sessions and can watch them on-demand until August 31.

Challenge 1:

Just Breathe

Join us for a series of guided breathing meditations for finding relief from our busy, distracted minds.

During this 7-day meditation challenge, we can learn how to incorporate breathing meditation into our busy lives and gain confidence in its effectiveness to create peace within ourselves.

This challenge provides effective techniques for settling the busyness in our mind, letting go of distractions and quieting the mental chatter that keeps us awake at night.

THE BENEFITS OF BREATHING MEDITATION

Just by doing breathing meditation for ten or fifteen minutes each day, we will be able to reduce the stress and tension that we normally experience. We begin to experience a calm, spacious feeling in the mind, and many of our usual problems fall away.

SESSION 1:  Breathing to find our natural peace 


SESSION 2:  Breathing & slowing our racing mind 


SESSION 3:  Breathing & relaxation 


SESSION 4:  Breathing & awareness 


SESSION 5:  Breathing & mindfulness


SESSION 6:  Breathing & energy


SESSION 7:  Breathing & purity

Registration

Please Note: Recordings will not available after August 31st

Challenge 2:

Be Kind to Your Mind

Join us for seven meditations on letting go and finding inner peace.

In this 7-day meditation challenge, we will practice seven Buddhist meditations that help us “be kind to our mind” by learning to skillfully let go of our inner turbulence and allow our mind to become peaceful.

Negative emotions such as anger, worry and loneliness can take over our mind and destroy our happiness. Often we find it difficult just to "shake" these disturbing mental states.

Buddha taught many skillful meditation techniques to let go of disturbed unhappy minds -  here we explore seven that address our most common unhappy states. The more experience we gain with these, the freer and happier our mind becomes!

Session 1: Letting go of distraction

Session 2: Letting go of bad feelings

Session 3: Letting go of worry

Session 4: Letting go of guilt and self-hatred

Session 5: Letting go of anger

Session 6: Letting go of isolation

Session 7: Letting go of unhappiness

Registration

Please Note: Recordings will not available after August 31st

Challenge 3:

The Buddhist Way of Loving Kindness

Here in our troubled world, what could be more helpful right now than getting better at love?

The Buddhist way of loving kindness is heart-opening and transformative. Buddha shows us how we can view our world more realistically - and this knowledge naturally gives rise to love in our heart. In other words, when we see ourselves and others as we really are, love will natural arise in our heart.

This challenge is a great opportunity to develop and strengthen our loving kindness, and to improve our meditation and spiritual practice.

Each day we will engage in a meditation that warms our heart a bit more, based on the book The New Eight Steps to Happiness by Geshe Keslang Gyatso Rinpoche. These meditations transform our life - they improve our relationships - and they contribute to peace and healing in our world.

Session 1:  Seeing kindness

Session 2:  The benefits of cherishing others

Session 3:  Making room for others in our mind

Session 4:  Seeing others value

Session 5:  Looking beyond faults

Session 6:  An open heart

Session 7:  All the happiness in this world

Registration

Please Note: Recordings will not available after August 31st

Challenge 4:

Mental Detox

Although we want to be happy all the time, negative energy in our mind often causes us many problems. This negative energy, or negative karma, has a toxic effect on our life, keeping us locked into painful experiences and habits that seem so hard to avoid.

Buddha taught many methods to detox our mind of this negativity. Known as purification, these methods allow us to make our mind clean and pure, lifting this heavy burden of negativity.

In this meditation challenge, we will focus on the special meditations to remove negative karma from our mind, which include the four powers of purification. As part of these we will learn a special Buddhist Sanskrit Mantra which we can also use in our busy daily life.

By engaging in this challenge, we can start heal our mind from negativity and gain a clearer, more positive state of mind.

Session 1:  Meditation on the pure nature of our mind


Session 2:  Meditation on karma


Session 3:  Meditation on regret


Session 4:  Meditation on reliance


Session 5:  Meditation on opponent force


Session 6:  Meditation on promise

Session 7:  
Integrated purification session

Registration

Please Note: Recordings will not available after August 31st

Challenge 5:

A Recipe for Daily Joy

Join this challenge if you are interested in a very happy week that will help you to develop a happy mindset for the rest of your life!

Rejoicing is the Buddhist practice that is commonly equated with practicing “gratitude.” Buddhist rejoicing meditations are naturally joyful and uplifting. They are easy antidotes to depression, discouragement and jealousy.

With Buddhist rejoicing, we tap into a deep feeling of appreciation and then let our mind soak in this happiness, like a hot-tub of joy.

Once we cultivate the mind of rejoicing in meditation we can easily bring it into our daily life, even while relaxing alone or with friends and family.

Session 1:  Rejoicing in our life

Session 2:  Rejoicing in our potential

Session 3:  Rejoicing in our efforts

Session 4:  Rejoicing in others' joy

Session 5:  Rejoicing in others' efforts

Session 6:  Rejoicing in challenges & challengers

Session 7:  Rejoicing in enlightenment

Registration

Please Note: Recordings will not available after August 31st

With Resident Teacher Trina Gunther

Trina Gunther is a long-time practitioner of Modern Kadampa Buddhism. She has studied and practiced in Dharma centers under Gen-la Dekyong and Gen Rigpa, and she has worked as Education Program Coordinator at centers in Los Angeles and the UK. She is an inspiring example of a lay practitioner of Kadampa Buddhism, and brings with her a wealth of practical experience of putting Buddha's teachings into practice amidst a busy daily life.

Online Class Policy

  1. You agree that you will not record the class or share links.
  2. To enjoy our online classes, you must live in Northern Colorado, Wyoming, or the surrounding states of Montana, North & South Dakota, Utah or Idaho, or have a prior connection to Heruka Center. Otherwise, we ask you to please support your local Kadampa meditation center and register for their online classes instead.
  3. If you experience technical difficulties, such as not receiving links, please contact info@meditateinfortcollins.org

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