Unlearning Meditation: Mini-Workshop with Buddhist Teacher Jason Siff

When we meditate, our minds often want to do something other than the meditation instructions we've been taught. When that happens repeatedly, we may feel frustrated to the point of abandoning meditation altogether. Jason Siff will discuss and sign his new book Unlearning Meditation: What to Do When the Instructions Get in the Way (Shambhala, $16.95), which invites us to approach meditation in a new way.  He teaches us how to become more tolerant of intense emotions, sleepiness, compelling thoughts, fantasies-the whole array of inner experiences that are usually considered hindrances to meditation. The meditation practice he presents in Unlearning Meditation is gentle, flexible, permissive, and honest, and it's been wonderfully effective for opening up meditation for people who thought they could never meditate, as well as for injecting a renewed energy for practice into the lives of seasoned practitioners.

Jason Siff was a Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s, where he began studying Pali and teaching meditation. After he left the Buddhist monastic order and returned to Los Angeles in 1990, he studied counseling psychology and worked as an intern for four years, at the end of which he decided to devote his life to meditation teaching instead of practicing psychotherapy. He co-founded the Skillful Meditation Project around that time, and began teaching meditation as his primary occupation, further developing his own approach to awareness meditation practice, which is called Recollective Awareness. Since then he has been invited to teach by several lay Buddhist Sanghas in America, Canada and Australia. He has also taught at Esalen Institute and the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. His books include King Bimbisara's Chronicler, a work of fiction set in the Buddha's time.