These poems
they are things that I do
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
and
are you ready?
These words
they are stones in the water
running away
These skeletal lines
they are desperate arms for my longing and love.
I am a stranger
learning to worship the strangers
around me
whoever you are
whoever I may become.
Lovingkindness Meditation Teacher Training Program
Begins April 14
Registration Deadline April 4
Learn to incorporate the science of compassion, the healing arts of lovingkindness meditation (also known as metta), and the liberating wisdom of the Buddhist tradition into your mindfulness teaching and practice. Develop the qualities needed to successfully offer compassion meditation; self-compassion, loving presence, and wise listening, in a 12 week training with accomplished Buddhist teacher-practitioners. Cultivate your own voice in practice sessions that ready you to integrate wisdom, compassion, kindness, caring, and balance into an approachable and skillful teaching style.
ABOUT
Research indicates that the cultivation of compassion has many beneficial effects, including improvements in personal relationships; decrease in inflammation; improvement in cardiac function; a boost in pro-social activities like helping others; enhanced ability to feel compassion for oneself and others; increased calmness and ability to handle stressful situations; better engagement and communication in relationships; and increased job satisfaction and decreased job overwhelm.
IDP is offering this training to mindfulness and meditation teachers who wish to deepen their knowledge and understanding of lovingkindness and compassion practices, as well as to caregivers, therapists, educators, life coaches, social workers, yoga teachers, and others who wish to effectively offer these practices to their clients, students, patients, and others.
IDP LKMTT recognizes the transformative power of compassion developed through secular Buddhist practices integrated with science and psychology.
This 50-hour training includes:
All weekends and workshops are led by an exceptional pair of talented and experienced teachers to give you the mentoring you need to confidently and wisely lead others to develop their minds and hearts. IDP recognizes that our influence as a meditation teacher training center depends on the integrity of our teacher-practitioners and our deep respect for the Buddhist traditions upon which these practices are based. We offer all our trainings to awaken everyone to the deep interdependence shared by all living beings, for the benefit of all.
This program is offered on a sliding fee scale. Please select the highest amount you can comfortably afford to support this and other donation-based initiatives. Scroll below for scholarship opportunities. Space is limited. Please register early to save your seat. No registrations will be accepted after 4/4/18.
Tuition
Payment and Refund Policies
Scholarships
Limited scholarship funds are available and are awarded in order of request. Please indicate on application if you wish to be considered for a Work-Study discount or a Person of Color scholarship.
Books:
Concepts:
Techniques:
Discover the sources of lovingkindness and compassion training, understand self-compassion, learn foundational techniques to offer LKM, and establish or re-establish your own LKM and gratitude practice.
April 14, 9:00–5:00 pm
Explore contemporary research and understandings of compassion and its impact for self, family and society, develop your teaching abilities, and deepen your ere exploring gratitude practice, and developing lesson plans for how to work this practice through with your students.
April 28, 9:00–5:00 pm
Exploring the special obstacles that may arise while teaching LKM and compassion practices;
in ourselves and in our students. Skillfully being present with suffering, difficult emotions, resisting the urge to give advice, enabling empathy, and developing self-soothing mechanisms.
May 8, 7:30–9:30 pm
Learning, sharing, and developing tools, practices, and exercises to help students build compassion and expand their capacity to be with difficult emotions and thoughts.
May 15, 7:30–9:30 pm
Discussion and tools to work with compassion burnout, despair, and hopelessness. Learn about the quality of resilience and how it can be cultivated through the development of balance and wisdom, and recognize our actions have far-reaching though sometimes unseen impacts.
May 22, 7:30–9:30 pm
Each participant will present guided instruction and meditation developed for the needs of their students/clients/group. Peers and teachers will provide encouragement and feedback. Discussion of other applications for compassion practices, interactive exercises, and time to share experiences and support with each other.
June 9, 10-5pm
June 10, 10-1pm
I watched the arctic landscape from above
and thought of nothing, lovely nothing.
I observed white canopies of clouds, vast
expanses where no wolf tracks could be found.
I thought about you and about the emptiness
that can promise one thing only: plenitude—
and that a certain sort of snowy wasteland
bursts from a surfeit of happiness.
As we drew closer to our landing,
the vulnerable earth emerged among the clouds,
comic gardens forgotten by their owners,
pale grass plagued by winter and the wind.
I put my book down and for an instant felt
a perfect balance between waking and dreams.
But when the plane touched concrete, then
assiduously circled the airport’s labryinth,
I once again knew nothing. The darkness
of daily wanderings resumed, the day’s sweet darkness,
the darkness of the voice that counts and measures,
remembers and forgets.
The cosmos is filled with precious gems.
I want to offer a handful of them to you this morning.
Each moment you are alive is a gem,
shining through and containing earth and sky,
water and clouds.
It needs you to breathe gently
for the miracles to be displayed.
Suddenly you hear the birds singing,
the pines chanting,
see the flowers blooming,
the blue sky,
the white clouds,
the smile and the marvelous look
of your beloved.
You, the richest person on Earth,
who have been going around begging for a living,
stop being the destitute child.
Come back and claim your heritage.
We should enjoy our happiness
and offer it to everyone.
Cherish this very moment.
Let go of the stream of distress
and embrace life fully in your arms.
Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand.
True to our God,
True to our native land.
Origin of poem/song from the author:
A group of young men in Jacksonville, Florida, arranged to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday in 1900. My brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, and I decided to write a song to be sung at the exercises. I wrote the words and he wrote the music. Our New York publisher, Edward B. Marks, made mimeographed copies for us, and the song was taught to and sung by a chorus of five hundred colored school children.
Shortly afterwards my brother and I moved away from Jacksonville to New York, and the song passed out of our minds. But the school children of Jacksonville kept singing it; they went off to other schools and sang it; they became teachers and taught it to other children. Within twenty years it was being sung over the South and in some other parts of the country. Today the song, popularly known as the Negro National Hymn, is quite generally used.
The lines of this song repay me in an elation, almost of exquisite anguish, whenever I hear them sung by Negro children.
Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,
between “green thread”
and “broccoli,” you find
that you have penciled “sunlight.”
Resting on the page, the word
is beautiful. It touches you
as if you had a friend
and sunlight were a present
he had sent from someplace distant
as this morning—to cheer you up,
and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing
that also needs accomplishing.
Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds
of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder
or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly
without a clue,
but today you get a telegram
from the heart in exile,
proclaiming that the kingdom
still exists,
the king and queen alive,
still speaking to their children,
—to any one among them
who can find the time
to sit out in the sun and listen.
I remember memories of awakening
with no memories:
I remember trying to forget:
never do I remember such hopeless
longing to stand up and do something
as in a Skid Row hotel room.
Two years covered up in cold
sheet warmth windows closed,
even the noise was cold,
and steam hissing like a snake
biting itself to sleep by mid-morning,
rattling dreams tossed
themselves a hot plate,
plugging in heat like a stopped-up sink
giving off floor water
when you turned it on:
plaster cracking sound of ancient pipe.
I am moving out of that hotel
to this day
my overlarge heavy white coat
with no buttons
is on my back by 9:30,
and I am waiting forever to go
back to sleep
because I cannot bare to stay awake
and this is human life
when I am waiting
not to be hungry.
Relax. This won’t last long.
Or if it does, or if the lines
make you sleepy or bored,
give in to sleep, turn on
the T.V., deal the cards.
This poem is built to withstand
such things. Its feelings
cannot be hurt. They exist
somewhere in the poet,
and I am far away.
Pick it up anytime. Start it
in the middle if you wish.
It is as approachable as melodrama,
and can offer you violence
if it is violence you like. Look,
there’s a man on a sidewalk;
the way his leg is quivering
he’ll never be the same again.
This is your poem
and I know you’re busy at the office
or the kids are into your last nerve.
Maybe it’s sex you’ve always wanted.
Well, they lie together
like the party’s unbuttoned coats,
slumped on the bed
waiting for drunken arms to move them.
I don’t think you want me to go on;
everyone has his expectations, but this
is a poem for the entire family.
Right now, Budweiser
is dripping from a waterfall,
deodorants are hissing into armpits
of people you resemble,
and the two lovers are dressing now,
saying farewell.
I don’t know what music this poem
can come up with, but clearly
it’s needed. For it’s apparent
they will never see each other again
and we need music for this
because there was never music when he or she
left you standing on the corner.
You see, I want this poem to be nicer
than life. I want you to look at it
when anxiety zigzags your stomach
and the last tranquilizer is gone
and you need someone to tell you
I’ll be here when you want me
like the sound inside a shell.
The poem is saying that to you now.
But don’t give anything for this poem.
It doesn’t expect much. It will never say more
than listening can explain.
Just keep it in your attache case
or in your house. And if you’re not asleep
by now, or bored beyond sense,
the poem wants you to laugh. Laugh at
yourself, laugh at this poem, at all poetry.
Come on:
Good. Now here’s what poetry can do.
Imagine yourself a caterpillar.
There’s an awful shrug and, suddenly,
You’re beautiful for as long as you live.
The same snowflake
Kept falling out of the gray sky
All afternoon
Falling and falling
And picking itself up
Off the ground,
To fall again,
But now more surreptitiously,
More carefully
As night strolled over
To see what’s up
people who are going to be
in a few years
at the bottom of trees
bear a responsibility to something
besides people
if it was only
you and me
sharing the consequences
it would be different
it would be just
generations of men
but
this business of war
these war kinds of things
are erasing those natural
obedient generations
whose ignored pride
stood on no hind legs
begged no water
stole no bread
did their own things
and the generations of rice
of coal
of grasshoppers
for their invisibility
denounce us
Compassion Camp 