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Talk
What precisely happens in our mind and body before a thought emerges or when we get lost in mind-wandering? How do we know we are experiencing an emotion? What is it really like to meditate from moment to moment, and how do we go about directing our mind to our mind?
Questions like these speak to a core aspect of our work at the Center for Contemplative Research (CCR), which is the integration of scientific and contemplative methods to gain a deeper understanding of the nature and potentials of consciousness. In this session, Clara Seeger, PhD leads us through an inquiry that maps one such mode of integration.
After guiding the shamatha practice of settling the mind in its natural state, Clara offers a brief introduction to micro-phenomenology: a first-person research method that is aimed at making explicit the microdynamics of singular experiences that usually go unnoticed as we are absorbed in what we are doing. In this methodology, participants are treated as co-researchers who are experts on their own experience, rather than subjects in an experiment. Clara then provides an opportunity for us to try this approach for ourselves, becoming micro-phenomenologists of our own meditative experience.
Additional Resources
About Clara Seeger
Clara Seeger (PhD), founder of Enlightened Leaders, is a leadership coach, corporate facilitator, course creator, speaker, and author, specializing in neuroscience, mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and mental wellbeing. Clara works with international companies across many sectors, languages, and countries, delivering neuroscience and mindfulness-based leadership development and executive coaching to help organizations create a culture of sustainable well-being in the workplace.
As a long-term meditation practitioner and student of B. Alan Wallace, on whose teachings she draws, she is well versed in contemplative teachings and meditation practices. Her approach to designing and facilitating mental well-being programs marries contemplative wisdom and meditation with findings from neuroscience, emotional intelligence, and psychology to facilitate human flourishing through cultivating the mind.
Clara has recently embarked on a PhD in contemplative science within the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience at Brunel University London. Using neurophenomenology, which integrates first-person, subjective accounts of conscious experience with third-person, neuroscientific data, Clara is investigating subtle meditative experiences of advanced meditators to illuminate the temporal unfolding and textural richness in their subjective experience of a variety of mental phenomena and processes.
What is Ghatika Monthly?
Ghatika Monthly is an in-person and virtual gathering held on the 2nd Saturday of every month, in which CCR expert teachers offer accessible guidance in foundational yet transformative contemplative practices. Ghatika is the Sanskrit term for one 24-minute meditation session, which is a recommended length for beginning meditators. While most of the CCR’s expert teachers come from a Buddhist background, these sessions are designed to be secular, informative, and welcoming to beginning and advanced practitioners alike. At Ghatika Monthly, we hope to offer a taste of the contemplative technology that our full-time contemplatives cultivate for 8–12 hours per day at Miyo Samten Ling Hermitage in Crestone. Subscribe to never miss a session!
