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Manny Mansbach teaches Insight (Vipassana) Meditation in Vermont and elsewhere in New England, and offers counseling and consultation for individuals, couples and organizations.

For his entire adult life, Manny has been keenly interested in nurturing and facilitating the connections between transformative inner work such as meditation and therapy, relational practices based in skillful communication, development of wholesome community, and nonviolent social transformation.

I hope your meditation practice continues to support you in staying loving, balanced and clear in these very challenging times.  I’m cheering you and all beings on!

What’s Happening? When?

Fall Class: Home for Good: Our Heartmind As Our True Abode

The text for Home for Good will be Ethan Nichtern’s accessible, witty and wise book, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path. Ethan is a second-generation Buddhist with a lively mind and a skill for expressing important nuances of honing self-awareness and sanely landing in today’s complex and challenging world. In his book, Ethan invites us to stop being “commuters” wandering repetitively in dissatisfaction (samsara), discovering instead the stability and power of the heartmind as our true home.

The Road Home is divided into four parts. The first part is about the journey of self-awareness, discussing meditation practice, exploring karma and patterns of conditioning that bind us, and how practice can expand and shift our view of human nature. The second part covers the realm of relationships, both to help us understand how we are formed in relationship with others, and to help us deepen in compassion and learn skillful ways of engaging with others.

The third section of the book is about the sacred journey, and how “every aspect of life and practice as well as every emotion, is said to have the potential to reveal that our mind is a profound and sacred home.”  It looks at how “we unnecessarily divide our secular experience from our spiritual path…and how…secular and spiritual truths can be completely integrated into one enterprise in which spiritual practice and worldly life support, rather than fight against, each other.” The final section deals with our shared path as a community and society.

Utilizing The Road Home, the class Home for Good: Our Heartmind as Our True Home offers dynamic, thoughtful encouragement to embark and continue on a journey of awakening and to discover true refuge. Sharon Salzberg in her foreword says “It’s not a journey to a finer address, or an exotic voyage to foreign lands…but a journey that we can have confidence in right here and now….” As Nichtern says in his book, Home for Good is about fostering “a commitment to living within awareness…befriending yourself, and proclaiming your mind as your true home.” This deep homecoming can be of profound service to each of us, to our loved ones, and to the entire world.

Both a zoom class and downtown Brattleboro in-person class will be offered.

In-person class: Four Monday evenings, 6-7:30

Sept 25^th–Oct 16^th

Hooker-Dunham Building, 139 Main St., Brattleboro

Masking could be required if conditions warrant…

Suggested Donation: $100-125

Note: All sincere students are welcome regardless of ability to contribute financially.

To register or for more info please email Manny at satisukha@gmail.com

(For Brattleboro-area students, The Road Home will be available at Everyone’s Books in early September.)

Zoom class: Five Wed evenings, 6:30-8pm

Sept 13^th–Oct 11th

Suggested Donation: $125-150

Note: All sincere students are welcome regardless of ability to contribute financially.

To register or for more info please email Manny at satisukha@gmail.com

Second Saturday Sangha

September 9th

October 14th

Feel free to email me if you have questions…or if you would like to be added to the email list.

I look forward to seeing you on Saturday mornings at 9:45am!

 

The Zen master Ikkyu was once asked to write a distillation of the highest wisdom. He wrote only one word: Attention.
The visitor was displeased. “Is that all?”
So Ikkyu obliged him. Two words now.
          Attention. Attention.