Meditation and Critical Approaches to Contemplative Practice

Week 1 – Welcome, Introduction to Meditation and Contemplative Practice
In our first session, we’ll begin by defining our key terms and principles of the course: meditation and contemplative practice. We’ll also ask the question of what it means to take a ‘critical approach’ and why this is important in our contemporary context.

Week 2 – A Brief History of Meditation
To understand how we arrived at where we are today, we’ll take a look back at historical approaches to meditation, from both yoga traditions and beyond. Without aiming to be exhaustive, we’ll try to orient ourselves in a fuller understanding of how the meaning and understanding of the word “meditation” has changed and shifted over time (much like the word “yoga”!). 

Week 3: The Rise of Mindfulness
Perhaps now the most widely-recognised and popularised form of meditation practice in the world, mindfulness for many is now ubiquitous with meditation. We’ll take a closer look at the historical and social contexts of mindfulness, and also a critical reading of how it’s been co-opted by the forces of late-stage capitalism, virtue signalling and structural oppression to some often questionable ends. 

Week 4: The Science and Study of Meditation
This week we’ll turn to the science and study of meditation, asking questions like: What can we know about what we’re doing? And how do we talk about it? How does positionality affect how you perceive meditation and contemplative practice? We’ll take a look at what neuroscience has to say about what might be going on when we meditate, and the limitations and challenges faced. What happens when we go from experiencing our meditation practice to trying to communicate, teach or study it?

Week 5: Developing our Personal Practice
In our final week together, we’ll turn our attention to the personal, with a workshop dedicated to exploring our personal (and if applicable, teaching) practices of meditation. We’ll consider questions like: what is my intention for meditation? What does it do for me? What does it mean for me? We’ll also consider the practicalities of meditation, alongside working to dismantle and reframe limiting attitudes and ideas about what our meditation practice “should” look like. Above all, what is YOUR expression of meditation, and how do we know how to check in with our needs and desires around meditation as they naturally shift over time?