Rebuild Your Attention
Buddhist Practices for Focus, Clarity, and Joy
About this Course
At the heart of Buddhist tradition is the ancient practice of meditation (bhavana), through which we train our faculties of attention and investigation with the aim of decreasing stress and suffering.
Meditation has never been easy—people in the Buddha’s time struggled with distraction, sleepiness, and worry the same way we do—but our sped-up, information-saturated culture makes it harder than ever. We all know it would be good to slow down and become more present, but how do we really do this?
This 5-week course is the second in a series of practice and study courses intended to build a strong foundation for Theravāda Buddhist training. Focusing in this series on meditation as attention training, we look at developing focus, concentration, and inner energy, and why these are the core skills in meditation and mindfulness. You do not have to have taken the first course in the series to take this one, and beginners are welcome.
We draw on early Buddhist teachings preserved in the Pāli Canon as the source of our meditation instructions, and weave in supporting material from contemporary neuroscience and psychology. Each section includes guided meditation, reading passages from the discourses, and resources for building or deepening a daily meditation practice. You will come away with an approach to Buddhist meditation that understands the central role that pleasure and relaxation hold in concentration, and actionable skills for slowing down and bringing focus back into your everyday life.
Created with New York Insight, winter 2025.
Take this Course
All courses are offered in the Gift Economy model. This course is available on a wide sliding scale, based on self-assessment of your income and ability to offer your resources in a way that supports others with lesser resources to attend. Please support us in using the Gift Economy model by engaging sincerely with the process and selecting the highest level you can on the sliding scale (or beyond it). Your generosity directly gifts scholarship support to those who need it, and allows us to share these teachings with everyone who might benefit from them, regardless of access to wealth. Thank you!
SELECT A TIER TO ENROLL:
Further scholarships are offered as widely as possible and based on request. Our goal is to not turn anyone away for lack of resources, both for this course and future offerings. Email us here to request a scholarship.
What’s included
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We begin our study of attention and distraction with basic training in seeing the two different types of thought: wholesome and unwholesome, or skillful and unskillful.
Reading content
Recorded meditation, 26 minutes
Recorded class teaching, 1.5 hours
Further study links
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In this class we look at five methods for diminishing unwholesome thought recommended by the Buddha.
Recorded meditation, 31 minutes
Recorded class teaching, 1.5 hours
Further study links
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In this week’s class we’ll explore the seven factors of awakening/enlightenment, and their particular usefulness as a guide for training attention and focus.
Reading content
Recorded meditation, 22 minutes
Recorded class teaching, 1.5 hours
Further study links
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This week we’ll begin to explore the practice of meditative focus as an embodied, blissful state, and look at the Buddha’s descriptions of body-based meditative immersion, or samādhi.
Reading content
Recorded meditation, 29 minutes
Recorded class teaching, 1.5 hours
Further study links
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We’ll close our series looking at the full expression of meditative concentration, the four jhānas. These are ecstatic states of single-pointed focus that amplify bodily pleasure and bliss as the doorway to equanimity and letting go. The jhānas are perhaps the most frequently described meditation states in the Buddha’s discourses, and are the definition of the eighth limb of the path, “Right Immersion” (sammā-samādhi).
Reading content
Recorded meditation, 30 minutes
Recorded class teaching, 1.5 hours
Further study links
The image I get when I think of these meditations in relation to my body is that of a deep, warm, and fertile core of the earth’s soil where the seeds able to withstand storms take root.
— Class Participant
Meet your teacher, Dr. Sean Oakes
He/they, queer, Puerto Rican & English ancestry, living on unceded Pomo land in Northern California
Sean teaches Buddhism, Yoga, and somatic practice, focusing on philosophical inquiry, trauma healing, devotion, and social engagement as expressions of the Dharma. He wrote his dissertation on extraordinary states in Buddhist meditation and experimental dance, and teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and elsewhere. Read more about…