Mindful presence is a capacity to discern and maintain a state of mind balanced between extremes of restless agitation and foggy sleepiness, to recognize mind slipping into one of those extremes as well as to apply methods for correcting such mistakes. It is also a capacity to recognize what my mind is busy with and where your attention is placed at the moment.

The minimal objective of the practice is to learn to perceive the events of one's own mind as distinctly as we can see an apple in our palm, to learn to see important interconnections between phenomena of mind, senses, and body. The chief aim is to discover the void and transparent space of mind, its natural condition. The discovery of such space makes a starting point for profound contemplative practices of various traditions. The course cannot guarantee you achieving such goals in one month but it provides the necessary means to achieve them in reasonable time through consistent and diligent practice.

During this introductory course, we study basic instruments for working with one's attention, the transition from focused attention to distributed attention (so-called 'open monitoring'). A necessary theoretical base for developing individual practice is also provided.

The program:
✦ awareness as a mental factor
✦ core principles of one-pointed concentration
✦ discriminating between direction or content of mind and mind's state
✦ main hindrances for meditation and how to overcome them
✦ mindful presence as a balance of mind

Students have access to the course's journal in Google docs that contains syllabus of each session as well as links to audio recordings of all sessions.

Discovering a mental space as an experience and not as just a concept is a crucial point in contemplative practice. This is the point when the practice of meditation becomes very clear and doesn’t require too much effort. This experience is a good foundation for many advanced meditation practices.

The course is intended for experienced practitioners.

✦ recognizing mind as a sense organ
✦ discovering the movement of thoughts
✦ discovering the space where this movement occurs
✦ discovering the natural inborn awareness

This course is the third cycle of continuation and the materials of the previous cycle are also available for the new students. Learning meditation is, in fact, a cyclic process in which we return to the same topics over and over again each time dealing with them based on deeper and broader experience, obtaining new insights from the things that already looked known and familiar. The journey inside one's own mind is infinite.