Akincano Marc Weber (Switzerland) is a Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist. He learned to sit still in the early eighties as a Zen practitioner and later joined monastic life in Ajahn Chah’s tradition where he studied and practiced for 20 years in the Forest monasteries of Thailand and Europe. He has studied Pali and scriptures, holds a a degree in Buddhist psychotherapy and lives with his wife in Cologne, Germany from where he teaches Dhamma and meditation internationally.
Teaching is essentially translation. It means ferrying an authentic contemplative tradition across choppy waters into our psychological and cultural realities, losing neither the vision nor the truth of what we know to be our immediate experience.
Dolls, loss, love and the narrative cure. Kafka consoles a girl with a series of letters about a lost doll. An excursion into four different and indispensable tasks for any contemplative practitioner:
(i) Calming & stabilzing
(ii) Dis-identification and decentering
(iii) Deep Inquiry and thorough contemplative Investigation
(iv) The bigger Picture – gaining an universal perspective on the personal
Satipaṭṭhāna as map of experience.
Somatic - hedonic - affective - discursive 'raw-materials' in these four categories.
Relationship between these channels.
Citta and the particular challenges with the states of the mind as objects of practice.
Establishing a somatic vocabulary for your moods.
The ending of something as an easy connection point to citta-states.
Breakdown of types of ignorance in Buddhist teaching. Unpacking some of the terms avijjā and moha. Sketching their different use in the old texts despite their occasional synonymous use.
Excursions into conditionality.
What happens when I'm *not* mindful?
(i) Loss of fluency in our attention —
(ii) Loss of the here & now
(iii) Loss of the space: collapsing into things.
(iv) Loss of embodiment
(vI) Loss of the other
Hindrances – a glance at the list of troubles and how they manifest .
The different starting points of Buddhist and Western psychology. The Buddhas vision of freedom
Different types of troubles: soteriological hindrances (samyojana), afflictions (kilesa), inflations (āsava).
A detailed look at the 5 nivāraṇa, the five psychological obstacles to the cultivation of stillness as the basis for insight and understanding. The phenomenology of their manifestation.
Upādāna in different Buddhist Teachings:
– Clinging as fuel for renewed becoming (punabbhava)
– Clinging in the 5 aggregates (khandha)
– Clinging in Dependent Arising (paṭiccasamuppadā)
– Clinging as four specific forms:
(i) kāmūpādāna – clinging to and identification with sensuality (“Seeking” experiences)
(ii) diṭṭhūpādāna – clinging to and identification with views (“Being right, being competent“)
(iii) sīlavaṭūpādāna – clinging to and identification with virtue, practices and ritual (“Having the
right technique“)
(iv) attavādūpādāna – clinging to and identification with doctrines of a self / Self (“Being
someone”)
