Classical Teachings of Loving-Kindness

Instructor(s): Andrew Olendzki and Susan Morgan

Program Description:

The Buddha offered the practice of loving-kindness as a way of easing the sorrow and anguish of this world. This program takes a comprehensive look at what the early discourses and commentaries in the Pali Canon say about the practice of metta and the other bhahma-viharas (compassion, empathy, equanimity); and how these practices may be translated into our own lives today. This program offers classroom lecture, discussion and  meditation practice.

About the Instructor(s):
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  Andrew Olendzki

  Andrew Olendzki, Ph.D., is a Buddhist scholar, teacher, and writer living in Amherst, Massachusetts. Trained at Lancaster University (UK), the University of Sri Lanka (Perediniya), and Harvard, he was the first executive director at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, MA, and went on to lead and teach at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies for almost twenty-five years. He has also taught at numerous New England colleges (including Amherst, Brandeis, Connecticut, Hampshire, Harvard, Lesley, Montserrat, and Smith colleges), spent two years at the Mind & Life Institute heading up their Mapping the Mind project, and has been a longtime member of the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy. Andrew has contributed chapters to many books on Buddhist psychology, writes regularly for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and is the author of Unlimiting Mind: The radically experiential psychology of Buddhism (Wisdom, 2010) and Untangling Self: A Buddhist Investigation of Who We Really Are (Wisdom, 2016). He is currently creating and teaching a number of online programs as the senior scholar of the Integrated Dharma Institute, and is Professor and Director of Mindfulness Studies at Lesley University.

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  Susan Morgan

  Susan Morgan, CNS, is a psychotherapist in Cambridge, MA. She is a board and faculty member of the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy and contributing author to Mindfulness and Psychotherapy. Susan has a longstanding meditation practice and recently completed a four-year meditation retreat at the Forest Refuge. She has been leading retreats, primarily for caregivers, for the last 15 years. Lovingkindness and mindfulness of the body are integral to her teaching.