Jennifer integrates her training and experience as a therapist with twenty years of meditation practice and Buddhist psychology. She has been influenced by many teachers including Robert Beatty, James Baraz, Tara Brach, Howard Cohn, Leigh Brasington, Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein.   Jennifer has completed Spirit Rock Retreat Center’s Community Dharma Leader Program, a two year teacher training to facilitate meditation classes, non-residential retreats and sitting groups, and Dedicated Practitioners Program, another two year training, at Spirit Rock. James Baraz, Co-Founder of Spirit Rock, is her mentor.

What is mindfulness meditation?

Meditation is the cornerstone, if not the foundation of many spiritual traditions. Insight meditation, or Vipassana, is one of the central teachings of Buddhism. It has continued as a living practice for over 2500 years. At the heart of insight meditation is the practice of mindfulness, the cultivation of clear, stable and non-judgmental awareness. While mindfulness practice can be highly effective in helping bring calm and clarity to the pressures of daily life, it is also a spiritual path that gradually dissolves the barriers to the full development of our wisdom and compassion.

Mindfulness meditation is nothing more mysterious than developing our ability to pay attention to our immediate experience. We are often preoccupied with thoughts about the past or the future or with fantasies. While sometimes such preoccupations may be innocent and harmless, more often they contribute to stress, fear and suffering. Mindfulness practice is learning how to overcome preoccupation so that we can see clearly what is happening in our lived experience of the present. In doing so, we find greater clarity, trust, and integrity. Mindfulness relies on an important characteristic of awareness: awareness by itself does not judge, resist, or cling to anything. By focusing on simply being aware, we learn to disentangle ourselves from our habitual reactions and begin to have a friendlier and more compassionate relationship with our experience, with ourselves and with others.