True to Life: Seeing Beyond Thought
Six Day Workshop on Sundays
Pre-Requisites: None
In contemplative photography, our inspiration is to establish a relationship with unconditional visual perception. Sometimes we have experienced moments of seeing which are vivid, brilliant and mind-stopping. We want to see our world this way, pure and genuine, unconditioned by our previous ideas and thoughts about what we see.
We call this experience of seeing, direct or unconditional perception.
Unconditional perception does not arise from thought. It arises from a gap in our mind’s stream of endless thinking.
In fact, the birthplace of direct perception is this gap in our thinking mind.
Through the essential practice of Recognizing Direct Perception, we connect with our visual world as it is, free from the filters of expectation, preference, and manipulation. We can shift our orientation from our usual ways of categorizing what we see, to staying still in a state of non-thought as the perception occurs.
Assignments train us to bring eye and mind together in a single moment with clarity of intention.
The visual practices and assignments in this course have been developed over forty years of teaching and refining the essential nature of the journey of Seeing Beyond Thought.
Michael Wood is the founder of Miksang Contemplative Photography, and with Julie DuBose has shared these teachings and written numerous books to support this way of seeing and being in our lives.
The Heart of Perception: Feeling the Moment
Six Day Workshop
Pre-Requisites:
True to Life: Seeing Beyond Thought Workshop
Heart of Perception is a natural evolution from Making Contact. Once we start to feel like we are finding our sea legs, and we’re starting to feel okay with the fact that we don’t have to know what everything is, then we can be out in the world, appreciate it, and relax with that.
It feels very joyful and provocative and so we relax further. As we relax further our awareness goes out further from the central reference point of me and what I think about everything. And when that happens, we start to experience living, breathing moments. We are able to recognize the visual qualities of our world changing and feel the delicate visual formations around us.
The Workshop includes explorations into Static vs Non-Static Perceptions, Delicate Visual Formations, The Third Element and Visual Haiku, Quiet Moments and Visual Motifs.
Form, Space and Moments: Further Dimensions of Perception
Three-Four Day Workshop
Pre-Requisites:
True to Life: Seeing Beyond Thought Workshop
The Heart of Perception: Feeling the Moment
In order to further refine our relationship with our visual world, it is very helpful to clarify and deepen our awareness of the aspect of perception which we call space. As part of our conventional way of looking at the world, there is a tendency to look at objects, which we usually fix into place through thinking, labeling and associating. We tend to move from one object to the next as we navigate our experience. Seldom do we notice the visual space in which objects appear and the space around or between things. This workshop introduces methods of relaxing our gaze and our fixation on things so that we can actually experience, notice and express the qualities of space in our world. Through exercises and assignments our images begin to express our experience of visual dimensionality rather than our customary emphasis on form and its qualities.
Cutting Loose / Floating Free
Six Day Workshop:
Pre-Requisites:
True to Life: Seeing Beyond Thought Workshop
The Heart of Perception: Feeling the Moment
When the form becomes one with the mind and the discipline is transparent we can let the arrow fly. We feel the target instinctively and through a subtle realignment we launch on contact. There is no need to reexamine or contemplate. Our experience of seeing and its expression become a seamless stream, effortless.
To help stabilize our experience of the first instant of perception, we need to collapse our experience of seeing, understanding and expressing into a single moment, free of hesitation. And that single moment rests on two qualities—confidence and genuineness.
The assignments in this course allow us to further let go of our habits and patterns involved in seeing—even those associated with our previous Miksang training. We can cut loose even from our Miksang database and see without memory.
Master Class: The Five Qualities of Perception
Five Day Workshop
Pre-Requisite: All previous Miksang classes
The Five Qualities of Perception Workshop presents the unconditional nature of visual perception manifesting as five distinct, perceivable qualities. We explore how these qualities express themselves in our being and in our experience of the perceptual world.
As we become free of concept in our visual experience and we can spontaneously form the equivalent of our perception, the whole world is our playground.
Our visual world appears to us out of the blue, unconditionally manifesting as particular constellations of visual qualities which we can feel, recognize, experience, and appreciate.
We are not navigating based on what we like and dislike or choose to ignore. We know and understand what we feel and see, and each quality has a taste of its own.
We become acquainted with each quality by viewing and absorbing image examples which imprint the sense of them upon us.
Then we can go out in the world, free of agenda and solidity of this or that, and be magnetized by what we see and photograph it or not, depending on our unique predilections which are basic to our makeup, our basic pre- language, pre- thought, 100% natural state of being. This style becomes manifest when our relative filters and cultural bias become transparent.
To find out how to become a Miksang Instructor click here
The Miksang Institute has no relationship to nor any affiliation with any other contemplative photography organizations or teachers, and only workshops taken with Miksang Institute Teachers are counted as pre-requisites for any Institute programs.
