Week 1: Preparing for the Practice Week 2: Becoming Aware of our Habitual Ways of Seeing Week 3: Reframing: a New View Week 4: Applying to Everyday Living Week 5: Presenting
In this experiential course you will learn how mindfulness and meditation work to relax the mind and the body. You'll be introduced to photography as a practice, much like a meditation. Through contemplative photography exercises you will become aware of how you tend to see the world with preconceptions, labels, judgments, or an already knowing mind. There is no room for imagination or curiosity. Our view is often narrow. Through photography assignments you'll learn how to widen your view of the world as it comes to you. There is no aggression in this form of photography, no hunting for the perfect image or shooting it with the camera. Perceptions naturally enter as we walk through the world and we invite them in, using intuition and a soft heart to create images. There is a deep sense of gratitude with this creative process. These same principles can be applied to our lives. We cannot control what happens out there, but we can meet it in the same way we learn to take images using photography as a mindfulness practice.