This chapter describes the main introductory meditation classes offered at Friends of the Heart and Chandrakirti Centre in detail. It breaks the classes down into their various elements—rites of entry, opening prayers, meditation practice, talks or lectures, and so on—and discusses each as formalized or experiential means of learning that are ritualized to one degree or another. Comparisons are...
This chapter focuses on the specific ritual practices that meditation students learned and performed. Learning through devotional practices like chanting, prostrations and offerings is discussed, as is the example of one participant who decided to take on an offering rite without insisting on prior cognitive understanding. His experience of discovery through doing is a rare but illuminating...
Beginning with interview excerpts demonstrating the different ways in which respondents described their learning experiences, this chapter sets out a framework for understanding various types of learning. It briefly summarizes the learning domains of Bloom's taxonomy, showing how these domains and the learning tasks involved in each relate to learning in meditation classes. Respondents...