What Meditation Alone Doesn’t Heal: Guided Meditation and Buddhist Talk with Amma Thanasanti

Описание: Meditation is powerful, but it cannot heal everything on its own. In this evening’s teaching, Amma Thanasanti will explore three structures that meditation alone cannot reliably repair: trauma (overwhelming experience held in the nervous system), attachment wounds (relational strategies formed when relational safety and attunement weren’t consistently available), and narcissistic wounding (the deep sense that something is fundamentally wrong with us). One can have genuine awakening—profound insight and presence—and still carry these wounds. This talk will explore why this happens, what is needed for these deeper wounds to heal, and how understanding this distinction can transform both our personal practice and our communities. When we don’t understand what meditation can and cannot do, communities can fragment as trauma gets activated, attachment patterns collide and the extremely painful wound of narcissism gets triggered. In the absence of teachings that address these dynamics, we can lack a framework for both understanding and healing. Join us for meditation practice and a conversation about what completeness requires—not just insight and awakening, but the wholeness that allows both ourselves and our communities to truly heal.

Amma Thanasanti brings to her teaching 47 years of meditation practice, 28 of those years as a Buddhist nun. Amma returned to lay life in 2017. She founded and leads Awakening Truth, an organization devoted to early Buddhist teachings and adaptive strategies to make those teachings both trauma-informed and accessible for contemporary practitioners. She is the creator of the Integrated Meditation Program, which addresses what meditation alone cannot heal.

For further information about Amma and her teachings, see https://awakeningtruth.org

Insight Meditation Community of Charlottesville (IMCC) is dedicated to the practice of mindfulness awareness, also known as Insight or Vipassana Meditation. IMCC provides a full program of weekly meditation, ongoing classes, daylong programs, and retreats.