Where Mindfulness Takes Root: Exploring the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. A Five Week Series

Description

Today mindfulness is taught in hospitals, schools, and workplaces, where it has helped countless people meet their lives with more ease. Yet mindfulness did not begin as a wellness technique to alleviate stress or improve focus. Its roots reach back more than 2,500 years to the Buddha's teaching in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, known in English as the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. In the dharma, mindfulness is one strand of the Noble Eightfold Path, woven together with ethics (sīla), concentration (samādhi), and wisdom (paññā), held in compassion (karuṇā), and practiced for the sake of liberation.

Where Mindfulness Takes Root, a five-week series hosted by Delaware Valley Insight (DVI) and taught by Resident Teacher Aishah Shahidah Simmons, invites you to explore the four places where mindfulness can be established: the body, feeling tones, the heart-mind, and the dhammas. In these turbulent times, this ancient practice offers a way to meet our lives as they actually are, with steadiness and care. Each session includes guided meditation, dharma teaching, and reflection. Open to all levels of experience. Sessions will not be recorded, and you are warmly welcome to join for as many as you are able.

The five sessions, held online via Zoom, are scheduled as followed:

• Session 1: Tuesday, January 19th, 7pm - 8:30pm

• Session 2: Tuesday, February 2nd, 7pm - 8:30pm

• Session 3: Tuesday, February 9th, 7pm - 8:30pm

• Session 4: Tuesday, February 16th, 7pm - 8:30pm

• Session 5: Tuesday, February 23rd, 7pm - 8:30pm

Sliding Scale for the Series: $50 - $200

No one turned away for lack of funds

For those wishing to spend a day in practice with the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, DVI will host and Aishah will teach Rooted in the Storm, a hybrid daylong retreat open to all on Saturday, February 27, 2027 (10:00am to 4:00pm ET), in person in Philadelphia, and online, will offer extended time for practice together. The day will include sitting, movement, and chanting meditation, dharma teaching, and relational practice in the field of noble silence and mindful talking.

Teacher Bio
Aishah Shahidah Simmons (she/her) is a Black feminist lesbian survivor-healer. She is a Sufi Muslim-raised Buddhist practitioner, Insight meditation teacher, and filmmaker-writer. She has practiced vipassanā since 2002, beginning in the S. N. Goenka tradition, where she trained for 17 years before continuing in the Insight tradition, with over a year of silent retreat practice in the United States and India. Aishah serves as Resident Teacher at Delaware Valley Insight and is a trainee in the 2025–2028 Spirit Rock and Insight Meditation Society Residential Retreat Teacher Training Program, with her primary teachers Tuere Sala, DaRa Williams, and Shelly Graf. Her award-winning survivor-centered cultural works, NO! The Rape Documentary, and love WITH accountability, illuminate truth-telling, healing, and non-carceral responses to harm. Learn more: https://aishahshahidahsimmons.com