Words Become Worlds, Composing Verbal Fabrication (online course)

Words Become Worlds, Composing Verbal Fabrication is a four-week online meditation course led by Insight Meditation teacher Nathan Glyde. It meets on Wednesday evenings and is the second module of Weaving the Fabric of Experience, a series that explores three types of fabrication: bodily, verbal and mental. It suits meditators interested in how speech, inner dialogue and the stories we tell shape what we experience, and in the Buddhist teaching of dependent origination that sits behind it.

What to Expect

The course looks at words as something that creates, not only describes. Language, tone and even silence shape relationships and influence outcomes. They also form our inner landscape: the thoughts that direct us, the evaluating, narrating, arguing and reassuring that run through the mind.

This is verbal fabrication, the creative power of speech and thought. The focus goes beyond avoiding harm in how we communicate. It is about understanding how words can construct or dissolve experience. Left unchecked, inner speech can spiral into harsh self-criticism and into stories that hold the mind in fear, resentment or confusion. Well guided, it becomes a precise instrument of liberation. Directed thought and evaluation can be used to talk oneself into kindness, to gather into depth, and to develop wise choices.

Across the four weeks you will practise noticing this process as it happens and learning to guide it with care. The course is held online in the evening, one session each Wednesday.

About Nathan Glyde

Nathan Glyde is an Insight Meditation teacher recognised by Gaia House in the UK. He has practised and studied meditation since 1997 and has taught on retreats since 2007. In 2004 he co-founded SanghaSeva, whose retreats bring wisdom and compassion into ecological and humanitarian service.

With Zohar Lavie, Nathan writes the materials for DependentOrigination.org and runs every part of it. It is a body of work on the Buddha's teaching of dependent origination, the understanding that all things arise reliant on other causes and conditions. The two describe it as a practical exploration of how everything leans, looking at how stress depends on thirsting and how seeing such dependencies opens a path to freedom. Their aim is to make this deep teaching accessible to all. Nathan and Zohar also offer retreats, online drop-in groups and meditation sessions.

Before You Go

The course is offered through Gaia House and takes place entirely online, so you can join from wherever you live. It is one part of a three-module series. The bodily fabrication module comes first and the mental fabrication module, on attention, follows, though each module has its own focus and its own set of sessions.