"Maybe the point of our life's journey, our spiritual odyssey, is not conquest or perfection, whether spiritual or worldly, but rather the simple transformation into what we have been all along: flesh-and-blood people in a flesh-and-blood world, feeling what people feel and doing what people do. Returning home to what we are. Could this be enough?"

~ Norman Fischer, from Sailing Home: Using Homer's Odyssey to Navigate Life's Perils and Pitfalls

Basic Mindfulness Meditation

Through regular practice, mindfulness meditation develops self-awareness to improve focus, concentration, and relaxation. This class introduces strategies for turning mundane daily activities into opportunities for living in the present and decreasing the discomfort of boredom and impatience. Discover how bringing greater awareness and less resistance to simple things you do countless times can lead to more consciously experiencing the natural flow of your life.

Finding and Creating Rest

This workshop explores how to identify restfulness. We tend to cultivate habits of finding and focusing on physical and emotional discomfort while overlooking the presence of restfulness. It can be very useful to learn to identify and enjoy naturally-occurring restful states such as relaxation in the body and the pauses between thoughts -- states that occur spontaneously, but which we haven't practiced detecting and savoring. In the same way that physical exercise can improve strength, flexibility, and endurance, mindfulness strategies can gradually improve the baseline level of contentment in ordinary life.

Cultivating Compassion

Can compassion really be learned? Recent research in neuroscience seems to be confirming that it is a skill that can be developed. Learn mindfulness strategies based on these findings that help you begin to realize just how similar we all are beneath the surface and to erode the walls we tend to unintentionally build around ourselves in an effort to feel safe.