Yearlong Meditation Course begins August 16th, 2020

You’ve been a yoga practitioner for a while. You want to have a consistent meditation practice at home, but it’s not happening. You either try to sit every day, feel bored with your practice or have given up altogether. You’re not looking for a patriarchal, rigid, or dogmatic practice that was designed for monks and nuns. You want a meditation practice that enhances your life, rather than takes away from it. 

If you have deep aspirations for your spiritual life and there’s a fire inside you that longs to feel more peaceful, compassionate, and loving toward yourself and others, I can help. 

Sometimes, trying to force yourself to meditate makes things worse. You might do it, check it off your list, but still feel like you’re protecting your ego and distant from other people. Without guidance, and continually learning to let go of our thoughts and expectations, we become even more tightly wound and stressed-out. In an attempt to make our world more peaceful, we actually become less patient with others and repulsed by the messy-ness of life.  

That’s not the point of meditation.

I invite you to reconsider everything you know about meditation, and try a whole new way of looking at your practice, your body, and your spiritual aspirations. 

Over the course of one full year, I help you create, maintain and explore an embodied, somatic meditation practice that you not only make time for every day, but that you crave. 

I meet with our group every Sunday afternoon for one hour on ZOOM to give a guided meditation, dharma talk, and Q&A.  Then I send you weekly audio recordings to listen to at your own pace and keep you inspired. 

I transform confused, perfectionist, and uptight empaths into grounded, warm meditation practitioners who change the world by embodying love. 

Let your body lead.

Meditation isn't about ignoring your body or achieving idealized states of consciousness. 

In fact, meditation is about letting your body be your guide. 

And a meditative lifestyle ISN’T about depriving yourself, being strict, or putting on an air of “better than others” because you practice. 

It’s not about improving yourself. 

When you try to improve yourself through getting more, doing more, or being “better” -- it all eventually collapses. You might feel better for a while, but your body will eventually fight back.  You’ll get tired, or hungry! 

What the world really needs is not more “perfect” people, but more relaxed people. 

And that happens by listening to your body. 

By letting your body lead -- in every aspect of your life -- including your meditation practice, you take a bold stance against patriarchy, sexism, racism, and capitalism. You move toward nirvana. 

Your body becomes your ally, not your enemy. 

“It’s so worth it.”

I hear my students say this year after year. 

It’s a big commitment though, and I imagine you have doubts. Many of my students go back and forth about this decision. Maybe FREE youtube videos, or shorter programs are better for you. Maybe you want to study with a world-renowned teacher who has a PhD and is on the NY Times Bestseller list. Maybe you worry that meeting online with ZOOM will feel cold or impersonal. 

But truthfully, the community that gets created in my yearlong meditation course has always, every single time, become like family. You will share things with them that you’ve never shared with anyone. You will take emotional risks, be bold, get shy, cry, laugh, and doubt yourself. 

But you’ll do it in the best possible company - in the company of 30 other people (max) who are on a journey just like yourself, who you get to know slowly over time and create a deep and lasting relationship with if you choose. You won’t be judged, you won’t be frowned upon, or criticized. You may even feel what true self-acceptance means for the very first time in your life.

The same is true if you feel over-committed with other coursework, your job or your family.  

I’m able to show you how carving out 30 minutes a day, and 1-hour a week, actually makes you feel like you have MORE time. 

On top of that—most of my students report feeling even more productive in the time they spend doing other things!

Meditation is magical like that. 

WHAT YOU GET

WEEKLY LIVE CALL TO WAKE UP YOUR RIGHT BRAIN

You will learn about the concept of touching enlightenment in the body, which is very different from many other styles of meditation which focus on touching enlightenment, or finding enlightenment with the mind. 

Rather than using mantras or visualizations we will practice inhabiting the body with all its tension and all its desires. Doing this wakes up the right brain, which helps quiet the thinking mind, and can bring an incredible sense of relaxation and harmony to our life.

These practices, which I call somatic meditation, or embodied meditation, help us truly offer compassion to ourselves… and that changes us on a fundamental level. 

We then start to see other people as they really are. Not just as we think they are, or how we think they should be. It's very healing, and the people closest to us in our lives will notice a dramatic difference in how we interact with them. They will likely experience us as being more understanding, more approachable, more loving and more honest.

COMMUNITY

By having a group of other practitioners, and a teacher, who you can learn from in such a structured, regular way (once a week for a full year) there are nuances to the practice, the posture of meditation, and the relevance of meditation in everyday life that just can’t be seen in shorter, or more self-contained study. 

DHARMA TALKS

In addition to learning the how and why of meditation, you will ALSO be learning the best of what I’ve distilled from ayurvedic medicine and healthy living. Each week you will get a PDF with research that correlates to each of the lifestyle topics listed below. These things (diet, personal care products, daily routine, psychology) can really help us move through blockages that keep us from practicing more regularly or truly enjoying our practice. 

You’ll see how you can lighten your load and be more relaxed overall. 

A more relaxed you, feeling less overwhelmed, helps prevent many health issues as we age.

HAVE YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED

Each week on ZOOM there are 15 minutes dedicated to Q&A. 

You can ask me anything under the sun. No topic is off-limits and I love sharing what I’ve learned in my 20 years experience.  

Inevitably, we will talk A LOT about how as modern people we think we have to keep busy to have value -- and that resistance to meditation is a very common thing, even for “advanced practitioners.” 

STUDY TIBETAN BUDDHISM THROUGH A MODERN LENS

Each week we will focus on a chapter from Touching Enlightenment by Reggie Ray. As our intellectual roadmap for the course, we will use this book to help us study the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism and how they intersect with our modern lives. 

You’re a good fit if you…

• Really want to meditate every day, but can’t seem to do it on your own

• Have outgrown your old lifestyle and know it’s time for a change

• Feel stressed about time management

• Can’t figure out why you keep having communication issues with people you love

• Would rather feel centered and grounded than anxious and depressed

• Feel worn down by all the atrocities of the world

HOW IT WORKS

Week-by-week, I take you through an embodied meditation practice I call the 5 Essentials. Each week builds on the next, and I add nuances about posture, attitude, alignment, emotions, and much more. You ease your way into discovering your basic goodness and relaxing your tension.

Sunday Afternoons 3:00 - 4:00 pm ET on ZOOM

• Each Sunday afternoon we will gather online and practice somatic meditation together. We will start in functional silence (no chit chat upon entering, so that it feels similar to entering a meditation hall). I will guide you through a 25 minute reclined or upright practice. Then I will give a 15-minute dharma talk, and we will finish with 15 minutes of Q&A. The dharma talks this year will be very practical. Please see the detailed list of dharma talks in the table below.

Audio Recordings every Monday morning

• Each Monday morning I will send you a link to an audio recording of me reading a chapter of Touching Enlightenment by Reginald Ray. There are about 52 chapters, so we will cover about 1 chapter a week for the entire year. This book will be our main intellectual guide (ie different but complementary to our embodied experience). I will ask that you listen to the audio reading prior to each Sunday’s class. The recordings will be around 20 minutes each week. 

Free access to the Wednesday night Yin Yoga Class for 1 whole year!

• Your registration fee for this course includes full access to the Wednesday night online yin yoga classes, as well as the online library of recorded yin yoga classes. (a $49/month value). 

Recordings of all the Guided Meditations

• Every Sunday class is also recorded, so if you ever need to miss a week you can catch up by watching the recording at any time. The class recordings will be uploaded to a password protected page on my website, where you can access them anytime during the year. 

The Dharma talks teach you how to create a lifestyle that supports your practice, rather than distract you from it. 

You’re ready to invest…

1 Year | $2800

Or $235/month for 12 months

Things you will need for this course:

• A thick meditation cushion, bench, or chair such that you can sit with your hips higher than your knees

• 2 yoga blankets, or any 2 thick, sturdy, soft blankets that can either be folded and used under your sitting bones to give you more height when sitting, or to wrap around you like a shawl when you are cold.

• 2 yoga blocks

• A journal

The course is a total of 260 hours. 

• 52 contact hours (one hour a week on ZOOM for 1 year) * 

• 182 non-contact hours for your daily 30 minute home meditation practice (you’ll have the choice of listening to a recording or practicing in silence)

• 26 hours of homework - listening to half an hour a week of audio recordings of me reading Touching Enlightenment

*Once we know the size of the group and the exact date when we can start meeting in person, I will choose a location within 20 minutes of Doylestown, PA.  It will most likely be at a student’s home or a yoga studio. I’m planning on being very conservative about when we start in person and it’s likely that it won’t be until January 2021. But we will wait and see what the CDC says and I will make a decision that is sure to protect us, and our health, as much as possible. If you live too far away to attend in person, it’s no problem at all! I will always continue to livestream the class on ZOOM no matter what. 

You can walk away in one year with what takes many people their whole lifetime to figure out: how to be happy and at home in yourself no matter where you are or what is going on around you.

My Guarantee:

Once you make the commitment to join the course, full payment is required whether you pay in full or choose the payment plan. If you decide to withdraw from the course early, you will still be responsible for completing the payments on your payment plan. If you cancel your registration before August 7th, 2020 you will receive a full refund minus a $50 processing fee.