A Path to Presence

Introduction

A Path to Presence is an experiential course inviting you to radically reorient towards everyday life and awaken to greater ease, gratitude, wisdom, and love.

The teachings and content will provide a clear, cohesive map supporting you to enter a practice space within community for eight weeks—regardless of how busy your life may be. You will learn to make room for your deepest intelligence to inform everything that you do. All of this is easier (and loads more fun) when we do it together! 

The structure of the course is based on the recognition that our inner lives and innate wisdom develop gradually—a bit like a slow cooker recipe. We might have no idea what’s happening at first and may even feel doubtful about the results, but with time and consistent application, we eventually detect a wonderful aroma.  

The learning and benefits rely on a “gentle/firm” commitment to daily meditation, mindfulness practice, self-inquiry, and written reflection.

This course is open to beginners and dabblers in meditation and/or contemplative practices as well as to experienced practitioners seeking to deepen their practice. All are welcome.

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We’ve all had fleeting moments of connection, being, or what may feel like an unfiltered aliveness, free of our typical interpretations, preferences, defenses, and struggles. These moments are tastes of something precious and natural within us. There are many words that uniquely refer to this state of consciousness, like presence, being, awareness, love, and more. We can learn to deepen our relationship to our innate presence and discover the wonders that it may offer. 

At times, our struggles may be challenging to understand and heal. While we may know that something feels “off” with our state, mood, thoughts, etc., and we may think we know what our problem is, the inner landscape is often quite hard to see clearly.

We can develop our capacity to see clearly, to allow for the uprooting of the causes and conditions of struggle, and to make room for new and beautiful intelligences in the heart and mind that are waiting to awaken. 

What to Expect

• Weekly live 75-minute sessions

• Half-day retreat

• Clear thematic content, short readings, practices, and instructions for daily use

• Optional private meetings

• High-quality guided meditation recordings

Weekly Sessions

The Wednesday night sessions offer a chance to receive the benefit of guided practice, teachings, and community. Sessions include thirty minutes of guided meditation, small and large group discussion based on a weekly theme, and occasional brief talks or presentations. Throughout the course, you'll share what you're learning and experiencing and hear about other participants’ journeys. Part of what makes this course so powerful is the community that grows among everyone in it.

Weekly Material

• Week 1: Orienting to the Ordinary ~ We begin by investigating our tendency to endlessly “tumble forward” through the many moments that add up to our lives as a whole. We learn to slow down and cultivate simplicity, gather attention, and develop an experiential understanding of presence in everyday life. We open ourselves to the hidden satisfaction in the mundane or the extraordinary in the ordinary.

• Week 2: Embodiment ~ Peace in the mind begins with peace in the body and our relationship to our inner body experience. We explore the relationship between mind and body and the “ecosystem” of thoughts, emotions, and sensations. We become mindful of the body—our everyday movements, postures, and the reality of our somatic experience during all moments of the day. We discover the relationship between attention, sensory experience, our attachment to thinking, and the relief when we let go.

• Week 3: Feeling Tone, Part 1 ~ We begin to explore awareness of "feeling tone"—the pre-emotional, pre-conceptual experience nestled in every moment before we think or judge. We learn to register and skillfully savor pleasant experiences (no small thing!), include them in our framework of reality, and cultivate joy.

• Week 4: Feeling Tone, Part 2 ~ We begin to heal our relationship to unpleasant experiences as they arise in the present moment. We discover the astonishingly liberating effect of learning to shift our relationship to difficulty.

• Week 5: Wise Response ~ We examine reactivity, and we learn about the connection between mindfulness, equanimity, and agency—our capacity to choose new pathways of communication and action. We study the relationship between presence, emotional intelligence, and responding to challenges. We more closely examine the "bigger space" of awareness and the profound way in which that impacts our lives, our behavior, and, consequently, the lives of others.

• Week 6: Retreat ~ There is nothing quite like the structure of meditation retreat, even for just a half-day, to refresh our minds, bodies, and hearts. We learn to deepen our understanding of our struggles and our potential to awaken. We take a break from “real life” and spend a half-day together nurturing all we have been learning while taking refuge in community.

• Week 7: Presence of Heart ~ We explore the wise and loving nature of the heart and notice how our inner development help us view the world differently, serve, and become a gift to others. We “upgrade” our thoughts from those sponsored by conditioning towards ones generated by loving-kindness, compassion, equanimity, and joy.

• Week 8: The Refuge of Practice ~ In the final week of the course, there is more space to create and discover one’s own formal practice in a way that meets one’s regular life. We discover how the teachings have landed within us and can continue to blossom over time.