The present moment is the place from which your entire reality is created. Your work, relationships, home life and, day-to-day experiences all spring forth from your thoughts, feelings and actions that occur in a string of infinite moments.bBut how many of us are truly aware of the thoughts, feeling and actions that give birth to our lives? How many of us have taken the time to cultivate and grow one of the critical skills that is required to create the life and world we dream of? In-depth mindfulness training is perhaps one of the most important steps you can take on your path of spiritual growth and evolution. And this is why we’re thrilled to invite you to participate in our upcoming 7-week training and mentoring program with world-renowned mindfulness teachers, Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach.  You’ll learn valuable mindfulness skills and tools, develop a regular meditation practice —all while you experience The Power of Awareness to transform your life and the world.

The Power of Awareness

Our journey together starts with an overview of the work we'll engage with over the next several weeks. After an introductory video segment, we'll share some of the specifics related to the design and structure of the course, what you can expect, and our recommendations on how to move through the next seven sessions. Let's begin!

Course Introduction

The Power of Awareness - Session 1

In this class we’ll start with the basics: how to establish a practice right where we are. We’ll continue by learning how to cultivate and develop the foundational practice of mindfulness of breathing. As we begin to explore mindfulness, it may be helpful to start with a definition. Mindfulness is paying attention to the present moment without judgment, and is characterized by interest, friendliness, and clear seeing. | Start this session by watching the Class 1 instructional videos, then allow a few days to explore the home-practice guidelines we’ve outlined before you move on to Class 2. Also, remember to leave enough space after you finish the Class 2 content so that you have several days of home practice time before beginning Class 3 next session.

Understanding Mindful Presence

We would like to recommend a way to enter into your daily home practice. In the next few days, meditate twice a day for five minutes. If you miss a session or need to sit for a shorter period, that's OK—just keep going the next day. Feel free to sit on a chair or cushion, and if you become uncomfortable you can always adjust your posture. | If you are new to meditation, try opening to the experience of your body and senses. Notice the ever-changing play of experience with mindful, loving presence. As you move through the two sitting periods each day, notice how each is different. If you're interested, you may also revisit either of the guided meditations from Class 1. | In addition to sitting for a minimum of five minutes twice a day, we ask that you begin the practice of writing in your journal after each meditation session. Please include what you noticed during your sitting, what challenges or insights arose. | Here are the audio-only versions of the guided meditations we lead in Class 1. We've made these available separately so you can easily access and practice them anytime you want.

Arriving Where We Are

Deepening Our Capacity for Presence

We would like to recommend a way to enter into your daily home practice. In the next few days, meditate twice a day for five minutes. If you miss a session or need to sit for a shorter period, that's OK—just keep going the next day. Feel free to sit on a chair or cushion, and if you become uncomfortable you can always adjust your posture. | If you are new to meditation, try opening to the experience of your body and senses. Notice the ever-changing play of experience with mindful, loving presence. As you move through the two sitting periods each day, notice how each is different. If you're interested, you may also revisit either of the guided meditations from Class 1. | In addition to sitting for a minimum of five minutes twice a day, we ask that you begin the practice of writing in your journal after each meditation session. Please include what you noticed during your sitting, what challenges or insights arose. |Here are the audio-only versions of the guided meditations we lead in Class 1. We've made these available separately so you can easily access and practice them anytime you want.

Mindfulness of Breath

The body is a wonderful gateway to the world of sensations. In this class we'll learn how to bring a mindful and kind presence to the realm of bodily sensations so we can further explore opening our awareness in all domains of our lives.

You Are A Part Of Everything

As we move further into the first session, we would like to suggest that you establish a regular time and place to meditate for twenty minutes or more each day. Remember, if you miss a session or need to sit for a shorter period, practice when you can and keep going the next day. You can use a chair or cushion, and if you become uncomfortable, mindfully adjust your posture. Start each meditation session by bringing a kind attention to your body just as it is. | In your twenty-minute daily practice for the rest of this week, allow yourself to focus and relax with the movement of the breath. Be mindful of any strong sensations that arise in your body, and practice relating to them with a gentle attention and without judgment. | As we mentioned in the previous home-practice recommendations, you can revisit any of the guided meditations from Class 2. Remember to write in your journal after each sitting and to include what you noticed, what challenges or insights arose.

Connecting with Our Body

Learning To Stay

Recognizing Sensations

At the end of each session, we will share with you the question-and-answer period from the live retreat where the content for this training was recorded. The individuals at the retreat experienced the same content that you're experiencing in this training. These are the questions that arose for them after completing this session.

Questions and Answers

Through our combined experience of teaching and working closely with students, we've come to recognize a series of common questions and concerns that typically arise for individuals engaged in these practices. We felt it would be valuable for you to hear our responses to those questions.

Common Questions from Practice

We began Session One by exploring the importance of the breath, and then we expanded that to an awareness of our bodily sensations. In the beginning of Session Two, we will learn how to open the field of mindfulness to include emotions and feeling states, and then we'll broaden that exploration to our thoughts and thought patterns at the end of this session. | We would like you to continue the schedule of exploring the instructional videos for one class then allowing a few days to practice before moving on to the second class in the session. This pattern will continue through all twelve classes in this online training.

Recognizing Our Emotions

The Power of Awareness - Session 2

Here you will find the guided meditations that were offered in Class 3. You may revisit any of those practices as you see fit.

Awareness of Feelings

Naming Feelings

Mindfulness of Feelings

Our thoughts can feel so powerful and real at times. It's natural to feel trapped or controlled by them. In this class we will look at ways of bringing a mindful, heartfelt presence to include the realm of thinking as a way to continue our exploration of bringing awareness to all realms of our lives.

Lost in Thought

Here you will find the guided meditations that were offered in Class 4. You may revisit any of those practices as you see fit.

Mindfulness of Thoughts

Thoughts Are Real But Not True

The Arising of Thoughts

Working With Beliefs

Questions & Answers

Our focus up to this point has been developing our awareness and presence with our body, sensations, emotions, and thoughts. From here, we'll begin to look at bringing our awareness into challenging circumstances and share strategies for awakening mindfulness and compassion when we're in the thick of difficulty.

Remembering to Remember

The Power of Awareness - Session 3

Light R.A.I.N., or pausing for brief periods during the day, is as important in awakening us from trance as the more full-blown R.A.I.N. practice is. This exercise is a wonderful way to begin to recognize your emotional reactivity. The steps are essentially the same as the full practice, just abbreviated. | Start by pausing and taking three full breaths; allow your inner experience to be as it is. Then, investigate with kindness whatever feelings are most predominant. After a minute or two, resume your activity and notice if there is a more natural presence in your awareness. When you have some time, write in your journal about what you noticed.

R.A.I.N. Meditation

The Challenge of Self-Compassion

The Self-Forgiveness Scan, is designed to help you identify the ways you may be blocking or withholding self-forgiveness. | To start this exercise, take some moments to become still and to relax any obvious areas of tension. Then take a few long, slow breaths to help you arrive fully in your body. Now ask yourself, “Is there anything between me and being at home with myself?” Feel free to change the wording in any way that helps you identify the presence of self-blame. Then pause and see what comes up in your body and mind. What stories of wrongdoing have you been telling yourself; maybe stories of letting others down or of performing poorly at work. Are there ways you do not meet your standards as a parent, partner, or friend? If something arises, simply acknowledge it and offer it forgiveness. You might gently place your hand on your heart and whisper, “Forgiven, forgiven” or “It's OK.” Recall your intention to not push yourself out of your own heart. Then inquire again, “Is there anything else I'm holding against myself?” Continue in this way until you've identified whatever self-judgments you've been carrying. End the scan by offering yourself a wish for your own peace of heart and mind. Then take some moments to write in your journal anything you notice about the process of self-compassion.

Expanding Our Capacity for Self-Compassion

In this class we will be applying the strategies of mindfulness and compassion to trauma, strong fear, and the overwhelming feelings that can arise with great loss.

Finding Our Resources

Resourcing

Leaning Into Fear

Bringing R.A.I.N. into Fear

We are at the halfway point in our training. Over the past few weeks we've been building the skills for bringing more mindful presence into all domains of our lives. We began by establishing a practice and identifying our breath. We then brought our awareness into the body and to bodily sensations before moving on to applying that same awareness and presence to our emotions, thoughts, and difficult situations. | Now we will take the stable foundation of mindfulness you've been building and learn how to deliberately cultivate lovingkindness. We will also learn how to develop the practice of forgiveness. This session will conclude with expanding the practice of forgiveness to others and learning the initial steps of not pushing other people out of our hearts. | As you've been doing all along, continue the schedule outlined in the first session: watch the videos for the first class, allow a few days to engage with the practices, then move on to the instructional videos for the next class.

The Art of Loving-Kindness

The Power of Awareness - Session 4

When you practice lovingkindness, begin by focusing on whoever most easily opens you to lovingkindness. Then expand your lovingkindness to include others. As the course continues, you can more fully integrate the spirit of lovingkindness into your mindfulness practice. | In addition, practice lovingkindness or the forgiveness practice in real-world situations. As you move through your day—in traffic, at work, in the marketplace, or at home—explore how you can offer your lovingkindness to those around you. If any areas of your life arise that call for forgiveness—for yourself or for others—spend some time working gently with the forgiveness practice.

Loving-Kindness Meditation

Training in Forgiveness

Forgiveness Practice

We've spent some time in the previous class exploring the practice of forgiving ourselves. The next step in this process is learning how to extend our forgiveness to include others in our life.

Forgiving Others

As always, you are encouraged to explore any of the guided meditations we've presented so far. You can find the exercises from Class 8 below. | We would also recommend that you explore a short exercise that you can bring into real-world situations. It's called On-the-Spot Tonglen. Tonglen is a Tibetan word that means “giving and taking.” In this exercise, we will acknowledge the difficulties of others and offer those people our love and awareness. |Here's how you do it. If you recognize that someone you meet is having a hard time—whether you know that person or not—pause and take several deep breaths. During those breaths, silently breathe in his or her pain and breathe out relief. If you feel yourself resisting, turned off, or afraid of the pain, do this mini-tonglen for yourself and all those like you who are having difficulty opening to pain.

Loving-Kindness Practice for Others

Holding Others in Our Heart

As always, you are encouraged to explore any of the guided meditations we've presented so far. You can find the exercises from Class 8 below. | We would also recommend that you explore a short exercise that you can bring into real-world situations. It's called On-the-Spot Tonglen. Tonglen is a Tibetan word that means “giving and taking.” In this exercise, we will acknowledge the difficulties of others and offer those people our love and awareness. | Here's how you do it. If you recognize that someone you meet is having a hard time—whether you know that person or not—pause and take several deep breaths. During those breaths, silently breathe in his or her pain and breathe out relief. If you feel yourself resisting, turned off, or afraid of the pain, do this mini-tonglen for yourself and all those like you who are having difficulty opening to pain.

Widening the Circles of Compassion

Through this training, your awareness and presence have deepened. A natural result of that deepening is the growing desire to understand your true identity. This session, we'll explore the question “Who are you?” and continue our work by further developing an understanding of our own spacious awareness.

The One Who Knows

The Power of Awareness - Session 5

Experiment with allowing a sense of spaciousness to infuse your practice. You can further deepen your practice by taking the last ten minutes of a sitting period to rest in “being” and allowing whatever presents itself to be held with “choiceless” awareness and equanimity. | In addition, try the practice of listening with a “mind like sky” while sitting outside, in a restaurant, or in a busy place. Notice how opening to a sense of spaciousness affects your experience.

Resting in Spacious Awareness

Choiceless Awareness

The field of relationship is a wonderful place to practice our awareness and loving-kindness. In this class, we will learn how to bring the skills of mindfulness to our relationships and how to use our relationships as a lens through which to gauge the quality of our experience and presence as we move through the world.

Planting the Seeds of Goodness

Our course began with the inward work of connecting with ourselves. We started with our breath and body, and we slowly worked our way to ever-expanding realms of experience. Each class brought a new and deeper expression of our mindfulness in the world. In these final two classes we'll touch on our capacity for bringing an openhearted presence to daily living, and then we'll learn how to carry the gifts we've been cultivating into the world. | Week Six marks the last two of the twelve classes. Our format will change next week as we offer a slightly different way to engage with and deepen your practice. Please keep this in mind when you transition from this week to next week's coursework.

Arriving in Our Lives

The Power of Awareness - Session 6

Maintain your mindfulness practice each day by practicing any of the exercises we've explored. | In addition to your formal sitting practice, look for ways and times to bring the following three “informal” exercises into your day. | The first exercise is the practice of pausing. Identify several activities or events in your day when you can pause for a few moments. Examples could be after a phone call, before responding to e-mail, before getting out of the car, before eating, or while stopped at a red light. Use these moments to take a few conscious breaths. Bring your awareness into your body and awaken your senses to physical sensations, emotions, and sounds. Stay with your present experience for a few moments and then resume your activity with mindfulness. At some point in the day, write in your journal about what you noticed as you re-entered activity after pausing. | The second exercise is to take a few moments at the end of your day and identify three things you are grateful for. You can journal about these things, or you could find a gratitude buddy and send her or him a daily e-mail listing the three things you're grateful for. | Finally, we'd like to encourage you to revisit the Light R.A.I.N. practice we introduced in Session Three, Class 5. This is the practice of pausing for brief periods during the day in order to bring a fresher quality of attention into your awareness. Start the Light R.A.I.N. practice by taking three full breaths, allowing everything to be as it is. Then, investigate with kindness any and all feelings that are most predominant. Finally, resume the activity you initially paused, and notice if there is more natural presence. | With all of these short exercises, it's beneficial afterward to turn to your journal and write down what you've noticed.

Standing Practice

The Negativity Bias

Gratitude Practice

In our final class you'll learn how to extend and embody your mindfulness for the benefit of all, and you'll explore how to sustain the presence and awareness you've been cultivating through and beyond this training program.

A Transformation of Our Consciousness

In the remaining days of this session, continue to work with your thirty-minute daily practice. At this point, listen to whatever practice calls to you, and sit with that. At the end of your meditation, take a minute to reflect on when you can more fully embody mindfulness and loving-kindness in your daily life, and how you might do so. | Finally, take a few minutes during the next several days to appreciate what you have learned in this course and how it can serve you. You can also add periods of lovingkindness, forgiveness, and compassion practice whenever you feel it would support your meditation. Note any answers, insights, or responses to these reflection questions in your journal.

Offering Our Gifts

Sustaining Our Well-Being

Extending Our Gifts To The World

Our time together began with an introduction to the work we were to embark upon. Let's finish this portion of the course with a brief conclusion. In the following video segment, we'll look at where we started, where we are now, and where we go from here.

Course Conclusion

Congratulations on working your way through the previous twelve classes and the majority of the training we've designed for you. Over the coming week, please find a three-hour block of time that you can spend on the Half-Day Retreat. | Half-Day Retreat | Overview | We felt that it was important to create an opportunity for a larger stretch of practice during which you can dedicate yourself to presence and awareness in a different way than you have over the previous six sessions. It is our experience that this retreat will broaden your awakening and deepen the teachings that you've encountered in this course. | Preparing for the Retreat | While preparing for this retreat, inform your family members or loved ones that you'll be engaging in an extended period of meditative practice, and ask them to support you in creating the space and stillness you'll need. During your half day, it would be wise to silence your cell phone and eliminate any distractions that may be present in your practice space. | Because this course is being delivered online, the temptation to surf the Internet is a real possibility. There will be plenty of time after your retreat to check your e-mail or read a news feed. Allow this period to be a time of practice and stillness for yourself. | The material is divided into three segments of approximately forty-five minutes each. With the scheduled breaks and walking-meditation sessions, you will need a little more than three hours to complete this retreat. We encourage you to stick to the schedule and move through the content as we've presented it. | Before you begin the retreat, it may be wise to organize a few things so that you have what you need on hand. We recommend you find a comfortable place to engage with the instructional segments. Have your preferred meditation cushion or chair nearby, as we will move from instruction directly into periods of sitting. If you've been using your online journal within this course, you can continue to do so. Otherwise, have your journal or notebook and pen handy. | Finally, we will explain the practice of walking meditation in the first video segment and then invite you to engage in two periods of walking meditation. It may be helpful to determine the location of your walking meditation now, before we begin the retreat. This location can be indoors or outdoors and would ideally be ten to thirty paces long. | This retreat is a rich time, and we always enjoy bringing individuals through this experience. We're pleased that you're here, and we hope you benefit from this period of practice.

The Power of Awareness

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