Late Winter Six-Week Course and Retreat:
Mindfulness, Self-Love and Awakening
6-week course: February 13 – March 20, 2022
Weekend retreat: March 26 – 27, 2022
(Course & Retreat are Online Only)
“Tending to our suffering with wise compassion can free us.”
Henry’s overview of the 6-week course and weekend retreat:
In this 6 week course and weekend retreat, we will be exploring how mindfulness helps us deal with overwhelm, settle in meditation, and learn to be with challenging emotions in ways that can free us, ground us, and open us up more to the liberating insights of awakening. We will explore three key methods:
- breath and body awareness
- parsing out the inner and outer sense channels of present moment experience
- learning to grow from and through the “five hindrances” – namely, common challenges that come up in meditation
A transformation in my relationship to meditation from ‘I should sit today’ to ‘I get to sit today!’ After many years of sitting fairly regularly but not daily, I’m happy to report that I’ve meditated every day since the course began. In general, I feel both more grounded and buoyant, held and free.
Henry is by far the best meditation teacher I’ve found.
This course provided an extremely helpful orientation to meditation. The conceptual framework helped ease me into practice. I feel like I now know why a regular meditation practice is good. I’m inspired to make it a routine. The guided meditations were wonderful. I feel more capable now of guiding myself.
In this first course offered in 2022, we explore methods for settling more readily and deeply into our meditation. This helps us drop into the experience of here and now, and at the same time, giving our attention to present moment experience has the added benefit of turning down the dial on our emotional reactivity. We quiet the mind and calm the heart. We start to find a quality of restfulness, which is also alive, awake and dynamic, and which is the hallmark of mindfulness.
Intrinsic to our growing awareness of here and now, maybe subtly or maybe clearly, is a quality of lovingness. We are learning to love, tend and cherish our experience, whatever it may be, and at the same time be more equanimous about it. This is a beautiful thing to be developing, and can help us in our lives off the meditation seat in many ways.
This course focuses on Mindfulness primarily, as a key tool for opening up more love and self-love. The Original Love program has three other primary areas of growth that it addresses – Support, Flow and Awakening. But the deeper we go in our mindfulness, the more the other three areas start to show up by themselves. Through mindfulness we find ourselves opening more to Support. We also drop into Flow states more readily, and glimmers of Awakening start to show up.
Each of the four Zones of the Original Love program is connected to the other three. So taking any one of our courses can be a rich and fulfilling experience, offering multi-dimensional learning through the path of meditation.
Exciting New Features for 2022
Based on student feedback from 2021, we’re adding new features to our program for 2022:
Guided meditations:
People have really enjoyed Henry’s guided meditations. During the 6 week course, Henry will be sending out 2 audio guided meditations per week to enhance your experience of that week’s teachings. In addition to each week’s class recordings, you’ll have 12 guided meditations at the end of the course that will be yours to keep.
Facilitated community sharing groups:
Facilitated by experienced meditation practitioners selected by Henry, these optional groups will offer a way to build community in an intimate setting (max 10 people per group): a chance to share your meditation experiences, and get more personalized feedback on your practice. These facilitated groups will be scheduled once the course starts, and will happen in-between class sessions.
Connecting with meditation buddies:
We’ll be offering a community forum (similar to a Facebook group but on a different platform) where you can connect with meditation buddies who are in your time zone to build consistency and accountability into your meditation practice. The forum is also a place to generally build community with fellow students in between classes through online discussions.
Schedule:
6-week course:
Sundays February 12 – March 20, 2022, 10am – 12pm MT
Weekend retreat:
Saturday & Sunday March 26 – 27, 10am – 3pm MT
You can take the 6-week course, the weekend retreat, or both. You can also register once the course has started and receive video recordings of any classes you may have missed.
For those of you in different time zones – the 6-week course and retreat are being recorded and you will have access to each recording within a day or two of the event. All of Original Love is online. You will receive a zoom link when you register.
Class sessions and retreat days are live on Zoom, and will include:
- Guided meditations
- Talks
- Q&A
Recordings will be available a few days after each class for all participants, including people who can’t make it live.
Cost:
6-week course: $249
Weekend retreat: $195
Register for both the 6-week course + Weekend retreat: $395
Scholarships
We have a limited number of scholarships available. We don’t want anybody not to be able to take the program because of financial need. If you need financial assistance, please contact Jeremy.
If you have any questions, please contact Jeremy. We’re happy to answer any questions and look forward to having you join us!