Events for Sunday, June 30, 2019

10 am to 12 noon (Pacific Time - San Francisco, CA, USA) Time Zone Converter

Awakening is always already here, whether we recognize it or not. And, there is an unfolding, which can become the next natural stage of human development. If our true nature is already here, does awakening only happen unintentionally, or is there a way to intentionally realize and live from this? It seems clear that our will, the “doer,” our best effort, our attention and our ego can’t awaken.

So what is it that can awaken? It seems it is only awake awareness that can know awake awareness. But where, oh where, is this awake awareness that can know? In The Way of Effortless Mindfulness, I explore the ways that local awake awareness can know spacious awake awareness, and then welcome everything as interconnected love. This unique “method-less method” does not ask the “doer” to do anything. Instead, it begins by asking your already awake awareness to detach, unblend, or “unhook” from its identification with the small separate sense of self. Effortless mindfulness is a unique form of direct realization and inquiry.

In The Secret of the Golden Flower, it is said that the sublime truth is “turning the light of awareness around.” In Tibetan Buddhism, this is called “child awareness returning to mother awareness,” “looking back at your own face” or “flashing on awakened heart-mind.” The key is to be able to feel awareness immediately separate from thinking and return home to open-hearted awareness.

In this live online session, we will explore practical ways of experiencing local awareness unhook from the separate sense of self. Then, instead of getting caught in a pure awareness witness or not-knowing, we learn to shift into the embodied “not-knowing that knows.” This open-hearted awareness is a new operating system, which has the capacity to liberate traumatic karmic patterns and heal shadow parts.

Loch Kelly is author of the newly released guidebook, The Way of Effortless Mindfulness. He is a psychotherapist and awakening teacher affiliated with Adyashanti. He is the founder of the non-profit Open-Hearted Awareness Institute, whose goal is to make compassionate awakening more available to everyone. After a spontaneous awakening early in his life, he went on to explore how to access, abide in, and help others live from open-hearted awareness. In the early 1980’s, Loch was awarded a fellowship while at Columbia University to study forms of non-dual meditation in Sri Lanka, India and Nepal with teachers from a variety of traditions, including legendary Dzogchen and Mahamudra masters, such as Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche.

He has also worked extensively with the homeless, with families of 9/11 victims, and as an Inter-spiritual Chaplain at Union Theological Seminary. Loch has collaborated with neuroscientists at Yale, UPenn and NYU in the study of how awareness training enhances compassion and wellbeing. He is known for his warm sense of humor, and his practical, non-dual pointers, which help people shift into the freedom that has always been their true nature. His previous book, Shift Into Freedom: The Science and Practice of Open-Hearted Awareness, was awarded two “Best Books of the Year Awards.”

www.lochkelly.org

Suggested donation: $15 to $25
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