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Addressing trauma and how we hold it is essential to seeing through the illusion of the separate self. Join this powerful 6-session course as we create a safe and supportive healing community to do this deeper work that unfolds on the path of awakening.

Unexamined trauma is at the root of your conditioned patterns and keeps you feeling stuck, limited, and unable to be free. You long for freedom and maybe have had a taste of your true nature, but somehow these patterns keep getting played out automatically in your mind, emotions, relationships, and choices in life. You feel caught in the painful sense of separation…from yourself and the sacredness of all of Life.

Through practices, inquiries, and experiments during and between our sessions, we’ll learn to untangle these patterns and find our way home to the ever-present, relaxed space of inner aliveness.
Gail Brenner, Ph.D. is your guide on this journey. She is a clinical psychologist and lover of truth with a fire that burns brightly. She brings to this work years of experience with individuals and groups and is known for creating the sense of safety and trust needed for this deeper exploration. She is the author of three books, including the award-winning, The End of Self-Help.

If our mind identifies completely with “personhood,” we remain in a prison of our own making and miss what frees us to simply BE. In experiencing Presence, we may feel unbound and temporarily experience peace. However, if our mind imagines “it” must remain as “only Awareness,” it may continually judge its human expressions, challenges, and conditioning, creating endless suffering. A nondual view does not choose absolute over relative, but sees the play of both as a single flowing. Please join us for a retreat that will include silent meditation, experiential exercises, dharma talks, and discussion. Celebrating Halloween on the last day of our retreat invites a reflection on the masks we wear and project onto apparent “others.”

Dorothy Hunt serves as spiritual director of Moon Mountain Sangha, teaching at the invitation of Adyashanti. She is the author of several books of dharma and poetry, as well as articles on Nondual wisdom and psychotherapy.

Welcome to The Holding Space.

A space where we can gather together and BE exactly as we are

A space where the full spectrum of your human experience is invited

Calm, anxious, open, closed,

ALL is welcome here.

It's in this gentle embrace that everything can start to unravel. It's in this open space that we can begin to unwind the strategies that no longer serve us. This is the space that early mis-attunement failed to foster, the space where love blooms and new life can emerge. This is the space where all that quivers and shakes can come to rest, and where all that contorts can untwist into greater alignment. As you awaken and refine a more subtle way of Being and Being With, you can slowly but surely become the space – the container and the field – where healing takes place.
Georgia Simone found freedom in the teachings of Advaita; however, a significant bypass took place that reinforced a deep disconnection from life. After wading through the marshland of conditioning, she now shares her discovery with others. This living inquiry is her life's prayer.

The desire to relieve our personal suffering is often the driving force behind our seeking. But once we begin to discover our natural state of pure wakefulness, we may realize that we have been called to awaken by a deep longing of reality to awaken to itself through us. The limitless heart that originates the search is the very reality that we aspire to discover. What began as our individual journey of spiritual awakening turns into a love affair with Being itself.

In this two-part retreat, on successive Saturdays, we will explore meditations and contemplations that peel back the veils and open us to connect with the sacred dimension of Being, which is always available right now in our very own heart. This connection—more accurately, this recognition of our undivided nature—is the ultimate medicine for the loneliness, alienation, and fragmentation so common in our 21st-century lives.

Stephan Bodian is a teacher in the nondual wisdom tradition of Zen, Dzogchen, and Advaita. Trained as a Buddhist monk for a decade, he studied Advaita for many years with Jean Klein and received Dharma transmission from Adyashanti in 2001. His books include Wake Up Now; Beyond Mindfulness; Meditation for Dummies; and Buddhism for Dummies (with Jon Landaw).

Open Circle is pleased to be offering biweekly facilitated iRest sessions. Developed by meditation master Richard Miller, iRest is a modernized form of the ancient practice of Yoga Nidra or “yogic sleep”. It is a restorative practice that promotes deep healing, health, and well-being. This 45-60 minute-long group will be gently led by Kate Foley, an iRest trained facilitator. It will consist of a full 30 minute guided meditation, along with the opportunity to share and connect with community. The meditation is done lying down, and is an invitation for your nervous system to truly rest: nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be; simply a time gifted to yourself to relax and to be supported. Join as often as you like, and keep yourself nourished and balanced during these challenging times. No prior yoga experience necessary.

"When we gather and look into the essence of everything we are truly functioning as a Sage. Not being fooled by appearances or forms (except occasionally), we look deeper into the Nature of everything! Inviting it to know itself and return to its balanced naturalness and wisdom. As forest and mountain sages have lived for millennia, honoring nature and all animal and human beings equally, we also honor our inner wild beings, emotions, sensations and the body itself as wondrously wise and equal to the cosmos."

Join with Pamela and your fellow sages in being curious and listening within!

Pamela evokes through dialogue, inquiry and her very presence the qualities of unconditional love and radical acceptance. She is celebrated for her ability to open the heart and create a space in which long-cherished struggles and notions about one’s identity relax.

By cultural norms and conditioning, this time of transitioning to a new year prompts a reflection of the past and a view into the future. Yet, past and future are created intervals of time that exist only in the mind. When do you experience the past or the future? Right now as you think about them.

No matter what the calendar says, there is only this moment, now, free and uncaused, completely fresh and new, emerging from and infused with love. In any moment, we can turn away from our minds and be right here to experience our full aliveness.

Come and join this two-day retreat as we explore the possibility of consciously living from our true essence.
Gail Brenner, Ph.D. is your guide on this journey. She is a clinical psychologist and lover of truth with a fire that burns brightly. She brings to this work years of experience with individuals and groups and is known for creating the sense of safety and trust needed for this deeper exploration.