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Jon Bernie, author of Ordinary Freedom and his latest, The Unbelievable Happiness of What Is, is a contemporary spiritual teacher who offers a compassionate, heart-centered approach to awakening.
He has four decades of practice and study in the Zen, Theravada Buddhist and Advaita traditions (with Jean Klein and Robert Adams), and was formally asked to teach by Adyashanti in 2002. Jon’s teaching focuses on returning the attention to the already enlightened state that lies at the core of our human existence. He is also an experienced healer and teacher of somatic embodiment, trained in the Alexander Technique, Zero Balancing, Self Acceptance Training and the Qigong system of Dr. Yu Penxi. Jon works closely with individuals to facilitate awakening and deep emotional healing, and leads classes, intensives and retreats in the San Francisco Bay Area and nationally. He also does intensive, one-on-one work with individuals both in person and by phone or video chat.

Larry Robinson is something of a modern-day Renaissance man. Moving easily from the meditation hall to the halls of power, Larry is a long-time Zen practitioner, a published poet, a potter, a retired eco-psychologist, and a former Green Party city councilman and mayor of Sebastopol, known for starting off city council meetings with poetry. He is also the founder and producer of the critically acclaimed Rumi’s Caravan, a performance troupe dedicated to restoring the soul of the world through reviving the oral tradition of ecstatic poetry. Larry has been practicing meditation for 50 years, primarily in the Zen and vipassana traditions, and is a member of the Occidental Laguna Sangha in Sebastopol, a Zen gathering in the lineage of Suzuki Roshi.

“We are living through a time of societal and ecological collapse. Many of us are overwhelmed with feelings of grief and helplessness in the face of such enormous loss and suffering. It requires great courage to keep our hearts open at such a time. The Buddhist practices of Brahmaviharas ─ compassion, loving kindness, sympathetic joy and equanimity ─ offer a pathway to avoiding the twin perils of despair and naive hope while still being fully engaged in the world.”

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.

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.

“Meditation is not simply the art of sitting quietly on a cushion; it is the art of seeing deeply, being fully present and alive. Meditation in action is about unifying body and mind in the present moment, and living more and more consciously from the deepest truths we may have realized. If we are living our spirituality and not simply thinking about it, we are invited to BE the light of compassionate presence, authenticity, and love in our ordinary daily lives.”

Invited to teach by Adyashanti in 2004, Dorothy Hunt is the spiritual director of Moon Mountain Sangha, and the founder of the San Francisco Center for Meditation and Psychotherapy. Dorothy is the author of Ending the Search: From Spiritual Ambition to the Heart of Awareness, Leaves from Moon Mountain, Only This! She is a contributing author to several books on nondual awareness and psychotherapy as well as a featured spiritual teacher in Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Wisdom.

Pamela Wilson is a Bay Area treasure who has been sharing satsang for twenty years around the world, honoring the sage within everyone, and the absolute oneness of All That Is. Her own teachers included Lester Levinson (The Sedona Method), Robert Adams and Neelam. She evokes through dialogue, inquiry and her very presence the qualities of unconditional love and radical acceptance. She endears herself to her audiences with her playful and light-hearted humor, combined with compassion and deep understanding of what it is to be human.

Pamela is celebrated for her ability to open the heart, call forth our own inner sage, and create a space in which long-held struggles and notions about one’s identity relax. And she speaks the truth of non-duality, that the universe is one undivided whole. Featured in the book Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Wisdom, Pamela is at her best in heart-felt dialogue, so please come and bring your questions!

As we awaken to the ever-present awareness and bring that directly to our psychological, emotional conditioning, wounding, and sense of separate identity, it is transformed, healed and dissolved. Awareness is the only solution that has the power to dissolve our sense of separate identity, one thought, feeling, belief, sensation and perception at a time. We cannot do this from the conditioned mind. Only from the vantage of awareness can we fully meet all of our human experience and see it for what it truly is—passing phenomena taken to be a self. This requires recognizing the presence of awareness and inquiring from/as that into our experience as it arises and then falls away back into its source. In this webinar, Lynn Marie will share her presence and clarity, as well as wisdom derived from many years of experience as a nondual psychotherapist, through teaching, guided meditation and dialogue.