August 2021
Gail Brenner, Ph.D ~ Embodied Awakening in Everyday Life: A Weekend Intensive
3-Part Online Intensive
Aug. 27, 28 & 29, 2021
9:00 am – 12:00 noon Pacific Time, each day
Time Zone Converter
Event will be recorded
and emailed to participants after each meeting.
You're welcome to join even if you can't attend all the live sessions.
The Embodied Awakening Intensive offers a deep dive into the practicalities of awakened living. During our weekend together, your everyday human life will be the laboratory as we explore the myth of the separate self and how to live the deepest nondual teachings of infinite oneness.
How do you handle a frustrating encounter with someone? How do you navigate your relationships? What about money, sexuality, work, and life purpose? What do you do with feeling disappointed or hurt or bored? What about needs, desires, and stressful times? We’ll carefully shed the light of awareness on your personal attachments, bringing a loving perspective and clarity to these common life situations.
Through our time together in safe and supportive community, you’ll practice staying deeply grounded in your present moment experience. From this grounded awareness, you’ll learn to meet your programmed patterns and early trauma—the inner critic, long-standing shame, feelings of fear and insecurity—with intelligence and loving acceptance. This is how you begin to shed the feeling of separation so you are free to be fully alive in your life as it is right now.
We’ll use specific practices and experiments in our sessions and between sessions to study the living reality of non-separation. We’ll study being in life open, without defenses, and free of the mind’s need to control. This is the foundation you need for openhearted awakened living.
Here’s what we’ll cover in each 3-hour session:
Friday: No self, no problem; slowing down, resting in inner stillness. We’ll begin to investigate the sense of separation that appears through early trauma and conditioned patterns;
Saturday: Finding our ground in spacious, still awareness; navigating the mind, emotions, and body, especially when we’re triggered;
Sunday: Practical everyday living in surrender and intimacy with Life.
Come prepared to explore beyond your comfort zone. You’ll discover the brilliance of embodying love, awareness, understanding, compassion, and deep connection with all…available in every moment.
“I have found your approach really works for me. It gives me hope, and I actually believe that that I can live, think and feel differently, no matter what the situation.”
~F.C.
You are welcome to email Gail directly at gail@gailbrenner.com with questions.
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.
Sliding Scale: $60 to $105
Some Partial Scholarships Available
Please Register Early if you can.
September 2021
Marlies Myoku Cocheret ~ Women Only: Delighting as the Sensual Silence of the Female Body
‘Woman’ so deeply knows what is possible in the form as love.
That is her connectedness speaking, her feminine intuition.
In this three hour woman-only retreat, we will explore how much we can allow our bodies to be receivers of delight.
Did you know that female bodies love to move, give, taste, touch, dance and delight? The more we allow our bodies to be receivers of the silence of our being, the more silence and delight melt together as one warm delicious female body.
You are invited to join and discover the ecstasy of the female body.
Marlies Myoku Cocheret de la Morinière has devoted her life to the Beloved. She brings a potent invitation into the deep Silence that we are. The kindness of her gentle and direct teaching guides us home like a lighthouse. Marlies has been offering satsang and retreat since 2000 when Adyashanti asked her to teach. She lives in Santa Cruz, California and works internationally as a psychologist, Hakomi therapist and Tantric Educator.
Marlies is interviewed in the book Awakened Relating. A Guide To Embodying Undivided Love in Intimate Relationships by Lynn Marie Lumiere, and in the book Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Wisdom by R.M. Robinson.
“With Adya, the bottom fell out. I deeply knew I am not this body, mind, thought, psyche, and I am also all these things as well. There was no in and/or out. All is One.”
Suggested donation: $15 to $35
No one turned away for lack of funds.
Please register early if you can.
The event will be recorded and emailed to participants within a week.
To check your local time, use a tool such as: Time Zone Converter
Jeannie Zandi ~ Humility
There is much talk about humility in spiritual circles. What is it and how do we recognize it? What is the difference between humility and self-abasement?
Jeannie’s gift for inviting people to join her in resting and rooted presence evokes a deep meeting with oneself and reality. Within that, Jeannie’s humor and iconoclasm serve to bring people into an understanding that is beyond the intellectual. Through silent and guided meditation, spontaneous talks and exchange with participants, Jeannie will host a space of clarity and warmth where the richness of relating can be explored safely and your innermost questions met fully. Come join us!
Jeannie Zandi is the director of Living as Love, a nonprofit organization dedicated to seeding a culture of the Heart on the planet, inspiring, teaching and supporting people to live from their essence as Love. A year before the birth of her daughter, Jeannie was plunged into a dark night of the soul that culminated in a radical shift of consciousness. She is known for her fearless clarity, tender mercy toward humanness, and a juicy, poetic and often humorous style that draws from Advaita Vedanta, Sufism, Christian mysticism and the ongoing revelation of fully engaged living.
Suggested donation: $15 to $25
No one turned away for lack of funds.
Please register early if you can.
The event will be recorded and emailed to participants within a week.
To check your local time, use a tool such as: Time Zone Converter
Lynn Marie Lumiere, MFT ~ The Wounded Seeker: Meeting Trauma on the Path of Awakening ~ 4-Part Intensive
4-Part Online Intensive
Sept. 13, 17, 20 & 24, 2021
10:00 am – 12:00 pm Pacific Time, each day
Time Zone Converter
Event will be recorded and emailed to participants after each meeting.
You're welcome to join even if you can't attend all the live sessions.
Although our true nature is not affected by all that we experience, our human body and mind are impacted by experiences that result in trauma. Any experience, especially early in life, that is outside our window of tolerance, can overwhelm our nervous system and create chronic stress patterns in the body/mind. These stuck patterns can affect our spiritual awakening process by making it more difficult to relax, trust, be in the moment, and allow everything to be as it is—all of which are necessary for awakening and embodiment.
This intensive will explore how to meet trauma on all levels: body, mind, spirit and relational.
Part 1: The Most Important Thing: Awakening to what is already whole and free as the foundation of healing our human wounding. Includes guided meditation.
Part 2: Somatic Awakening: Building regulation and resilience in our autonomic nervous system so we can feel safe enough to be present in the body and in the now. Includes experiential exercises.
Part 3: Releasing the Past: Working with releasing traumatic memories and the conditioned beliefs and behavior patterns that go with them. Includes doing Flash Technique.
Part 4: Awakened Relating: Exploring how relationships trigger our relational wounding and trauma and how to be with those triggers in a way that includes awakened awareness, the Source of Love.
It is recommended to attend in person, if possible, and to do the suggested practices between sessions. You are also welcome to register and attend by listening to the recording.
Lynn Marie Lumiere, MFT is a nondual psychotherapist, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner and author. She offers knowledge and wisdom gained from over 30 years of experience both as a therapist and with nondual spiritual teachings. She is the author of Awakened Relating:
A Guide to Embodying Undivided Love in Intimate Relationships and The Awakening West: Evidence of a Spreading Enlightenment.
For more information se: www.lynnmarielumiere.com
Sliding Scale: $70 to $120
Some Partial Scholarships Available
Please Register Early if you can.
Georgia Simone ~ Awakened Healing: Become The Space Where Healing Takes Place
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.
Through gentle exploration and somatic awareness you can cultivate a new way of being with your most challenging patterns. No longer a victim of the push and pull of inner disturbance, you can step forward with greater confidence, knowing that whatever comes your way, you embody the resilience and the capacity to meet and integrate it.
You can expect a deeply held space where you’ll be invited to slow down, tune in, and track your present-moment experience. 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.
Bio:
The first leg of Georgia Simone’s path exposed her to the teachings of Advaita Vedanta, which provided her with the foundation she needed to dis-identify from pain and suffering. However, despite a growing freedom, a significant bypass took place, as her orientation towards transcendence reinforced her deep disconnection from Life. Upon seeing this, her focus became addressing the unresolved trauma that had woven its way into every fibre of her being.
After many years of wading through this marshland of conditioning, she now shares her discoveries with others. She believes that the spiritual path is as much about arriving here fully - as an embodied human being - as it is about dissolving into the infinite source that makes this life possible. How can we die to the absolute, while deeply embracing our relative human experience? This Living inquiry is her Life’s prayer.
Suggested donation: $15 to $25
No one turned away for lack of funds.
Please register early if you can.
The event will be recorded and emailed to participants within a week.
To check your local time, use a tool such as: Time Zone Converter
Ellen Emmet ~ The Awakening Body: 3-Day Online Retreat
We start at 9:00 am Pacific Time / 5:00 pm UK time / 6:00 pm Central European Time.
In this three day retreat we will explore our direct experience and let it reveal its essential reality of Awareness. Our particular focus is the body, allowing it to be our mirror and our pathway, our prayer and our altar, and ultimately the shining expression of this shared identity.
There will be time for questions and conversation each day as our inquiry deepens.
There will be a 20-30 minute break during the 3-hour sessions.
In our daily lives, the body is seldom tasted as it is. We rarely listen to its tactile and energetic language or allow it to simply unfold and blossom in its natural original intelligence.
In fact we have deeply disconnected from this level of experience and even when we turn back towards the body, we come with agendas and ideas that we project upon it, forcing the body into a new mode, only to perpetuate a felt identification with a body, that may seem improved, but in fact remains a mere projections for the separate self that seems to live in its center.
With silence as our main shrine, we will share gradually deepening guided tactile meditations along with simple postures, free movements, breathing, and visualizations. In this contemplation, resistances and chains of bodily contractions, the habits that create the illusion that our identity is limited, located and separate are revealed and free to unfold as they are: feelings and sensations that come and go in Awareness. We come to feel that our true identity is an open field of vibrating openness,limitless and ever-present.
Gently and effortlessly, in deepening waves, the body is slowly realigned with this felt understanding. It flows as a living substence with more and more ease and transparency and reflects and expresses the ever-present freedom and silence that is its invisible source.
Ganga Ma will be joining us and weaving her sacred chanting into the sessions.
About Ganga Ma: www.soulfulsilence.com
Ellen’s deepest intuition was confirmed when she met her teacher, Francis Lucille. In his presence, she recognized the eternal, limitless and universal nature of our shared reality. Over many years, her understanding deepened to touch all levels of experience. The process of aligning and stabilizing all aspects of her life to this understanding has continued to unfold since then.
Today, Ellen offers meetings and retreats in The Awakening Body, sharing a direct exploration of reality sourced in the tradition of Kashmir Shivaism and self-inquiry as transmitted through Francis Lucille and his teacher, Jean Klein. In addition, she has a private practice as a psychotherapist and facilitator of Authentic Movement. Her background of Dance Movement Therapy and Transpersonal Psychology is shaped by the non-dual understanding. Ellen lives in Oxford, England with her husband, Rupert Spira.
Sliding Scale: $60 to $105
Some Partial Scholarships Available
Please register early if you can.
The event will be recorded and emailed to participants.
To check your local time, use a tool such as: Time Zone Converter
October 2021
Swami Sarvapriyananda ~ The Yoga of the Awareness-Self
The talk will introduce the ancient tradition of Advaita Vedanta. We will take an experiential journey into the very heart of our existence and seek to discover our real self. The talk is designed around meditation techniques drawn from the Upanishads and later Advaita texts.
Swami Sarvapriyananda has been appointed as Minister and Spiritual Leader of the Vedanta Society of New York, and assumed his duties here on January 6, 2017. He is a Nagral Fellow for 2019-20 at Harvard Divinity School. Prior to this, he served as assistant minister of the Vedanta Society of Southern California for 13 months, beginning on December 3, 2015.
Swami joined the Ramakrishna Math and Mission in 1994 and received Sannyas in 2004. Before being posted to the VSSC’s Hollywood Temple, Swami served as an acharya (teacher) of the monastic probationers’ training center at Belur Math. He has served the Ramakrishna Math and Mission in various capacities including being the Vice Principal of the Deoghar Vidyapith Higher Secondary School, Principal of the Shikshana Mandira Teacher Education College at Belur Math, and the first Registrar of the Vivekananda University at Belur Math.
Suggested donation: $15 to $25
No one turned away for lack of funds.
Please register early if you can.
The event will be recorded and emailed to participants within a week.
To check your local time, use a tool such as: Time Zone Converter
Stephan Bodian ~ Realize Your Inherent Wakefulness ~ 2-Part Online Course
Oct. 9 & 16
9:00 am – 12:00 pm, Pacific Time
Time Zone Converter
Event will be recorded and emailed
to participants after each meeting.
You're welcome to join even if you can't attend all the live sessions.
"Just remain as you are, without question or doubt. That is your natural state." ~ Ramana Maharshi
Once we have an initial recognition that our thoughts and feelings do not in fact constitute who we really are, the next step is to realize our “natural state” of inherent wakefulness, which is never lost or gained and never sullied or disturbed by the thoughts and feelings that arise. This direct recognition, beyond the mind, of our essential spiritual nature is the breakthrough awakening to which the nondual spiritual traditions point.
Yet many seekers read the books and watch the videos but never come to this clear recognition, which is traditionally transmitted, and then confirmed, by direct pointing in the presence of a teacher. This two-day workshop/retreat, on successive Saturdays, will offer meditations and pointing-out instructions to introduce you directly to your natural state—what Tibetans call the “nature of mind” and Zen calls your original face before your parents were born. Once you know who you are without question or doubt, you have experienced a major shift in identity and can’t completely revert to your old, dysfunctional way of being again.
Stephan Bodian is a teacher in the nondual wisdom tradition of Zen, Dzogchen, and Advaita and the founder and director of the annual School for Awakening, an intensive six-month program of exploration and study. 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).
More about Stephan Bodian: www.stephanbodian.org
Sliding Scale: $50 to $90
Some Partial Scholarships Available
Please Register Early if you can.
Georgia Simone ~ Awakened Healing: Become The Space Where Healing Takes Place
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.
Through gentle exploration and somatic awareness you can cultivate a new way of being with your most challenging patterns. No longer a victim of the push and pull of inner disturbance, you can step forward with greater confidence, knowing that whatever comes your way, you embody the resilience and the capacity to meet and integrate it.
You can expect a deeply held space where you’ll be invited to slow down, tune in, and track your present-moment experience. 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.
Bio:
The first leg of Georgia Simone’s path exposed her to the teachings of Advaita Vedanta, which provided her with the foundation she needed to dis-identify from pain and suffering. However, despite a growing freedom, a significant bypass took place, as her orientation towards transcendence reinforced her deep disconnection from Life. Upon seeing this, her focus became addressing the unresolved trauma that had woven its way into every fibre of her being.
After many years of wading through this marshland of conditioning, she now shares her discoveries with others. She believes that the spiritual path is as much about arriving here fully - as an embodied human being - as it is about dissolving into the infinite source that makes this life possible. How can we die to the absolute, while deeply embracing our relative human experience? This Living inquiry is her Life’s prayer.
Suggested donation: $15 to $25
No one turned away for lack of funds.
Please register early if you can.
The event will be recorded and emailed to participants within a week.
To check your local time, use a tool such as: Time Zone Converter
Gail Brenner, Ph.D ~ Deep Trauma Healing: Tending the Ground for Awakened Living: A 6-Part Course
6-Part Online Course
Oct. 15, 19, 22, 26 and Nov. 2 & 5, 2021
9:00 am – 11:00 am Pacific Time, each day
Time Zone Converter
Event will be recorded and emailed
to participants after each meeting.
You're welcome to join even if you can't attend all the live sessions.
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.
You are welcome just as you are with your fears, doubts, shame, and questions. 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. There will be plenty of time for Q&A with Gail.
- Sessions 1 and 2: We’ll cultivate a sense of safety for those hidden, cut off parts of ourselves to come out into the light of loving awareness. This is what heals shame and separation.
- Session 3: We’ll attend to the nervous system and the body to stay rooted in present moment awareness.
- Session 4: We’ll practice honoring and embracing difficult emotions to give them the loving attention they need.
- Session 5: We’ll learn to challenge limiting beliefs and notice repetitive thought patterns without getting caught in them.
- Session 6: We’ll explore devotion, surrender, and the practicalities of awakened living.
And we’ll discover, over and over, the ground of being, your spacious true home that has never been touched by any life experiences.
Stress and worry…people pleasing…persistent relationship struggles…proving yourself through accomplishments…the inner critic…these longstanding patterns are profound invitations into liberation from the sense of separation. Together, we discover being fully alive in our humanness as we expand into overflowing gratitude, vibrant joy, and deep knowing of all of Life.
Gail is offering a free information session on Tuesday, October 12 from 9-10am Pacific. You’ll learn more about the course, and there will be time for Q&A. Please click here for details and to join the session.
If you have any questions or would like to know more about this course, please email Gail directly at gail@gailbrenner.com.
“I am now experiencing longer moments of pure awareness and joy. No longer a slave to external circumstances and inner chatter. Loving life the way it is.” ~Susan R.
"Your work is a bridge between practical daily life and Supreme Reality.” ~Henrique N.
"I love the meetings; I feel so safe and connected in the group.” ~Judy F.
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.
Sliding Scale: $110 to $170
Some Partial Scholarships Available
Please Register Early if you can.