Meditation is a practice with many methods and techniques for:

calming our bodies + minds

opening our hearts

deepening concentration + focus

contemplating life questions

changing habitual tendencies

and awakening the freedom, ease and creativity of our natural state of being.

Historically to learn meditation you would need to seek out a contemplative tradition and work directly with a teacher who would help you understand the path of meditation, and give you practices to help you walk the path in your own life. Now with meditation apps and guided meditations readily available, we have easy access to meditation practices, but many of us lack the support of a teacher or guide and don’t have a clear map of the path of meditation.

This workshop style course is designed to provide a map of the meditation path as well as:

Introduce you to the five main styles of meditation (calm-abiding, concentration, heart-based practices, inquiry and open-awareness)

Help you understand the intention of each method and how to practice it

Help you understand how the various methods and techniques fit together and support each other

Provide a fun, non-judgmental learning environment where you can try things out, ask questions and explore

Give you the opportunity to work with a teacher with an extensive background in various meditation techniques

Far from being a set of rules or doctrine that we must follow, the Bodhisattva precepts act as koans, inquiries that we are empowered to take into our life. They ask us to consider, what does love look like in this situation? In this relationship, how do I work with my anger? Who is it who wants to gossip, or inflate one’s self? How can I show up authentically in the world?

With the final five grave precepts, pure precepts and refuges as our guide we will explore the heart of what it means for each one of us to live a life of integrity and love. We will explore how each precept touches the personal, interpersonal, global and secret dimensions of our living.

The format for the class will be part teaching, part discussion.

Mindful Eating is embodied, conscious eating. It’s eating with awareness, attention, presence, self-compassion and care. While eating is something that we all do, many of us have developed a strained and painful relationship with eating and food. Awareness is the most sustainable way to change unhealthy habits around eating and re-establish a balanced and appreciative relationship to food.

So much of our strained relationship with eating comes from the ways we perceive and experience our bodies. This is a body conscious class series, where we learn to embrace and inhabit our bodies with kindness, compassion and love.

🌱 Are you ready to take your meditation practice to the next level?

🌱 Do you want to reinvigorate or deepen your experience in meditation but are unsure how to do it?

🌱 Are you curious to learn more about meditation and try out different methods and techniques?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, this course is designed for you.

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What is the sacred feminine? A zen student may ask. And for good reason, aren’t we taught in Zen to transcend duality?

Chozen Roshi would often say: Zen practice invites us to become completely male, completely female, both and neither.

Still, cast under the cloud of patriarchy, for millennia the sacred feminine and the women ancestors have remained hidden and obscured within the Zen Buddhist tradition.

Or have they? What if their hidden-ness is itself an invitation to descend into the depths? To encounter the mystery? To share in the open secret?

To persist in loving another is one of the most rewarding and challenging aspects of human life.

Taking our primary relationship as a spiritual path revisions what relationship actually is and renews our sense of its possibilities. This requires skills and outlooks that may go against the grain of our tendencies.

With these outlooks and skills we can navigate partnership, its ups and downs and in-betweens, as practices of presence, compassion, non-duality and kindness–rekindling the magic of connection and the mystery of love’s play.

This 5 part class will be a buffet of contemplation, conversation, and practices to nourish, refresh and deepen our relationships in their various forms: mates, lovers, partners, colleagues, teacher-student and more.

Our template for exploration will be both parts work ( voice dialogue, IFS) and Buddhist teachings.

The Dharma teachings remind us to regard experience as dream. Could it be that our thoughts, ideas, views of separation–are a dream?

The dream-like nature of reality is a teaching on the empty yet apparent nature of experience. It is a teaching of liberation and love.

During this sesshin we will explore the nature of experience through the lens of dream. We will be encouraged to bring awareness into our night-time experience & dreams, and we will open our awareness to the deep + subtle manifestations of this waking dream.

What is a dream made of? What is the dream ego made of? These are crucial inquiries for a person on the path of liberation, the path of awakening, the path of dreaming.

This is the dream expressed within a dream, prior to all dreams.–Dogen Zenji

Do you ever feel stuck? Maybe it’s a creative project, a relationship, a job, your spiritual life, your meditation practice, or a certain thought-pattern or belief? As human beings, we tend to tie ourselves up in knots, thinking things should be otherwise, different, somehow better. This thinking can leave us feeling stuck– dry, arid, without options, lacking creativity and perspective.

This monthly workshop is grounded in the four principles of nondual meditation: embodiment, openness, inquiry and compassion. Make space every month to deepen your meditation practice, awaken your creativity and connect to the Earth with guided prompts, deep imagery and embodiment exercises.

Wednesday Mornings 9A - 9:30A

Creativity is an innate capacity and a skill that can be trained and strengthened in every one of us. This class will help you explore how to release fixed perspectives, create S P A C E to engage your life freshly, and choose new, creative responses to areas where you feel stuck. As you open to new realms of possibility, you’ll cultivate an inner reservoir of strength, motivation, and happiness.

This Meditation is offered through Pause Meditation.

Want to give it a try join once for free. OR become a member to join classes regularly.

The inquiry into what we human beings are at depth is the primary inquiry in Dharma practice. This invitation is nuanced, textured, blessed, frustrating, insightful and so much more.

In this Class Series we will be looking at dreams as a 'read out' of the 'Self'. Call it a way of lightening our shadows and embracing all we contain. Dreams also offer us insight into the empty yet apparent nature of experience. This insight is liberating on the heart-essence level and can transform our lives.

We are living into the sixth major extinction event on this planet. With climate instability it is hard to know what the future will bring. It can be difficult to know what to do, when the future seems so uncertain.

From a contemplative training perspective, if we are willing to directly face and work with this uncertainty, the conditions of our life and world are the ideal conditions for our awakening.

Earth body, sky heart. Rooted and flowing. Luminous and open. We are made of earth and sky, of wind breath and rain song, our lives woven from the teachings of the natural world.

This retreat is an opportunity to re-connect and relax into the wild, ancient, wisdom of the Grasses, Trees and Great Earth. We will spend time learning from each of the five elements, as they manifest in our experience. Deeply exploring and releasing into our interconnection with the living, breathing body of the Earth, waters, energizing air, bright fiery sun, and vast spacious sky.

A Zen teacher once said, medicine and disease heal each other. The whole earth is medicine. What is the self?

This weekend retreat is designed to encourage us to directly face the Climate Catastrophe. This retreat is for those who may be on the front lines of climate activism to those who are empathetic yet unsure what to do and everyone in between.

This retreat will take place out-of-doors on the spacious monastery grounds, which includes a temperate rainforest, large garden, open meadows and a big sky. Meditating with the natural world, we allow ourselves to be graced by the wisdom of the more than human world AND we allow ourselves to open to the feelings and emotions we may be experiencing in regards to the climate crisis.

In this weekend workshop we will step into Dreaming together and explore our night time dreams as read-outs of energetic polarities, (open/closed, masculine/feminine) alive in ourselves and the world. Through art and embodied practices we will thread these dream polarities into waking reality.

Metta is a sanskrit word that translates as Loving Kindness or Friendliness. It is a practice in the Buddhist Tradition to aid in relaxing and opening the heart & learning to be who we truly are.

In Metta practice we practice loving our bodies and ourselves & extending this love to the Earth and all beings.

As we find ourselves in the midst of a great transition on this planet. With a devastating war and global pandemic—our hearts wish to respond. One way I have found to stay engaged with difficulty both in my own life and challenges in community & world—is to practice Metta.

Are you interested in awakening? Yet what if awakening means waking up to life as a dream and dreams as a vital part of a wisely lived life? Suppose it does mean this and that this is a fabulous thing. Dreaming is a wild river of mystery flowing through us, ready for the drinking.

Come together in community to practice healing ourselves, the more-than-human community and the living Earth. We will focus on meditations that connect us to the Earth and practice making space for our own feelings and emotions during this time of great climate transition.

No registration required. Click the button to join. Optional donation $5 - $15. Venmo @amykisei or Paypal amy.kisei@gmail.com

Eating is meant to be an enjoyable activity that provides nourishment and energy so we can live life to the fullest. And yet, our modern world has complicated our relationship with food. Faced with endless unhealthy choices and busy, stressed out lifestyles, let alone all of the cultural messages we receive about body image and eating "right" – food too often feels like a struggle.

Enter: Covid-19. Our already stressful world is turned on its head, and emotional eating is taking a toll. Have you been craving more cookies than usual? You're not alone, friend!

In this interactive masterclass, we'll explore the mechanisms behind emotional eating, learn simple strategies to uproot unhealthy patterns, and set a foundation of mindful habits to unlock the joy of eating in both the short and long term!

Living awake in this world is living on the brink of tenderness. As a human species and planet we are under-going a time of great uncertainty and change. Living through this time of change can illicit confusion, anxiety, grief, anger, rage and fear. Compassion gives us space to grieve, to deeply feel/experience our lives, our emotions and our connection with all beings.