Classes
Upcoming offerings to connect you to practice and community

Classes on meditation, Zen, and contemplative spirituality are offered throughout the year on Tuesday or Thursday evenings.

Monthly Mindfulness Practice Group
Our most popular regular offering!

Offered every month on a Saturday, 9:00-11:30am, via Zoom (check calendar for dates).
Appropriate for beginners and experienced meditators alike, our monthly drop-in group features meditation, teaching, experiential, and group discussion. It's an informal gathering that explores basic mindfulness and self-awareness practices in a "lightly-Zen" (mostly secular/spiritual) sense. There's usually around a dozen of us, and it's usually a combo of more experienced folks and pretty new folks. We usually start and end with a short, silent sitting. We have a theme/teaching portion, and an exercise or two designed to help us see something we might not otherwise. Bring a journal or notebook.
Each group is recorded, and the link sent to all participants as a resource to revisit later if desired.
A relaxed a friendly atmosphere, perfect for exploration.

Suggested donation $30-40.
No registration required; all are welcome!
For the Zoom link, click here.

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Upcoming Class

Befriending the Small Self:
Meeting Our Conditioning with Kindness

Five Tuesdays, May 7 – June 4, 6:00-7:30pm CT, via Zoom. $129 (early registration, before May 1) or $149 (standard rate)

The Back Story:
The great Zen Master Eihei Dogen famously said about Zen,
To study the Way is to study the self.
To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is enlightenment.


What does Buddhist self inquiry look like? What is this “self” he’s talking about?
What do we mean by the term ego (personality, or “small self”) in Zen?
How did it come to be? How does it work? Is it who we really are?
Is it an illusion to be forgotten, an enemy to be vanquished, or a function to understand and befriend?

The Class:
This class will focus on using our meditation practice as an active tool for deeper self-awareness. We’ll spend five weeks exploring the creation and function of our personalities (our ego identities) and discover more about how they operate.
Each week will highlight a component of the small self of ego, time for discussion and exploration, a teaching presentation designed to support and facilitate deeper engagement, and handouts of all related material for further individual exploration.

"Never condemn what you see in yourself because what you are is a living thing."
—Krishnamurti


Some of what we’ll cover:
• Present moment activators
• Memory, conditioning, and beliefs
• Emotions
• Reactivity and defenses
• Meditation as transformative relationship with ego


By better understanding what we are not, we better understand what we are. Join us for this fascinating, challenging, and practical inquiry into who we think we are, and who we most truly are.

The Details:
Class is five Tuesdays, May 7 – June 4, 6:00-7:00pmCT, via Zoom. The fee is $129 (registering with a friend, or early registration before May 1) or $149 (standard rate). Scholarships available upon request. A commitment to a daily meditation practice is requested. No required text; all readings will be provided.
All classes and course content will be recorded, so non-sequential learning and distance attendance are both possible and encouraged.
You won’t miss anything!

The Reminder:
People care about this beautiful and suffering world. They do it most powerfully and most directly by caring for their own precious inner lives. And after more than 2,500 years, walking the spiritual path is still a choice people make; a loving response to the human condition that people still choose. This will be a gentle, sincere, unique, and collective inquiry, and will help us develop creative day-to-day mindfulness practices so that we more deeply experience and appreciate our precious and fleeting lives. Please join us and bring a friend!

Register

Retreats

Deepen your practice with these immersions in silence.

Half-day Retreats

Regularly on a Saturday, 9am-3pm,
in person at Aslan Institute

Our silent Half-day Meditation Retreats are six hours in length and feature sitting meditation, walking meditation, a short dharma teaching talk, and the option of meeting one-to-one with the teacher.
Appropriate for beginners and experienced contemplatives alike, these simple retreats are user-friendly, restorative, and often profound.
$40/person

Check the calendar for the next one and join us to discover what a big difference a few short hours of silence can make.

Register

Zazenkai mini-retreats

Regularly on a Saturday, 8:30-11:30am,
via Zoom

Our regular zazenkai mini-retreats
("to come together for meditation")
are simple, three-hour immersions in group mindfulness practice.
They feature a few periods each of both sitting and walking meditation,
a short teaching talk, and a little break half-way through.
Simple, easy, friendly, quiet, and open to everyone.
$30 donation suggested.

Check the calendar for the next one and join us to discover what a big difference a few short hours of silence can make.

Register