Plan Ahead! Coming Soon:

NOVEMBER

Fishing for Fallen Light:
An Honest Exploration of Right Relationship
Six Tuesdays, 6:00-7:30pm, November 9 – December 14, 2021
via Zoom, $125
“We need to sit on the rim of the well of darkness and fish for fallen light with patience.”
– Pablo Neruda

• What really is Right Relationship?
• Do my limitations, grief, and sin define me?
• Is the light I’ve left behind really lost?
• What’s the truth, and where can I find it?

We all probably have a general idea of what Right Relationship might mean for us in our interpersonal relationships, and likely understand the basics of honesty, kindness, balance, and generosity that help make our external relationships function at their best.
But are these the limits of Right Relationship?
Is this what the spirit of Right Relationship really implies in a deeper, spiritual sense?
The "Fishing For Fallen Light" series will explore our universal and innate longing for Right Relationship by focusing on what Right Relationship means internally, with ourselves. We’ll look at this primarily through a mindfulness-based Zen lens, but we’ll also include some Christian language and understanding as well as drawing from the perennial wisdom wells of poetry and the great mystics from across the world’s traditions.
Our six weeks together will include daily practice, varied experientials, written teaching handouts, weekly class meetings with teaching and discussion.
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!
This will be a gentle, sincere, unique, and collective inquiry. Join us!

“Right Relationship is, in essence, love. It’s choosing to return to, explore, feel, and know the sacred truths that we hold in our body and emotions (our “felt sense of memory”). It’s like a salmon choosing to swim back upstream to find its original home, its spawning grounds. We have a sacred impulse to return to the space of our own making in order to reconcile ourselves to something dangerously real. We have an invisible intuition that longs for us to reconcile our own opposites and shine our falsehoods with the light of our truths. We need to grow large enough to contain all our contradictions and divisions with the wide arms of wisdom’s understanding, love’s forgiveness, and compassion’s reconciliation. This upstream journey to Right Relationship is arduous, and everything can seem to be fighting against that sacred homing impulse. Yet we persevere, understanding that to find the truth of our origins is to find the truth of our now... just as to find the truth of our now is to find the truth of our origins. The truth isn’t bound by time. So, we can see the golden thread of truth that runs through all our days, regardless of how distant we may feel from it. We are drawn by the irresistible force of ourselves, the truth of our being, the love that we have always been. The Relationship can always be Right again.”
-Bussho Lahn


LOOKING AHEAD:
JANUARY, 2022

Mindfulness & Zen:
What Are They, Really, and How Do We Practice Them?
Six Tuesdays, 6:00-7:30pm, January 4- February 8, 2022, $125, via Zoom
Mindfulness is a fundamental component of Zen Buddhist meditation practice, but despite being commonly used, both those words- meditation and Zen- are widely misunderstood.
These six weeks will be used to explore mindfulness, meditation, Zen, and the beautiful Buddhist framework that holds them all.
Our six weeks together will include daily practice, varied experientials, written teaching handouts, weekly class meetings with teaching and discussion.
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!
If you're wanting a meaningful investigation into what self-awareness practices are and can offer you, this is the course for you. 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 enjoy our precious and fleeting lives.
Join us!