Awakening to Spirit Group

Hi Dear Ones.

At our May gathering, Toni Bernhard shard her wonderful wisdom– from a Buddhist perspective — on how to be in a calm, peaceful state when dealing with chronic illness and pain.  And we had a great turnout!  Check out her book, How to Live Well with Chronic Pain and Illness: A Mindful Guide.

On Saturday, June 18, our group will carpool to visit Prasanna at his home in Sonoma.  We are very excited that he has invited us to meet with him! Prasanna is an awake mystic and spiritual teacher who offers up his teachings, and his amazing spiritual paintings, at his home. Prasanna has provided commentary on Ramana Maharshi on documentaries, and has translated a book of Nisgardatta quotes into English.  He has also written his own book, Two:The Love Story of One. I have met with him and he is an incredible teacher who can very directly point us to the truth of who we are. There is limited space for this event so please contact me before June 10 if you are interested in joining us.

On Saturday, July 16, we will meet to discuss the Michael Singer book, The Untethered Soul. As usual, I will first lead the group in a nondual meditation.

Note that there will be no gathering in August.

If you have never attended our gatherings, you are most welcome to check us out.  Please just email me to let me know about your interest.  [email protected]

Many blessings.

Hi Dear ATS Friends and Newcomers.

Come check out our group if you haven’t yet, and bring a friend. The group is very friendly, warm and inviting.

Our gathering for February takes place on Saturday February 13 at our usual time: 10 am to noon.  We will be practicing i-Rest again, this time with the focus on connecting with the Awareness that is behind and within all of our experience. I hope you will join us for this 6th i-Rest session.  No previous i-Rest experience needed.  I-Rest, developed by Dr. Richard Miller, is a very powerful path to help you live a contented life, free of conflict and fear, by opening your mind and body to its inherent ground of health and well-being. I-Rest includes body sensing, breath awareness practices, relaxation yoga (Yoga Nidra) and other practices designed to achieve deep calm and peace quickly and easily, even when faced with difficult or traumatic events. As you learn and practice i-Rest, you will find inner resources for deep peace and rest that can be done almost anywhere and at anytime to gain relief from  anxiety, fear, or other uncomfortable physical and emotional symptoms, and cultivate inner peace and homeostasis.

In March we will meet on Saturday the 19th, for a discussion of Michael Singer’s book, The Surrender Experiment. If you have read even a portion of this wonderful book, I hope you will consider joining us.  We will begin with a surrendering meditation.

Hi ATS Friends.

We are continuing to experience i-Rest practices designed to help you with anxiety, depression, sleep challenges, body pain and discomfort, and most of all–with awakening to your true nature!  The next gathering takes place on Saturday October 17.

I-Rest is amazingly simple but profound. Working with our breath, body sensations, thoughts, beliefs, emotions where we let everything be just as it is and notice what happens is powerful! We get to let ourselves experience moving fully into what is happening and to welcome the opposites of our unpleasant thoughts, emotions and sensations, all the while experiencing the subtle sense of being or presence that is always the background of whatever is arising. We practice and learn to tools to bring balance into our often hectic, unstable lives.  Such a gift!  Come and see what I mean if you have not yet partaken of the i-Rest process. You will likely go home with a smile on your face and feeling relaxed and revived, at the very least.

Deb

For my old and new ATS friends:

I want to take you on a journey when we meet together over the course of the next 10-12 months.  I want to present to you experiences of being more in touch with your body, and more in sync with what it wants for you. Your body is very wise.  And, I want to give you exercises that will help you connect with a deep sense of being–of being the truth of what you are.

I will share with you some relaxation yoga and “getting-in-touch” practices that I learned from a training with Dr. Richard Miller, of the Integrative Restoration Institute. Richard developed i-Rest, a very powerful path to help you live a contented life, free of conflict and fear, by opening your mind and body to its inherent ground of health and well-being. I-Rest includes body sensing, breath awareness practices relaxation yoga (Yoga Nidra) and other practices designed to achieve deep calm and peace quickly and easily, even when faced with difficult or traumatic events.

As you learn and practice what I share, you will find inner resources for deep peace and rest that can be done almost anywhere and at anytime to gain relief from  anxiety, fear, or other uncomfortable physical and emotional symptoms, and cultivate inner peace and homeostasis.

As well and most importantly, iRest is a path of awakening.  Richard Miller himself is an awake, nondual teacher.  He has extensively studied all of the great wisdom spiritual teachings from around the world, as well as deeply studying and experiencing many forms of yoga.  He had a number of awakening experiences many years ago and lives as a shining light of awakeness for so many.  He is helping military personnel all over the world to awaken to their true nature through his iRest trainings, which are now taught at dozens of military bases and VA Centers.

I had the pleasure of partaking in a i-Rest teacher training with him recently and I am now an iRest “teacher in training,” and will be teaching his powerful full-body awakening process to you! I am working toward becoming a certified i-Rest teacher.

This all begins on Saturday, April 18. Each month I will build on what I shared previously.

If you miss any sessions, you can still come, partake of the process, and not be lost. Each month the exercises we do will stand on their own, but together, they will provide you with a foundation that –if practiced  ongoingly– will help you eliminate stress, assist you with sleep challenges, provide relief from interpersonal problems, and neutralize anxiety, fear, anger and depression.

At its deepest level, iRest helps you enter a deep meditative state and go beyond self-limiting beliefs to reveal your true nature as awareness.  In fact, this process of connecting with awareness is woven in throughout the i-Rest course that I will offer.

I am very excited to offer this and I hope you will come try it out.

For our next regular monthly gathering in Davis, from 10-12, we will discuss the question, “Is there a reason or a purpose for everything?” We are going to try something new, and see how it goes.  Everyone who plans to attend will give this question some thought and feel into it and write about it. See if you can access your heart wisdom or intuition in answering this question for yourself. Then we will each look at a nondual teaching that relates to this question and bring it in to share. I will lead us in a meditation and I will  offer something experiential  that will relate to this question. (If you do not find a teaching that relates to the question, come anyway.) As always, please email me if you plan to attend.  [email protected]