Strengthen a meditation practice with our online course, May 9 – June 13, 2020.
Saturdays 10am-11:30am Mountain Time
Reclaiming the vital lost art of the spiritual container
to re-ignite your spiritual life
If you’re like many people, you may know how to keep you calm and centered – like with a regular meditation practice, yet you have a hard time bringing it in your daily life.
Living in turbulent times, when it seems nobody is immune from the growing levels of fear, depression, and anxiety in the world, we can easily feel overwhelmed by what’s going on around us.
Even with a regular meditation habit you may still feel pulled off-center through the day as your precious energy gets leaked away.
Yet, it IS possible! Even on the busiest days, to be centered and engaged. You can learn simple tools to set up your life in a way that supports and protects your energy, while re-igniting your spiritual life.
How can you do this? By learning about the art of the spiritual container, and recrafting your daily life to be hold you as if you’re in the protective space of a retreat.
Sounds impossible?
Well, like you, we’re not monks or nuns – not in this lifetime, at least. This is a very practical course about how we can really thrive and grow in a busy world. We’re not promoting how to withdraw, or fit in hours of formal meditation.
So, what’s missing? Attention to the outer supports you need
What just isn’t working in our daily lives? Why when we try to find calm, presence, and joy do we still sometimes feel disheartened, stuck, or lost?
Well, in fact it’s no surprise. Especially in turbulent times, the daily demands of living do stay very much in charge – unless we step in and tweak our lives to better support us.
If the inner work you’re doing isn’t nourishing you, then you’re probably missing the importance of the outer supports you need – especially if you’re one of those people who leans towards taking care of others, more than you take care of yourself.
When you set up these outer supports, you’ll have a better container in which to generate a sense of calm, focus, and joy.
Outer supports: The Five Principles of a spiritual container
After years of running a retreat centre, and applying what we learn to our own lives, we’ve rediscovered five ancient principles that help create the right outer conditions we’re talking about:
- Honoring your space
- Using structure and routine as your friends
- Using conversations to shape the spaces where we meet
- Freeing up energy by cleaning up big areas of your life
- Embracing that it’s easier with others
These are the factors that have made Clear Sky work so well. A retreat centre that wakes people up and supports their practice. Yes, these same principles transform and support our daily lives, too.
That’s why we created this course. We’ll share with you the many learnings we’ve discovered from creating Clear Sky – a physical and virtual centre for awakening – in the form of these five simple and empowering principles, that have been time-tested over centuries.
As well as the core content on each of these principles, each webinar includes meditations and exercises to try in your daily life, and ends with question-and-answer sessions.
Costs
We offer this course on the basis of dāna. If you’re not familiar with dāna, you may have come across related approaches such as “pay from the heart.” Dāna is a Sanskrit term that translates as generosity in English. It’s radically different from the transactional way we normally interact in the world – where we give to get something back, either a service or thing. Instead, with dāna, we give as a mutual exchange of generosity. It’s our joy to offer this course, and we trust you’ll match our time, energy, and passion by giving an amount of money that feels good and healthy to both you and us.
You’ll see equivalent live courses offered for between $120 and $360 CAD. Over six, 90-minute classes, this represents an average of $20-$60 per class. We highly recommend taking time to check in with your heart on an amount that feels good. Find the amount you feel balances and honors your aspiration for this course, the energy we are giving to deliver the course, and what is sustainable for you.
In this pay from the heart exercise, you might also consider what you pay for different things as a matter of course: a night out with friends, a session with a chiropractor or acupuncturist, or an hour with a life coach, for example.
As for our part in this pay from the heart reflection : since we have expenses hosting the classes and we are investing significant amounts of our own time and experience in creating and teaching the course, we are setting the minimum amount at $120 CAD.
Why do you use dāna?
The practice of generosity is central to spiritual unfoldment, whatever path you follow. In our own Buddhist lineage, teachings have always been given on the basis of dāna, and we are committed to this practice and its development in the West. Dāna is also a radical and – we believe – viable economic alternative to capitalism, which our planet would really benefit from. We all know there must be something better than capitalism or its hungry cousin, consumerism. We maintain that, together, we can offer a financial model that is based in life-affirming mutual support. Please join us in co-creating this promising economic alternative.