Events
Effortless Mindfulness and Sustainable Compassion Retreat
Creating a Field of Care for Ourselves and Others in Turbulent Times
10 a.m.-4 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 30
Valinor (formerly the Empathy Center) – Garden Room, 1964 Las Canoas Road, or online via mindfulheartprograms.org Zoom room
Please join us for our post-Thanksgiving Day retreat offering respite and guidance to reconnect with your deep, inner resilience. We will practice ways to meet ourselves, those around us, and our world with empathy, wisdom, and ease. While being led in effortless, non-dual meditation practice, an advanced-yet-simple form of mindfulness, you will tap into the calming and openhearted space of awake awareness. By unhooking awareness from chattering thoughts, you will be able to realize that awareness is much bigger than your thinking mind, and that you can connect with your already awake and loving nature.
To help us navigate through these challenging times, we will introduce the Field of Care* meditation, which will allow us to develop compassionate presence to feelings and transform our own layers of suffering into compassion. These meditations were developed to facilitate access to the compassion that already exists at the ground level of our being, to become more aware of its presence, and to experience what hurts us within the vast and ever-present quality of loving awareness. (*Refer to sustainablecompassion.org to learn more about these concepts.)
The suggested donation for this day-long retreat, in person and online, is $60. Donations of any amount are gratefully accepted via our website or in person at the retreat to help cover class costs. Everyone is welcome. Please bring your lunch. Snacks and beverages will be served.
Teachers
Radhule Weininger, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist in private practice and co-founder of Mindful Heart Programs. She has been a student and teacher of mindfulness, compassion, and Buddhist psychology since 1981. She has a special interest in non-dual awake-awareness practices. Her books include Heartwork: The Path of Self-Compassion, and Heart Medicine: How to Stop Painful Patterns and Find Freedom and Peace – at Last.
Michael Kearney, M.D., an author and meditation and nature connection teacher, has worked for 45 years as a palliative care and hospice physician. His books are Mortally Wounded, Place of Healing, Nest in the Stream, and Becoming Forest. Michael is especially interested in simple yet profound ways of cultivating deep resilience to help us find a peaceful path through challenging situations to a place of healing.
Bella Weininger, PsyD, is a psychologist and meditation teacher with training in sustainable compassion practices. She has a special interest in working with adolescents and young adults. Her experience also includes answering suicide hotline calls.
Newsletters
Heart Medicine in Difficult Times
In this online year-long drop-in series, Radhule will teach you psychological and spiritual skills that will guide you to address the root causes behind painful patterns and show how to address them with comprehensive practices. Working with painful patterns is especially necessary in these times, as many of our old painful patterns are getting triggered by current difficult circumstances in our world. Uncertainty and trauma bring up our own woundedness and fear. In order to be engaged in our world, we need to heal our painful patterns and connect to the wholeness that is already there.
Register with InsightLA
Awake Aware: Touching the Sky behind the clouds and bringing it back to Earth
New Series with Radhule Weininger, MD, PHD.
This Monday (over zoom), we will continue an exciting new series on awake awareness meditations and the pointing-out instructions. We are repeating this series on Monday nights at 7.15 pm (Yoga Soup, Studio 2, as well as zoom).
Location: Yoga Soup, 28 Parker Way, Santa Barbara
Heart Aware: Mindful Body Breath and Awake Awareness Meditation Group
Time: Thursdays at 6:30pm (beginning December 1st, 2022)
Location: Saint Michael’s University Church, 6586 Picasso Rd, Isla Vista, CA
We will meet in person to practice meditation and self-compassion. Join us to cultivate a regular mindfulness practice and experience a sense of community and belonging on a weekly basis.
Heart Medicine in Difficult Times
with Radhule Weininger, MD, PhD
Sunday, August 28, 12:30-2pm
Last Sunday every month in 2022
In this online year-long drop-in series, Radhule will teach you psychological and spiritual skills that will guide you to address the root causes behind painful patterns and show how to address them with comprehensive practices. Working with painful patterns is especially necessary in these times, as many of our old painful patterns are getting triggered by current difficult circumstances in our world. Uncertainty and trauma bring up our own woundedness and fear. In order to be engaged in our world, we need to heal our painful patterns and connect to the wholeness that is already there.
Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC): 8 Week Course
With Hattie Bluestone, DPT and Anahita Navab Holden, PhD
Sundays: August 7th-October 2nd
(with the exception of Sunday 8/28)
10 AM-12 PM
La Mesa Park
Price: $400
For registration, please visit www.yogasoup.com
In difficult moments, what would it be like to offer yourself the same kindness, care, and support that you would naturally extend to a friend? Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) is an empirically supported, 8-week program that teaches core principles and practices to cultivate the skill of self-compassion. MSC was developed by Kristin Neff, PhD, and Christopher Germer, PhD, leader in the integration of mindfulness and psychotherapy. The program includes guided meditations, short talks, experiential exercises, group discussion, and take-home practices to integrate self-compassion into daily life. For more information please contact: info@anahitaholdenphd.com.
Deepening the Experience of the Sacred: Mindfully Embracing our World
During the morning of this day-long seminar, Radhule will teach you to deepen the practice of Ordinary and Non-dual Mindfulness, Introducing pointing out instructions, so you can learn to rest in awake awareness. Radhule will also introduce Self-compassion and Compassion-for-others (Tong Len) practices, which will include the care for ourselves and our world.
From 2 to 4 pm, Dave Richo will join us again, so we can together integrate our experience of the Sacred. We will also discuss how Kindness and Compassion can help us hold our personal suffering and how we can live with meaning and purpose in our troubled and breathtakingly beautiful world.
Maintaining our Balance in a Shaky World: Psychological and Spiritual Practices that Foster Inner Peace
In our present world of surprises, we may find it difficult to find a footing of safety and security in ourselves or in society. Violence and disease seem to be the new normal.
In an age of anxiety like this one it is perfectly understandable that we fear the future and perhaps lose trust in the political, psychological, and spiritual sources that were reliable before. Likewise, we may lose our trust in our own inner resources.
In this topsy-turvy world we still have one another. That is our source of hope. Our only challenge is to trust it when all the evidence has become shaky. We can learn to do that, always as beginners and always as enthusiasts.
In this workshop we will have time and space to explore what we fear or trust. We will experience practices of ordinary and non-dual mindfulness that take us to deep awareness.