Classes

Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction

An 8-week evidence based, experiential program designed to provide participants with intensive and systematic training in mindfulness meditation and movement practices, and integrating into one’s daily life what is discovered and learned through the process of participating in the program.

First created in 1979, by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., MBSR has over 40 years of research that consistently demonstrates positive outcomes associated with increased self-awareness and emotional and attentional regulation. In addition, outcomes highlight statistically significant reductions in symptoms for various physical and behavioral health conditions including anxiety, depression and chronic pain, along with positive changes in risk factors that may lead to more serious chronic ailments.

Join us to explore how mindfulness may support you in living life more fully, with greater ease and joy.

MBSR, or Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, is an eight-week mindfulness training program that was created by Jon Kabat-Zinn in 1979 at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.

Intro to Mindfulness

In this a four-week Introduction to mindfulness class you will

• Learn how mindfulness can support you to become more present and less anxious about the future. 

• Discover ways that mindfulness can build your capacity to be more responsive and less reactive thus improving your connections and relationships with others especially those closest to you.  

• Incorporate self-compassion into your day and learn how to become our own best friend to support yourself through difficult times. 

• Experience mindfulness practices that can help cultivate more ease, gratitude, compassion & joy while enriching and adding more meaning to your life. 

• You will be lead through several different mindfulness practices and walk away with tools that support you in feeling more grounded and at ease. 

Please join us if you are a beginner who is curious and would like to learn more about mindfulness and/or if you are someone who has meditated in the past and would like to re-ignite your meditation practice & become more consistent.  

Yoga Nidra

Yoga Nidra is a guided meditation that has the power to transform, heal and rejuvenate you at core levels. Through the use of body sensing, breath awareness, guided imagery and other practices, you are systematically guided on a meditation journey through each level of your whole being called the koshas.

Mindful Art

An approach to painting developed at River Gallery School by Ric Campman, Sequencing is a way for both beginners and more experienced art makers to enter the process of painting at a deep and direct level. Through this process, Sequencing allows you to engage in creating art without self-doubt or other barriers that can inhibit creativity. You engage directly with the paint, surface and tools in a very immediate and tactile way.

Sequencing quickly identifies important elements in our creative work, momentarily suspends part of our thought process, and allows us to begin work without the burdens of self-doubt, memory, and desire. It helps to free us from the idea that quality artwork is wholly dependent on technique. Sequencing emphasizes metaphor, color, light, the horizon, the physical encounter with the paint, and of course, awareness and its counterpart, looking. It offers the opportunity to suspend many of our prejudices and to reformulate and deepen our processes of art making.

“Sequencing is a way for both novice and experienced art-makers to enter the process of painting. We use our hands, no brushes, and allow the magic to happen. It’s a very satisfying and visceral approach to art-making.” — Lydia Thomson

Gentle Yoga

An effective gentle yoga class provides a safe, effective, compassionate, noncompetitive environment that is welcoming to all.

Dynamic Gentle Yoga is a refined style of gentle yoga that is characterized by active stretching, stimulating the flow of energy, focusing inward and developing meditative awareness. This approach to yoga is based on the Kripalu style of yoga, a yoga of conscious awareness. Dynamic Gentle Yoga emphasizes attuning to your inner experience. That attunement begins with body awareness, closely linked to the next subtler level, breath awareness.

Mindful Self-Compassion

Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) combines the skills of mindfulness and self-compassion to enhance our capacity for emotional wellbeing.

Mindfulness is the first step—turning with loving awareness toward difficult experience (thoughts, emotions, and sensations). Self-compassion comes next—bringing loving awareness to ourselves. Together, mindfulness and self-compassion comprise a state of warm, connected, presence during difficult moments in our lives.

Most of us feel compassion when a close friend is struggling. What would it be like to receive the same caring attention from yourself when you needed it most? All that’s required is a shift in attention—recognizing that as a human being, you, too, are a worthy recipient of compassion.