Meditation
New Year’s: Open Heart, Peaceful Mind
A Pendle Hill New Year’s Retreat with Valerie Brown
December 28, 2023 – January 1, 2024
For nearly two decades, hundreds of people have welcomed the New Year at Pendle Hill with the gift of this retreat designed to rest, reflect, renew, and restore. At these times of high stress and high anxiety, we need now, more than ever, to exhale deeply and feel fully nourished through resilience-building, heart-opening, and peace-making practices. We can’t do this alone. We need a caring and supportive community and space and time to be nurtured and supported.
Many of us live with anxiety, worry, and stress about relationships: caring for aging parents, worry about our children, seeking connection and belonging in an all-too disconnected world. Some of us feel frustrated about social justice issues like climate crisis, gun violence, and social equity that are beyond our capacity to influence. We can get caught in self-limiting beliefs, cynicism, and perfectionism that sabotage us on the way to real change. This year’s retreat theme is Becoming Your One True Love. We focus on truly loving and accepting ourselves as we are as the foundation for creating meaningful relationships with ourselves, with others, with our communities, and our society.
This retreat includes periods of silence, reflection, group discussion, creative arts, walks in nature, deep relaxation, and mindful movement. Savor guided meditation and extended periods of silence to deepen discernment about how to live your best self as you close the year and enter the New Year.
You will learn how to:
- Choose love when conditions are uncertain and ambiguous.
- Reflect on what matters most with soul-amplifying questions.
- Align your values with your work for a greater sense of purpose and meaning.
- Cultivate body intelligence and body awareness.
- Show yourself real kindness through self-compassion.
Surrounded by a supportive and caring community, you will restore balance and calm, and feel uplifted toward the best version of you, and return home with a Becoming Your Own True Love Plan of Action and other tools to create greater peace and belonging in your life.
Hope Leans Forward
An online series with Valerie Brown offering tools and practices to navigate these challenging times.
Two consecutive Saturdays, 10:00am-11:30am Eastern Time (US & Canada) in collaboration with Woodbrooke Study Centre.
We are being pulled apart and broken-open by the global pandemic, violence, racial injustice, climate crisis, etc. This course will equip you with tools and practices to navigate these high-stress, high-anxiety times.
Based on Valerie’s latest book, Hope Leans Forward: Braving Your Way toward Simplicity, Awakening, and Peace (Broadleaf, 2022), this course will cover skill-building, evidence-based mindfulness practice, and soul-amplifying questions grounded in Quaker faith and practice that go to the heart of discerning your life purpose, meaning, and direction and supporting you to live your best self now.
In these highly interactive sessions, we’ll explore the Buddhist Seven Factors of Awakening, including:
- Choose bravely when conditions are uncertain and ambiguous.
- Examine unconscious patterns that hold you back.
- Reflect on what matters most with soul-amplifying questions.
- Align your values with your work for a greater sense of purpose and meaning.
- Cultivate body intelligence and body awareness.
- Show yourself real kindness through self-compassion.
Hope Leans Forward
An online series with Valerie Brown offering tools and practices to navigate these challenging times.
Two consecutive Saturdays, 10:00am-11:30am Eastern Time (US & Canada) in collaboration with Woodbrooke Study Centre.
We are being pulled apart and broken-open by the global pandemic, violence, racial injustice, climate crisis, etc. This course will equip you with tools and practices to navigate these high-stress, high-anxiety times.
Based on Valerie’s latest book, Hope Leans Forward: Braving Your Way toward Simplicity, Awakening, and Peace (Broadleaf, 2022), this course will cover skill-building, evidence-based mindfulness practice, and soul-amplifying questions grounded in Quaker faith and practice that go to the heart of discerning your life purpose, meaning, and direction and supporting you to live your best self now.
In these highly interactive sessions, we’ll explore the Buddhist Seven Factors of Awakening, including:
- Choose bravely when conditions are uncertain and ambiguous.
- Examine unconscious patterns that hold you back.
- Reflect on what matters most with soul-amplifying questions.
- Align your values with your work for a greater sense of purpose and meaning.
- Cultivate body intelligence and body awareness.
- Show yourself real kindness through self-compassion.
Mindful Mondays
The Friends Counseling Service of PYM is sponsoring an online, 4-session series on mindfulness meditation this winter, led by Deborah Cooper of Germantown Monthly Meeting.
Together we will learn how to bring mindfulness practice into our daily lives. We will investigate ways in which this practice can begin to bring us a sense of increased well-being and decreased suffering as we negotiate the inevitable challenges which confront us every day.
Join on Mondays from January 23 to February 13, at 2:30-3:30 pm, for a brief talk, a guided meditation, and a time for questions and comments.
Come for one class or the entire series, as your schedule permits. These are free events; at registration you will be asked if you would like to make an optional, as-led contribution.
Mindful Mondays
The Friends Counseling Service of PYM is sponsoring an online, 4-session series on mindfulness meditation this winter, led by Deborah Cooper of Germantown Monthly Meeting.
Together we will learn how to bring mindfulness practice into our daily lives. We will investigate ways in which this practice can begin to bring us a sense of increased well-being and decreased suffering as we negotiate the inevitable challenges which confront us every day.
Join on Mondays from January 23 to February 13, at 2:30-3:30 pm, for a brief talk, a guided meditation, and a time for questions and comments.
Come for one class or the entire series, as your schedule permits. These are free events; at registration you will be asked if you would like to make an optional, as-led contribution.
Mindful Mondays
The Friends Counseling Service of PYM is sponsoring an online, 4-session series on mindfulness meditation this winter, led by Deborah Cooper of Germantown Monthly Meeting.
Together we will learn how to bring mindfulness practice into our daily lives. We will investigate ways in which this practice can begin to bring us a sense of increased well-being and decreased suffering as we negotiate the inevitable challenges which confront us every day.
Join on Mondays from January 23 to February 13, at 2:30-3:30 pm, for a brief talk, a guided meditation, and a time for questions and comments.
Come for one class or the entire series, as your schedule permits. These are free events; at registration you will be asked if you would like to make an optional, as-led contribution.
Mindful Mondays
The Friends Counseling Service of PYM is sponsoring an online, 4-session series on mindfulness meditation this winter, led by Deborah Cooper of Germantown Monthly Meeting.
Together we will learn how to bring mindfulness practice into our daily lives. We will investigate ways in which this practice can begin to bring us a sense of increased well-being and decreased suffering as we negotiate the inevitable challenges which confront us every day.
Join on Mondays from January 23 to February 13, at 2:30-3:30 pm, for a brief talk, a guided meditation, and a time for questions and comments.
Come for one class or the entire series, as your schedule permits. These are free events; at registration you will be asked if you would like to make an optional, as-led contribution.