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:
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.
When Kristin Simmons’ youngest daughter was born, her husband Tim was working at Delaware Valley Friends School. As lifelong Catholics, they were feeling disillusioned with church, and decided it was time for a change. Together the family turned to Quakerism, looking for a simpler, connected life to the divine Light. It was both faith and community that drew the couple to Old Haverford Monthly Meeting seventeen years ago. When Kristin was young, her mother worked as a librarian at a Quaker school for 20+ years and committed time focusing on social justice issues and sharing key insights among various faith groups. Kristin’s father, George Salloom, and his wife remained practicing Catholics until about seven years ago when George became a member of the Quaker community.
The father and daughter duo, George and Kristin, now serve as co-clerks at Old Haverford Meeting. They both hold master’s degrees in social work; George graduated from Howard University while Kristin graduated from University of Pennsylvania. Kristin also currently serves as PYM’s Youth Engagement Coordinator on the Program and Religious Life team. Their stories of how they became Quakers and co-clerks of Old Haverford Monthly Meeting are heartwarming and engaging.
[Read more…] about Meet the Father and Daughter Co-clerking Duo of Old Haverford Meeting
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
We live in a fast-paced world, with a constant stream of input from email, news, texts, and social media. Whether we are working from home or are in retirement, we are bombarded with so much stimulation that the still small voice inside is easily crowded out, and we lose our grounding.
Mindfulness meditation is a spiritual practice that has its origin in the teachings of the Buddha and has been described as “learning to become aware, in the moment, of exactly what is happening, without judgement.” (Jon Kabat-Zinn) As we learn to quiet the mind by centering our awareness on the body or the breath, we begin to slow down, the mind becomes quieter, and we become more receptive to the voice of the Spirit. [Read more…] about How Can the Practice of Mindfulness Benefit Friends?
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