8 Week Mindfulness and Active Hope Course (1)

***Please note that ticket prices are are on a sliding scale. Please opt for the ticket that is appropriate for your current circumstances. Suggested donation for 8 wk course: between £80 (unwaged)- £240 (higher earner). Higher amounts

support inclusion of all regardless of means. Please consider donating as much as you are able

This course is a unique and inspired combination of Mindfulness practices and insights with The Work That Reconnects: a system of exercises, meditations and teachings designed by Joanna Macy and others. Joanna defines the essence of the work as “building the desire and capacity to take part in the healing of the world” and it has encouraged and motivated many activists and spiritual practitioners over the last 5 decades. She suggests that “as a society, we are caught between a sense of impending apocalypse and the fear of acknowledging it. In this place our responses are blocked and confused.”

A committed, daily practice of meditation is essential in providing the necessary stability, inner calm, compassion, creativity and courage that allow us to acknowledge our difficult feelings and liberate those ‘blocked and confused’ energies into action. Otherwise it is only too easy to lose heart, burn out and get stuck in denial, despair and depression. Mindfulness practice helps us to balance the negativity bias of our threat-based thinking by living in the moment, content with the rich experiences our senses connect us with. In that sense it is revolutionary as it makes us less liable to fall into the traps of consumer

marketing. It also trains the muscle of the moral imagination, the ability to feel intimately connected with others and with the ecosphere we are part of.

The course will follow the movement of a spiral from gratitude to honouring the pain for the world, then seeing with new eyes and finally going forth into action, weaving together tried and tested Mindfulness with Active Hope approaches. ‘Active Hope’ is about finding, and offering, our best response to the crisis of sustainability unfolding in our world. It offers tools that help us face the mess we're in, as well as find and play our role in the collective transition, or Great Turning, to a life-sustaining society.

The aims of this course are to:

- Establish and/or deepen your daily mindfulness practice

- Feel resourced to face inner, local and global difficulties with courage and compassion

- Have clarity about the roles you can play in the Great turning

- Enjoy the ongoing support of the learning community

You will receive summaries of the sessions and audio links to guided meditations.

Dates and Times

The course will run on Monday evenings, 7.15 – 9.30pm, starting 8th Feb 2021 plus a discounted day retreat on 13 March 2021 10am to 5pm

Recommended fee is £80 (unwaged) – £240 (plus £25 for day retreat)

We don’t want people to be excluded from participation for financial reasons, and we also have to make a living. We encourage you to think carefully about how much you are able to contribute; both more or less than this figure are welcome. People who pay more will enable people with less income to have discounted places.

Larry Butler teaches tai-chi and leads expressive writing groups at the Maggie Cancer Care Centre. Poet

& editor for PlaySpace Publications and for Lapidus Scotland https://www.lapidusscotland.co.uk/ ; and

is a facilitator trainer in the Work That Reconnects.

Ratnadevi is a highly experienced mindfulness teacher, trainer, supervisor and coach at Living

Mindfulness and registered facilitator with the Work That Reconnects Network.

Larry and Ratnadevi have co-facilitated many retreats and courses and many people have benefitted

from their kind, inclusive, creative and well-informed approach.