how are we learning to be in today's world?
How do we navigate living in uncertainty, change, and collapse?
The challenges of today’s world are like giant mindfulness bells, calling us to wake up, grow up, and show up with wisdom and compassion, with strength and skillfulness, with access to purposefulness and community.
Monterey Bay Meditation Studio is:
Monterey Bay: depth, complexity, resilience, regeneration, diversity of life forms, unknown/unknowable, sea change, tidal rhythms, relationships of reciprocity, upwelling (nourishment from the deep), ecotones (transition zones), currents, ecosystems
Meditation: presence, clarity, compassion, equanimity, non-judgmentalness, awareness, openness
Studio: practice, learning/unlearning, growth, community, discovery, experience, creativity, connection …
In other words, MBMS offers what is needed to meet and navigate personal and global healing through restructuring, transformation, and evolution.
Featured Offerings
Everyday mystic, everyday healing: The luminous liberatory teachings of Dr. Barbara Holmes
Tuesdays, MAR. 1, Apr. 1, 15, 29, 13, 27, 5 - 6:30 PM pacific, ONline
Everyday Mystics, Everyday Healing is a six-session course/journey that centers the transformative work of Dr. Barbara Holmes, integrating her teachings on liberation, spirituality, cosmology and contemplative practice from her most recent texts: Crisis Contemplation: Healing the Wounded Village and Walking with our Ancestors: Contemplation and Activism. Participants will explore spiritual practices and liberatory frameworks that support justice, healing, and the birth of new possibilities for needed community and planetary care.
Communing & Kinning: An In-person gathering of the MBMS Community
Sunday, Mar. 23, 1 - 3 PM pacific, Rip Van Winkle Open Space
Spending slow-moving, contemplative time in the forest feels, in many ways, like coming home to a peaceful place inside the heart. The practice of shinrin-yoku (“Forest Bathing”) is a form of guided walking meditation, an “immersion” into the space of trees, plants and inhabitants of the forest.
Now, more than ever before, we need to sense ourselves as Community, coming together to support, assist, and inspire each other as we, along with every living being on Earth, face and meet the change, uncertainty, loss, and growth of being alive.
Mid-Week Sea Change: Pausing to Take a Breath
Mar. 26, 9:00 - 9:30 Am pacific, Online
Every day, we find ourselves engaging with unprecedented global change happening at an increasingly rapid pace and meeting circumstances that we never imagined – naturally most of us are feeling overwhelmed and, often, alone.
Enter Mid-Week Sea Change.
Join us to re-member the power of practicing in a group, establishing a weekly rhythm of cultivating a sense of community and belonging as we engage, together, through sharing practices of meditation, exploration, and deep listening to ourselves and each other.
Monterey Bay Meditation Studio is dedicated to:
Accessing and cultivating internal resources and conscious community as we face and find our way through this time of uncertainty, grief, fear, upheaval, and collapse.
MBMS invites experiential exploration:
How do we be in relationship with what is happening?
What are the qualities that we need to cultivate in ourselves, our culture, and our way of being?
How do we access our capacities to adapt and to evolve?
MBMS offers:
A field of enlivenment in which we engage in shared learning/unlearning explorations, meditation, relational practices, outdoor engagements, and community that cultivate our capacities for resilience, flexibility, stamina, curiosity, courage, belonging, stability, balance, and compassion – all of which are keys to meeting and living in the current opportunities for healing, regeneration, transformation, and evolution.
MBMS links:
Inner healing, growth, and transformation with active and intentional engagement
with Earth, Universe, and all Life forms,
in service of co-creating and vitalizing a story that is lived as a culture of relating with all beings
through collaboration, reverence, and reciprocity.
“We are Earth unraveling and reforming creation. We are meant to engage not isolate. These are difficult days. What causes us to recoil, strike, and retreat is also what allows us to reach out from the anxiety of unknowing and dare to trust what is to come – a re-assembling of our humanity.”
To navigate this personal and global journey, we need to know how to “stay with the trouble” (Donna Haraway). This engagement of sitting-with-the-grit can lead to healing, transformation, and evolution when there is support available for emotional processing and conscious response. MBMS offers …
multi-dimensional online and in-person courses,
practice groups, experiential book study conversations,
outdoor engagements,
and community gatherings
… that focus on cultivating the capacities that we need to develop in order to face the immensity of what is happening.
In Monterey Bay Meditation Studio, we are asking new questions, exploring different perspectives, and engaging multiple forms of practice in every offering. We reflect and incorporate the interconnection of Life and Living through 4 Currents of Exploration and Practice (Mindfulness & Meditation, Relationship with Earth & All Beings, Outdoor Engagements, and Evolution of Consciousness & Spirituality). These currents intersect and interweave, as how we participate in the Universe’s non-linear evolution towards greater connection and complexity. As we become more aware, we sense our unique embeddedness in this spiral of belonging: Individual, Community, Earth, Universe.
Mindfulness & Meditation
Mindfulness is a practice of cultivating awareness of what is happening in the present moment without judgment, agenda, story, or resistance. As we become conscious of the connection of our thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and energy fluctuations, as well as the layers of systemic structures that shape our beliefs, perceptions, and action, we have the opportunity to work with them. As we gain clarity of this awareness through meditation, we strengthen our ability to meet what’s here (in our personal and intersubjective worlds) without projecting or assuming, so that we are more able to see what-is and what-might-be.
Practices of Mindfulness and/or Meditation are woven into most MBMS offerings.
“... the urgency of the situation and our care for that is also a motivator for our own transformation. It’s a motivation in which we see ourselves as part of something whole that needs our wholeness in order to be realized.”
Relationship with Earth & All Beings
Deepening our awareness and sense of connection with ourselves and our internal world leads to healing and re-membrance of our capabilities, resources, and potentialities. We have a greater sense of who we truly are and the meaning of Life beyond our individual self. We become more conscious of our relationship with the larger world (of which we are an integral part) and expand our cultural frames. Our circle of compassion and care – our relationality – expands to the greater field of Earth and all beings as we explore the core question, “How am I being in relationship with …?”
The seeds of this shift are created through relationship and, for sustainability, need to be planted in community. As we expand and deepen our sense of community, we cultivate ecosystemic resilience. In short, when it comes to healing, transformation, and evolution: it's all about being in collaborative and reciprocal relationships.
Practices of healthy and authentic Relationship are woven into most MBMS offerings.
“What we need today then is a different ethos of responsivity, one that situates us in a web of becomings, and allows us to
care for the small ways our links with others and the world at large have consequences.”
Outdoor Engagements
Within MBMS, we are dedicated to re-membering a relationship of reverence and reciprocity with the world around (and of) us – a relationship that honors the sacredness of Life that we share with all beings. In this spirit of Kinship, we re-discover our capacity to sense connection and community that is always, already here … a relationality that is beyond words, beyond concept. Our qualities of caring, gratitude, and respectful reciprocity naturally arise as we realize ourselves as part of a vast eco-system of collaboration and mutual support.
Invitations for Outdoor Engagement are part of most MBMS offerings.
“I feel a kinship with my older relatives, with the cyanobacteria that oxygenated the earth, and with the small bones and shells of those ancestors who are now sand. With the heat at the core of the earth. With the deep breathing of the planet.”
Evolution of Consciousness & Spirituality
We are living in a time of global transformation. Given these circumstances, it is natural to have a sense of being at-the-Edge and of living beyond-the-Familiar as Life as-we-have-known-it is not what-is-happening-now. What we are experiencing as chaos, cataclysm, and collapse can also serve as motivation for internal exploration, rearrangement, and expansion. Now, perhaps more than ever before, we are invited to make conscious choices about what we value, how we live, why we matter, where we put our energy, and when do we “expand our repertoire.”
Evolution of Consciousness refers to the capacity of human and all beings to adapt, transform, and evolve as participants in the vast ecosystem known as Universe. With awareness that our way of being in relationship affects ourselves, each other, and all beings, we recognize the agency and potential that we have to intentionally participate in the story that we are living.
Through Spirituality, we explore the understanding that there is a sacred consciousness that creates our world. We are invited into various ways of experiencing, relating to, and conceptualizing the presence of the “Sacred” as a way of being and as the essence of all beings.
Explorations of Consciousness & Spirituality are foundational elements of most MBMS offerings.
“We don’t have to know the path ahead in order to walk it.”
How to begin?
Now that you’ve read through this Homepage, with some curiosity about Monterey Bay Meditation Studio, you are invited to read it again with attunement to yourself. Bring attention to your body, mind, and heart and notice what has you feel energized or more curious, what resonates with your heart. As you look through Currents and Offerings, pay particular attention to what calls you.
We are all living in a time of expansive and deep transformation. As our lives and the world change, we have the opportunity to become more aware of our inner world – What needs to be tended? What and who are most important to us?
We have the opportunity to embody more kindness and compassion in our relationships with all beings. How can we contribute to healing what has been harmed?
As so much is changing so quickly, we find ourselves at the edge of uncertainty. How do we want to show-up as things get tough and tougher? What are the seeds that we want to plant for future Life on Earth?
We are invited to imagine:
What if we expand and deepen …
… How we bring mindful awareness to every thing, every body, and every doing?
… How we embody community with all beings – thinking, living, and acting within an ecosystemic context?
… Our capacity of “finding joy in weathering the storms” (Vanessa Andreotti) rather than sitting in the suffering of wishing the storms would just go away?
… How we honor and celebrate Life?
Given the current circumstances and parameters …
… How might we respond?
… What can we imagine?
The teachers, facilitators, and community of MBMS are committed to offering experiences, opportunities, guidance, and inspirations for catalyzing, supporting, and sustaining stamina, consciousness, and connection. We are dedicated to practice, being of service, and creativity in response to this time of emergence with its potential for healing, transformation, and evolution. We invite you to join us in this journey of conscious response as a way of being with ourselves, with each other, and with Earth and all her beings.
“No matter the outcome, how do we comport ourselves? I am of consequence to, or for, or of. Suddenly I am of what has come before me, and I am also what is yet to happen. So how do I try to create a condition in which I am of consequence?”
Our free online community is where we gather for Ongoing Connection | Meaningful discussion threads | Sharing of resources | Collaboration | Groups focusing on specific topics or actions. We invite you to join us.
community.montereybaymeditation.com
Wishing you well-being from the inside out,