Integrating Mindfulness Online Course
A Six-Week Course (Online or In-Person at Clear Sky)
March 18 – April 29, 2023; No class on April 8 (Easter Weekend)
Saturdays: 10:00am-12:00pm MDT *Click here to see your timezone
Recordings available for those who cannot attend live
There may have been a time when mindfulness apps, guided meditations or regular yoga classes were relaxing. Yet for many, those are not enough anymore.
With all that’s happening in the world, how do we collectively come up for air?
This course is for those who feel exhausted, distracted or disconnected; those who want to find meaning and embrace their life fully. It is to help integrate and apply mindfulness in your life, for your own sustainability and happiness. To be able to be of better service to those around you and to our planet.
NOTE: This course can be attended online or in-person at Clear Sky.
Navigating the complexities of today’s world requires more than just feeling good on retreat, or using a daily mindfulness app. We have to learn how to embody mindfulness while thinking about our planet’s future or navigating the pressures of daily life.
Integrating Mindfulness helps you apply the power of awareness to your life, and to cultivate a supportive container for personal resilience.
This Course Helps With:
- Strengthening your mindfulness or meditation practice to experience more calm and clarity.
- Creating supportive structures that help you stay balanced, protect your happiness and support your year-round growth.
- Applying the power of awareness to:
- Develop a supportive environment, and healthy consciously-chosen structures and routines in your daily life;
- Cultivate more meaningful conversations and connections in your relationships and community;
- Bring awareness and transformative change to big areas of your life that may be draining energy – concerns about your future, money, time management, food and health.
- Integrating and weave mindfulness into your all aspects of your daily work and life.
Based on Clear Sky’s Five Principles, Integrating Mindfulness helps you build a sustainable meditation practice that permeates your body, career, relationships and all other areas of your life.
You can learn more about our Five Principles here and get our free pdf overview by clicking the link below.
"Mindfulness is like turning on a light in a dark room. The power of awareness lets us see what is there - in our bodies, emotions, mind, workplaces, homes and relationships. Seeing what is there gives us the freedom and the courage to make deeply impactful changes. I've found it helps craft our lives, environment and structures in a way that deeply supports connection and growth".
Course Overview
Using Clear Sky’s Five Principles of creating a supportive container for mindfulness and growth, Integrating Mindfulness teaches you how to apply mindfulness across all areas of your life, and to create an environment that supports you physically, mentally and emotionally. The course includes meditations, exercises and community check-ins.
Week 1: Creating a supportive space for your growth;
Week 2: Transforming habit and making friends with structure;
Week 3: Quieting the monkey mind and creating generative conversations;
Week 4: Cleaning up big areas of your life frees up energy;
Week 5: The power of mindfulness for real and lasting change;
Week 6: Community and transforming our relationships with others.
"Deep transformational growth is really supported by having a container, a supportive structure around us. I feel like we're so disembodied today in our technological culture that this is my little kindness to myself in saying 'hello body, you're part of my day.'"
Our Approach
This course uses three interwoven approaches to support you in: cultivating mindfulness, to craft a supportive container; and to powerfully integrate mindfulness into all aspects of our life and work.
By mindfulness, we mean the natural power of awareness we all have, and the approaches that help us cultivate this in daily life. Mindfulness helps to slow down racing thoughts, distractions and negative emotions. Becoming more present and aware is like turning on a light so we can see better. And when we really start seeing what is happening in our bodies, emotions, minds, relationships and environment, we have the freedom to make transformative change.
Flourishing in our distracted and difficult world relies on bringing awareness to the people and things that nourish us, letting go of what doesn’t, and creating a container to protect our happiness and life-energy. More than ever, crafting a supportive container for our mindfulness practice and year-round growth is an essential skill.
When we have “turned on the light” and crafted a supportive container for deepening mindfulness, integrating mindfulness means applying this transformative power of awareness to all aspects of our life and work. We allow awareness to light up and transform our environment; our habits and use of time; how we listen and speak; areas of life where we may be stuck such as money, health, food, or life vision; and how we relate to others and build community.
Clear Sky Retreat Center’s mission is to support people transform struggle and embrace vitality. We provide a supportive container for depth work and transformation, and aim to be generative across a quadruple bottom line: spiritual, financial, environmental and social. Rooted in a deep history of our Buddhist lineage, we are a conscious community and “living lab” for developing integrated modern approaches to awakening. Under the guidance of our founding teachers Qapel and Catherine Sensei of www.planetdharma.com, we weave into our course and daily living an integral spirituality approach, and work across four key pillars of meditation, wisdom/study, mindfulness-in-action, and integration of the shadow.
Meet the Teachers
Karen McAllister
As Clear Sky’s Chair of the Board and Director of Business Development, I’m passionate about teaching the much-ignored principles of nurturing the factors – like honor your space, structure, and communication – that create the conditions we need to wake up more in daily life. I see how I learned and embodied these principles in my different roles at Clear Sky as the center went from self-starter to second-stage growth. This is what I call “the hands-on way of doing an MBA with a spiritual bottom line!”
In my free time, I love travelling, speaking Portuguese and reading history, architecture and art books.
Duncan Cryle
Through 30+ years of personal practice and 15+ teaching meditation and mindfulness, alongside an active career working all over the world, I’ve learnt a lot about an integrating mindfulness into daily life. As a founding member of Clear Sky in 2004, I’m amazed at the power of a beautiful, natural and dedicated space for supporting people to deepen their meditation and feel more connected. Alongside. my Clear Sky work, I hold a director position at a large software company where I also run a volunteer global mindfulness program to 1000s employees. I was formerly one of the pioneers of IBM’s mindfulness movement. I’m passionate about how mindfulness-based approaches can transform how we live and work together, and be of better service in the world.
What Previous Students Are Saying
"I think this course is a beautiful, utterly grounded and relevant way of making the spiritual life very real and integrated with how we are living every day of our lives. It lays an important foundation for a meditation practice that can actually go somewhere and lead to a well-rounded and truly fulfilling life."
"It's really, really brought me back home to myself. I found myself in the past very scattered and would put off all the important things, the spiritual aspects of life, the mindfulness and so on, just to blast through my day and get things done, but now I am really taking pause. I still don't get everything done, but I don't get everything done in a much more calm and soulful way."
Course Cost
We offer this course on the basis of dāna. If you’re not familiar with dāna, you may have come across related approaches such as “pay from the heart.”
Within this model, we are offering this course on a sliding scale from $120-360 CAD.
Dāna is a Sanskrit term that translates as “generosity” in English. The practice of generosity is central to spiritual unfoldment, whatever path you follow. In our own Buddhist lineage, teachings have always been given on the basis of dāna, and we are committed to this practice and its development in the West.
Dāna is a radical and – we believe – viable economic alternative to capitalism. We all know there must be something better than capitalism or its hungry cousin, consumerism. We maintain that, together, we can offer a financial model that is based in life-affirming mutual support. Please join us in co-creating this promising economic alternative.
To help you choose an amount that feels right for you, we recommend this heart-based exercise from our friends at Planet Dharma.
It’s our joy to offer this course, and we trust you’ll match our time, energy, and passion by giving an amount of money that feels good and healthy to both you and us.