This program will be held in person at our Center in Cambridge. Please bring a vegetarian lunch. From 4:00-5:00 pm we will have tea and social time for those who wish to linger and mingle at the Center. Masks will be optional.
Join CIMC’s vibrant 35 & Under community for a day-long workshop that supports and deepens our spiritual path through learning and practicing together. Our program will consist of three parts:
Meditation Skills Development: We will do three meditation exercises centered on mindfulness of hearing, tasting, and physical sensations. These will assist us in learning just how refined and subtle our capacity for mindfulness can become. We will then engage in a detailed examination of our breath as a way of understanding what exactly it means to be mindful of the breath. Experienced meditators will get a lot out of this, even as the practices may seem introductory!
Insight through Story Writing: Writing a story from a moment or event in our past can give us remarkable and unexpected insight. We will begin this practice with a guided meditation to create an open space for a memory to arise from our deep mind. We will then take time to write, using pen and paper, and see what emerges. We’ll end by reading our stories to each other in small groups.
The Nervous System, Regulation, and Meditation: This session consists of four learning segments to help us work more effectively with anxiety, stress, overwhelm, trauma, and more.
- Understanding the nervous system: polyvagal theory and the window of tolerance.
- Dysregulation: identifying physiological and cognitive/affective symptoms of hyper- and hypo-arousal.
- Somatic and breath practices to reregulate the nervous system.
- Interaction with meditation: nervous system dysregulation during meditation and ways to adjust.
This program is appropriate for both new and experienced meditators. Our time together will include meditation, breathing and movement exercises, instruction, writing, small group discussion, Q&A, and socializing.
Full and partial scholarships are available up to 72 hours before the start of the program. This program is in-person only and will not be recorded.
Sumi Loundon Kim is the Buddhist chaplain at Yale University and the author of Blue Jean Buddha, The Buddha’s Apprentices, Sitting Together, and Goodnight Love. Following a master’s degree from the Harvard Divinity School, she went on to work as the associate director at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. She has also served as the Buddhist chaplain at Duke University. She’s the founder of Mindful Families of Durham in North Carolina and early co-founder of the GenX Buddhist Teachers Sangha. Sumi’s parents lived in a Zen center when she was a kid, and in her teens she fell in with the bodhisattvas of Barre, sticking with that ever since. She lives in southern Connecticut with her husband, two teens, and a dog named Bodhi.