Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics – North Carolina

Registration now open: click HERE

Unwind for this gleeful exploratory romp into the mysterious heart of meditation, with meditation instructor and award-winning writer Jeff Warren, co-author of the best-selling Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics.

On this retreat, we will explore the common language that is the foundation for all practices. Underneath the external form of a practice—whether playing music, or noticing the breath, or moving the body in martial arts—deep life skills are being trained. Understanding these skills is central to building your own practice, to being your own life teacher, and to sharing practice with others.

The goal is not to clear your mind but to focus your mind—for a few nanoseconds at a time—and whenever you become distracted, just start again. Getting lost and starting over is not failing at meditation, it is succeeding.

In this workshop, we will:

• Look at four skills in particular, as one way to understand how practice works.
• Learn to recognize and develop these deep skills not only while meditating, but also in other areas of life.

This is about healing, exploration and empowerment—there is no greater adventure.

Nurtured by breathtaking views, this retreat is suitable for total beginners to more experienced practitioners. Three days of sitting and discussion, with some movement and nature excursions to keep the energy moving and the body limber. Excitement will be had, as well as peaceful sighing and a great many bad jokes.

A NOTE FROM JEFF

Welcome to Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics—where it doesn’t matter how many techniques and paths you’ve explored and accidentally screwed-up. In this workshop, we start again fresh!

We’ll dig into the magical mystery weirdness of concentration, clarity, equanimity, and care, and then we’ll build an understanding of practice that works for each of us. We’ll do all this in a rigorously humanistic way that nevertheless gets cool and mystical at the end, because, frankly, that’s where the fun is.

The community is the real teacher. I’m always amazed by the everyday wisdom that comes out when people get honest and real about their lives and their practice. We all have something to teach each other about being human. There’s no hierarchy from this perspective: no special artist over here, or enlightened person over there.

As you take a break from daily life in this retreat, you’ll:

• Unwind in an environment of comparative simplicity
• Keep your body still and your mind awake
• Learn the core life skills that exist within all meditation types
• Make space to do is nothing at all
• Enjoy the sense of connection through group meditation
• Create a custom meditation practice just for yourself.

Meditation can be ridiculously helpful, and it doesn’t have to look anything like the stereotypes, nor do you need to buy into a particular worldview to enjoy its benefits and perspective.

When we understand how the practice works in our own nervous systems, we can begin to be our own teacher. And then we pass it on, so the practice can find its unique expression in someone else. This is how sanity becomes a social movement.

Hope to see you in October!

Jeff

Testimonials

“Jeff is a fantastic teacher: funny, empathetic, open-hearted, wise, and smart as a whip. The workshop was a game-changer for my meditation practice.”

“Jeff Warren is a wonderful teacher for those of us just beginning to get deeper into a meditation practice. I have no doubt he can support more experienced/seasoned mediators as well. I found him down to earth, easily able to relate to and a teacher I would be interested in taking a longer meditation retreat with. A really positive and welcoming experience for me.”

“It was a fantastic program that was able to reach people of many different levels of meditation experience. Jeff Warren uses humor and his own experiences to de-mystify meditation in a way that makes it accessible to anyone!”

“Jeff Warren did a fantastic job! He is an excellent speaker and teacher and I’d be thrilled to attend any program he offers in the future.”

About Jeff

Jeff Warren is a meditation instructor and journalist, celebrated for his accessible and pragmatic style of teaching. He is the co-author of The New York Times bestselling Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, and founder of The Consciousness Explorers Club, a nonprofit meditation educational group based in Toronto. Jeff has successfully taught meditation to police officers, young offenders, social workers, and Google executives, among many others. His meditations are featured on the popular 10% Happier app.

His agenda: