We work with individuals and teams on training their hearts and minds in the skills of concentration, mindfulness, heartfulness, inquiry, and awareness. These inner skills enable a more powerful and sustained focus, a greater awareness of one’s team members and shareholders, and a deeper effectiveness that arises from knowing how to work with difficulty and uncertainty.
Mindfulness coaching serves as a type of catalyst to help speed up and smooth out your inner development. We will pull from the five styles of meditation listed below to create a personalized training curriculum. We’ll then use regular feedback and interactive coaching to help you refine and deepen your understanding of these techniques. Your mastery of these techniques will go a long way towards solidifying your gains in both your formal meditation and in your work/life situations.
We’ll also focus on questions that are just as vital as technique. That will include questions such as: What brings you to train your mind in the first place? What are the questions that drive you? What are your aims for practice? Oftentimes, we will find methods and models that will seek out answers to these questions. But sometimes we will strike out into uncharted territory. In this unmapped space, deeper questions will arise. These new questions and answers will become a launching pad for further exploration.
The following mind training sessions can be done in either a half or full-day format.
Meditation is about learning to reprogram our inner operating system from the inside out. It’s a way of hacking our minds such that we can radically enhance our ability to focus, respond to the situations, and open our hearts to whatever challenges we meet. There are many styles of meditation, but the following five represent the most potent ways to hack the inner OS.
Each of these meditation styles are a training module. They can be taught in a standalone program, or mixed and matched to two styles for a half-day and three styles for a full-day program. During each interactive workshop we’ll explore the theoretical underpinnings of these practices, and do some combination of guided silent and social meditation. There will be plenty of time for fine-tuning and questioning as we journey into the process of hacking the mind through meditation.
Concentration
Strengthening of the muscle of attention.
Mindfulness
Noticing what you notice as you notice it.
Heartfulness
Inclining the mind towards opening the heart.
Inquiry
Working with the power of a question to open up new vistas.
Awareness
Simply being with what is.
Creativity is sometimes thought of as a completely generative process. We sit down, think really hard, and then generate a new idea. But the creative process might best be described as one of creative destruction. As something new is born within us, something old has to simultaneously fall away so that we can step into a new vision for how things might be.
In this training we’ll explore the creative process as a four-phase journey. In the first phase we move from an initial intention and effort to a consummate breakthrough in understanding. From the peak of the mountain top we then spiral down through a process of dissolution and letting go, finally resolving in a deep sense of equanimity and clarity of vision. In each of these four phases there is a development task and a requisite inner shift that’s required of us, the creatives, so that we can become one with the creative process itself.
We’ll explore each of the four phases of creativity, paying special attention to the inner practices of concentration, mindfulness, and loving acceptance that enable us to unify our life force with the creative impulse, instead of resisting and fighting against it. The result is a deeper connection with the source of of our own creativity, a profound sense of aliveness, and an increased ability to innovate by allowing the problems we face to solve us, rather than the us solving them.
Sharon Salzberg is a meditation teacher and New York Times best-selling author. She is the co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, and has played a crucial role in bringing Asian meditation practices to the West. Sharon has been a student of meditation since 1971, guiding retreats worldwide since 1974. She is a weekly columnist for On Being, a regular contributor to The Huffington Post and the author of many books including “Real Happiness,” and “Lovingkindness.” For more information please visit her website at www.SharonSalzberg.com
Vincent Horn is part of a new generation of teachers translating age-old wisdom into 21st-century code. A computer engineering dropout turned modern monk, Vincent spent his 20s co-founding the groundbreaking Buddhist Geeks project and working in a variety of start-up environments while doing a full year of silent meditation practice on retreat. Vincent began teaching meditation in 2010 and in 2016 received dharma transmission from his core teacher Kenneth Folk. That same year he helped start Meditate.io, which is dedicated to offering in-depth mind training for the digital age. Vincent has been called a “power player of the mindfulness movement” by Wired magazine and was honored to be featured in Wired UK’s “Smart List: 50 people who will change the world.” He lives in the mountains of Asheville, NC with his teaching & life partner Emily Horn and their son Zander.