InSpirit Center for Spiritual Living and Three Intentions bring you a day-long workshop with Mark Nepo. You have the opportunity to attend one or both sessions.

Cost:
Half-day: $48
Full day: $98
Join Mark Nepo in Mission Viejo, California, for one or two powerful sessions—a great opportunity to experience the profound power of his work in an intimate setting.

Schedule:
Morning Session: 9:30-12:30pm
Lunch: 12:30- 2:00pm
Afternoon Session: 2:00-5:00

Details:
InSpirit Center for Spiritual Living
25782 Obrero Dr. Unit D, Mission Viejo CA, 92691
For questions, call Brooke Warner: 510-967-9333 or email Brooke.

REGISTER FOR ONE SESSION:

REGISTER FOR BOTH SESSIONS:

Morning Session: Seven Thousand Ways to Listen

This half-day workshop is based on Mark’s new book, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen, which won the 2012 Books for a Better Life Award. About Mark and the book, Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat of Spirituality & Practice said, “A consummate master of telling stories and parables about people’s hopes, dreams, yearnings, fears, sorrows and triumphs. . . Nepo has written a masterwork on the spiritual practice of listening which plays such a predominant role in our private and public lives.”

Beloved as a teacher, poet, and storyteller, Mark, the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Awakening, is a gentle guide on our journey to discover our personal truths. Using ancient and contemporary stories, poetry, journaling and dialogue, Mark will invite participants to befriend their own stories and listen for their own wisdom in this reflective and experiential gathering.

We spend much of our time on earth listening and waking. When awake, we come upon the risk to be authentic. And taking that risk, we are faced with the need to stand by our core in order to live life fully. If we get this far, we are returned, quite humbly, to the simple fate of being here. And after all this way, it appears that a devotion to deep listening remains the simple and sacred work of being here.

Yet how do we inhabit these connections and find our way in the world? By listening our way into lifelong friendships with everything larger than us, with our life of experience, and with each other.

In this journey, Mark will open the work of listening on these levels. Our friendship with everything larger than us opens us to the wisdom of Source. This is the work of being. Our friendship with experience opens us to the wisdom of life on earth. This is the work of being human. And our friendship with each other opens us to the wisdom of care. This is the work of love. These eternal friendships are intertwined and inseparable. We need to listen for their wisdom if we have any hope of living an awakened life. These three friendships—the work of being, the work of being human, and the work of love—frame the journey of this workshop.

Bring a journal.

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Afternoon Session: Finding Inner Courage

Courage is the heart’s blossom.
It is the song from within
that keeps the pain of living
from snuffing our lives.

The original notion of the word courage means to stand by one’s core. This half-day workshop is based on Marks’ book Finding Inner Courage. It is exploration into how to find our way to our core, to stand by our core, and to then sustain the practice of living from our core—to live out of our courage. To encourage means to impart strength and confidence, to inspire and hearten. So, the question unfolds: How do we encourage ourselves, each other, and the world? And just what does it mean to live a life of encouragement? These notions frame the journey of this workshop. This is an education I never had in school, but which life has been shouting at us all, as long as I can remember. This is an education of what matters.

For the courage we all admire—where ordinary people summon unexpected strength to run into burning buildings or to stand up to tyrants, whether an abusive father or an abusive leader, this inspiring and mysterious impulse to rise and meet a dangerous situation, which Hemingway referred to as grace under pressure—grows from another kind of courage: inner courage. By inner courage, I mean the ground of quiet braveries from which the more visible braveries sprout. These are the ways of living and being that make bravery possible in the first place; not just as an event, but as an approach to life, as a way of life.

Thinking about courage in this way opens us to an array of small and constant efforts that no one ever sees, but which have changed the world: the courage to feel, to see, to accept, to heal, to be. Efforts of this nature often go unnoticed and unrecognized. Like the courage to break life-draining patterns and let the story of our lives unfold. Like the courage to persevere through the doorway of nothing into the realm of everything. Like the courage to choose aliveness over woundedness, to remember what matters when we forget, and to build on the past instead of hiding in it. Like the courage to choose compassion over judgment and love over fear, to withstand the tension of opposites, and to give up what no longer works in order to stay close to what is sacred. These subtle yet essential states, and more, make up the elements of living, and so, it serves us well to explore how they grow singly and together.

This workshop will be an invitation to be in relationship with deep and life-giving material. We will delve into: the courage to listen to your own life, the gift of vulnerability, the willingness to experiment and explore your own voice, the abiding commitment to respect your own and others’ journeys, and the life skill of working with what we’re given. No experience is required, just a Beginner’s Mind and Heart.

Bring a Journal.

REGISTER FOR ONE SESSION:

REGISTER FOR BOTH SESSIONS: