START: SPRING 2012
END: SPRING 2013

FOUR WEEKENDS (FRI. 6:00-9:00 P.M., SAT. 9:30-5:30 P.M., SUN. 9:30-12:30 P.M.):
APRIL 13-15, 2012
JULY 13-15, 2012
NOV 9-11, 2012
APRIL 12-14, 2013

Those who wake are the students.
Those who stay awake are the teachers.

This journey offers a chance to work with Mark in a small group setting as a way to deepen your own path in the company of a small circle over a year of your life. The group will meet for four weekend retreats in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

The course experience will explore staying awake as an applied art of spirit while unfolding the archetypal dynamics we all encounter in our struggles to engage our full humanity. The retreat is based on the 8CD box set of teaching conversations that Mark has recently recorded for Sounds True under the same name. Mark has been exploring these themes for thirty-five years.

On a personal level, staying awake is not something we can manipulate, but only live into. Each of us is born instinctively awake and yet it takes courage to stay awake, to remember that all we encounter is real. As such, staying awake is a timeless practice we must ultimately enter alone, but one we can enliven together. The journey back to wakefulness is an invitation each day to delve into what it means to be alive.

From inside this aliveness, it seems the point of experience is not to escape life but to live it. Mysteriously, truth is a secret hidden in the days until opened by our experience. For at the center of our experience, each of us holds an aspect of wisdom waiting to be discovered, and everything we meet, if faced and held, reveals a part of that wisdom to us. Each of us has a language of truth in our heart that only living our life can give voice to. And being a spirit in the world centers on how we meet the life of experience that no one can escape. In this, life is the master and we remain the student.

Using ancient and contemporary stories, poetry, journaling, and dialogue, Mark invites participants to befriend their own stories and listen for their own wisdom in this reflective and transformational journey. This course is an invitation to engage with profound and life-giving material that will deepen the way you perceive and relate to the world.

I bear witness to a mysterious truth that life has given me: that we are stronger, gentler, more resilient, and more beautiful than we imagine, and that the resource we call life is never far away. I know this because every time my heart has been broken or shattered, I have felt certain that it could never be put back together. And every time, without exception, not only has my heart mended but it has become larger, stronger, and more loving for the breaking. The mysterious and unfailing journey of how this happens is the ordinary art of staying awake and it involves the deep and continuous act of being present in all ways in all directions, which is the practice of holding nothing back.
—Mark Nepo

REGISTRATION FOR THE YEARLONG JOURNEY INCLUDES A SIGNED COPY OF THE SOUNDS TRUE BOX SET.

CLASS SIZE IS LIMITED TO 24 STUDENTS.

If the course is full, please add yourself to the wait list and you will be contacted if space opens up.