Welcome to Real Life: A Journey From Constriction to Connection. In this introductory video, Sharon describes the arc of the course, its features, and where we might see signs of spiritual and psychological progress.

Welcome to Real Life

A journey towards connection and freedom

This course offers a journey not of adopting beliefs, but of experimenting with our awareness and seeing what we discover.

Each section will be accompanied by a guided meditation and suggestions for bringing the theme of the class into your everyday life. They will, in addition, include an invitation to personal reflection through contemplation or journaling. We'll begin by talking about what that journey entails, how a journey isn't necessarily linear, and how we dare to imagine something bigger, something greater, something different than what we may be going through right now.

• We'll look at the times when we feel the most confined, the most trapped, the most constrained, the factors that habituate us to that—and ways we can work through these stuck places.
• We'll look at the times when we feel the most expansive, the most free, the most open, and how to enhance those.
• We'll look at what we take on this journey from isolation to freedom and what we might well learn to leave behind, just let go of rather than carry along and be burdened by.
• We'll look at the fact that however alone we might feel, in truth, we're never actually all alone, cut off, or isolated because the truth of life itself is connection.
• And we'll look at our aspiration to grow and connect: daring to dream bigger, daring to imagine. And how we take all of this into our lives.

Changing how we relate to life

I just want to say that in doing meditation practice, some of you, of course, are new, some of you are very experienced. For everybody, there are many kinds of experiences that happen. This is natural. This is inevitable. We might have some image that the perfect meditation will be all serene and then blissful and then joyful and no thoughts whatsoever. And that's just not so. 

We're not looking to have a singular kind of experience in meditation and cling to it. We're looking to change our relationship to every experience that comes our way, which is why meditation is a practice for life.

There are many things that will come and go. Some experiences are joyful, the wondrous is so beautiful. Some are difficult or painful. And there's an awful lot of time in-between where it's just kind of ordinary, repetitive routines being okay. We learn how to be more fully aware, alive, connected to each of these in a different and often a new way.