Deepening Your Practice

With Amy Edelstein & Chris Parish

An experiential course to empower your ongoing spiritual development

This course will open you up to ways you can get the most out of your spiritual practice and efforts to evolve. In this 9-month course, experienced guides and educators Amy Edelstein and Chris Parish will skillfully illuminate the openings that can make all the difference, opening portals to the next step in your own spiritual development. With humor and insight, they will share what has leveraged and accelerated their own spiritual breakthroughs. Equally important, they will share insights gleaned from their own false starts and dead ends on the path. They will make all of their experience available to you to save you needless time in similar trial and error. These tips and discoveries will help you channel your previous spiritual energy into constructive paths so you begin to experience the cumulative results of effort well made.

In this course, you will learn about a variety of spiritual practices, what the different effects and strengthening we can anticipate from each, how to judge and guide ourselves through the obstacles that inevitably arise from external issues, knowledge gaps, and our own self deception. You will also have the opportunity to work with others in the cohort supporting each other’s spiritual efforts and practicing collective inquiry.

Chris and Amy intend for everyone to make leaps in this class and will do everything they can to support the depth, strength, and spiritual passion of every individual in the cohort. They will share invaluable insights from their many years of practice (combined 70+ years of time clocked on the proverbial spiritual cushion) so you can avoid unnecessary pitfalls and detours that sap time, energy, inspiration, and confidence. You’ll also simply experience, from lesson to lesson, the buoyancy and joy of spiritual momentum and support, feeling the sacred camaraderie of expert mentorship and work with other caring co-evolutionaries.

While not the first time they have taught together, (Chris and Amy share a 25 year history of friendship and dharma dialogue together on the path) this course is newly developed from exactly what they both feel is essential to share with other dedicated individuals.

Deepening Your Practice will take you on a transformative and supportive journey. In sensitive and clarifying instruction, Amy and Chris will show you you how to tie the inner safety ropes so you feel confident to explore your own depths. Through colorful stories and passages for contemplation, they will introduce you to teachers and methods you may never have heard of before as a way of supporting your own intention to develop. And most of all, both Amy and Chris look forward to sharing the joy of discovery and liberation together, creating in our own micro-culture a rich environment formed from deeper and higher values.

Chris Parish began his meditation practice in 1973 in India, and Amy Edelstein began her dedicated spiritual work in 1979 in Israel. In Deepening Your Practice, they bring their knowledge of time-honored spiritual paths and of contemporary evolutionary spirituality. They also offer you the immeasurable benefit of their personal insights about practice, gleaned by clocking countless hours, persevering through challenges, and experiencing liberating breakthroughs. The spiritual teachers and meditation instructors they have studied with in person include (more or less in chronological order) JK Krishnamurti, Munindra, Dipa Ma, Christopher Titmuss, School of Advanced Jewish Studies, Eido Roshi, Yogi Amrit Desai, Lama Zopa, Yeshe Dorje Rinpoche (One of the Dalai Lama’s Spiritual Advisors), HH the Dalai Lama, Kirti Tsenshab Rinpoche (one of the Dalai Lama’s Senior Tutors), Geshe Sopa Rinpoche, SN Goenka, Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Swami Krishnanada (from Sivananda Divine Life Society), Swami Chidananda (from Sivananda Divine Life Society), and both were designated Senior Teachers of Evolutionary Enlightenment, having practiced this path for twenty five years with Andrew Cohen.

Monthly Topics

Spiritual Practice: Transforming Our Orientation to Life

This first module will set the foundation for the course and for our entire relationship to spiritual practice. In this module, Chris and Amy will illuminate a posture where spiritual practice is an orientation to life, rather than an activity we “do” in order to get something or get somewhere. Making this fundamental shift in posture is key to truly transforming our life from one touched by the sparks of spiritual insight into one that is infused with our deeper intention, passion, and love of the numinous.

This module will also orient you to the course module—how we make our spiritual practice count. With insights from decades of spiritual practice, Amy and Chris will introduce you to an orientation that will deepen your experience of practice. You will discover how your own intention can lead to sustained transformation and ongoing spiritual fulfillment and ease with life.

In this module you will learn:

What spiritual practice is and can do for you.
How to change your orientation towards life to deepen the effects of your practice.
How to practice to keep developing, not just to attain specific liberating insights.
What the difference is between meditation, contemplation and study, and collective inquiry practice.
How to create the right environment for practice including your physical space, the time you dedicate to practice, the company you keep.

Meditation: Why & How Do We Practice?

What is the purpose of meditation? In this module, Amy and Chris will give you an overview of the purpose and types of meditation. Through stories (personal and classic), meditation exercises, and discussion of the subtleties of meditation as spiritual practice, you’ll delve into the depths and unexpectedly captivating nature of meditation. Chris and Amy will lead you into an exploration of the relationship (or non relationship) between meditation and enlightenment, raising as many questions as they answer and open a doorway to the joy, thrill, and maturity of a spiritual orientation to life.

You will learn:

Meditation exercises from several sources
How to begin, cultivate, or review an ongoing practice of meditation in your life
What is meant when it’s said, “The path and the goal are one.”
How to integrate our meditation practice with the rest of our lives.

Meditation: Discovering an Endless Source of Depth

This module will open up an understanding of the perennial meditation instructions of “Letting go.” What does it mean to let go? How do you let go at the same time as you are practicing? Why do they say that when we let go we discover our “natural state”? Can we really let go and trust when the vicissitudes of life continue to toss us this way and that? What is the nature of the Self or depth that we discover? You will be guided in meditation to experience that fullness/emptiness referred to in so many of the great traditions and time-honored mystical writings.

You will learn:

The relationship between effort/no effort.
How you cultivate confidence in spirit or Self
Why even the greatest mystics point to consistency over experience.
What the balance is between self-discovery and adherence to a path, practice, or discipline.

Contemplation: A Different Way to Inquire

“Why do some people contemplate and develop wisdom and understanding, while I seem to go in circles?” If this is a question you secretly or not-so-secretly ask yourself about your practice then this module will be a turning point for you. Chris and Amy will explore how to approach our individual contemplation in a way that will lead to deeper insight and development. We’ll look at the importance of self-reflection, contemplation of spiritual truths, the practice of journaling. We’ll remove blocks and misconceptions along the way to reveal the richness of discovery. And we will share with you what it means to contemplate in a way that takes us beyond the known.

You will learn:

Different approaches to contemplation: reflection, reading inspirational passages, journaling.
How to structure a contemplative practice.
What it means to have “beginner’s mind”
The value of adding contemplation to your meditation practice

Contemplation: When Study Becomes Spiritual Practice

Cognitive development can also become a central component of our spiritual path. Why does the understanding of so many Ph.D.’s not lead to spiritual wisdom? Why do some religious traditions eschew studying in favor of meditation, worship, service, or prayer? How can we relate to learning philosophy, spirituality, history, the social or natural sciences in a way that deepens our approach to spiritual transformation? These are questions that are becoming increasingly important in our information-based world so we do not create false divides between Spirit and Engagement in the world. They are also questions increasingly relevant to those of us who see the world through a spiritually awakened evolutionary perspective.

You will learn:

The different posture between classic academic study and study that informs our desire for transformation.
How to nurture our innate curiosity
How our motive to awaken can be strengthened by our understanding of history
Several key thinkers who transformed Amy & Chris relationship to study and spiritual practice.

Contemplation: Learning & Practicing an Evolutionary Worldview

An evolutionary worldview is increasingly becoming the context for contemporary spiritual practice. Evolutionary Christianity, Evolutionary Judaism, Evolutionary Enlightenment, Integral Practice, all incorporate a deep time perspective and a scientific appreciation for the principles and process of evolution that has created our beautiful world. This worldview is more and more the lens we relate to the world around us from. What is an evolutionary worldview? How does it inform our practice? Chris and Amy will illustrate how an evolutionary worldview re-colors the way we see the world, how we can “practice” this view to internalize it, and how it can transform our values and relationships with the world around us.

You will learn:

What is meant by the term “evolutionary worldview.”
Why this perspective generates a sense of optimism and strength.
How it changes our priorities, values, ethics, motives, and sense of care.
How to cultivate a lens of cultural developmental inquiry.

Collective Inquiry: Generating a Field

Spiritual practice is not only a solitary endeavor. Life is about relationship and our transformation and degrees of awakening show up in the qualities and values found in our interrelatedness. In this module, we will explore the art of collective inquiry. Chris and Amy will walk you through the mechanics of how to bring our practice of awareness, sensitivity to consciousness, and what Gregory Bateson referred to as the space between us into focus as the center point of our spiritual practice.

You will learn:

How to become sensitive to the qualities of consciousness in group dialogue.
What to look for in an inquiry group that will take the whole group deeper.
How to hold and accommodate multiple perspectives while sharpening your discernment.
How to surf the edges of the known while tracking authentic spiritual insights and discoveries.

Collective Inquiry: Working in a Field

This module will explore the aspects of collective inquiry in more detail. The entire module will work experientially, deepening your confidence in this type of practice, revealing how to develop surety while not becoming fixed, rigid, or exclusive. You will practice skills of listening and interest, learning from mistakes and how to skillfully get back on track when the thread gets lost. You will learn how to listen for the deeper place another is speaking from so you can support development wherever it is trying to occur.

You will learn:

How to pay attention for emergence.
How to discern ways to follow the thread and weave a variegated tapestry together.
How to focus on the whole while participating fully.
How to move attention from performance to shared discovery.

Next Steps: Feeling Good About Your Practice

In this module, you will bring together what you have learned and discovered into a simple plan for how you want to proceed with your practice. Whether you already have a set practice in a tradition or you want to develop a practice for your next time period, this module will help clarify and coalesce the insights you’ve had so you feel you are walking on a firm path forward. Amy and Chris will be sharing deep insights from their own years on the path, knowledge about times to push, times to gestate, times to focus inward, times to focus on interrelatedness.

You will learn:

How to take responsibility for your own practice.
Learning to listen to the different cycles and rhythms within.
How to work at your edge.
Establishing your practice in deeper and higher motives