Our curriculum
Why spiritual?
Our spiritual curriculum is designed to develop the foundations of a spiritual life, including prosocial virtues like humility and compassion, a reverence for reality as it is, a deep sense of interconnectedness, and a commitment to a purposeful life of service towards others. Our primary tool is breath-based awareness, which we cultivate through meditation and strive to bring into every activity that we do.
The foundation of our spiritual curriculum is seated meditation. We start by developing awareness through concentration on the breath. From there, we gradually expand awareness to encompass thoughts, emotions, sensations, sights, and sounds. We then turn to non-dual meditation, with the ultimate goal of seeing through the dualistic notions of self and other that stand in the way of true spiritual development.
Seated meditation
Through movement-based meditations, like walking and yoga, we bring the concentration and awareness of the breath developed on the meditation cushion to ordinary living. By observing movement while meditating, we begin to appreciate that the world is unfolding in the only way that it possibly can.
Moving meditation
We learn to apply the awareness and attention developed through meditation in the activities of daily living, such as cleaning, manual labor, and food preparation. We also explore the how food and sleep contribute to a rich spiritual life: food as a way to connect with others at the table and develop gratitude for the plants, animals, and humans that make our meals possible; and sleep as a well-deserved respite from hard work and an entry into the strange world of dreams that is our most natural form of altered states of consciousness.
Daily living
Our spiritual curriculum also includes other physical practices, like breath work, chanting, and dance. We use breath work to relax or energize ourselves on command. In chanting and dance, we find an opportunity to express the inexpressible, participate in activities as old as our ancestors, and operate in unison with the others with whom we chant and dance.