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The Learning
To Listen Yoga & Meditation Collective's Center is
currently in the planning stage. We are looking to
acquire funds to puchase land in the North Bay to create
this sanctuary for our community. Elements of the
center will include: a yoga & meditation hall, yurts,
a sauna, hot tubs, and a sweat-lodge. For those of
you familiar with other local retreat centers, we are hoping
to create a Spirit Rock meets Harbin Hot Springs meets Esalen meets
Yoga; hope that's just confusing enough to pique your interest.
For a more detailed map of what our plan is, our
vision statement is below. See Our Past Brochure: Inside Outside Also, if you have skills, or know of someone with skills in the areas of fundraising, nonprofit development, marketing, planing, or other areas that may serve this project, please contact us. Please consider making a financial contribution via our Giving Page (WHY INVEST?) |
VISION STATEMENT
Overview: Meditation, Yoga, Initial and Thirty Year Plan
Yoga, Meditation, and Retreats Centers Worldwide
Why a yoga and meditation center? There is a movement among us, and throughout the entire world today. This movement is strong, as its roots are quite long. Several thousand years ago spiritual practitioners began establishing communities from which to plant a deep seed of truth in the world. In Asia, these communities have been primarily monasteries for Buddhists, and ashrams for those on a yogic path. Buddhism and yoga are close cousins (perhaps even twins separated at birth), both having as their parent philosophy the elemental thought system of Sankya; and thus, they are a match made in heaven.
Meditation centers where people reside and retreat are gaining popularity in the United States and abroad, and yoga retreat centers are exploding on the global mindfulness scene as a way to retreat, vacation, relax, renew, heal, and grow. But what has yet to happen, is a true merger, a yoking of the yoga ashram and the meditation center; and maybe a third thrown in for good measure, the hot spring – a Spirit Rock meets Esalen meets Harbin meets Yoga – a sanctuary: a place where people can explore movement of mind, body, and spirit. This is the vision for the Learning To Listen Yoga & Meditation Center (LTLYMC).
Initial Thoughts
The retreat center’s initial vision is quite simple, as simplicity and an attention to natural/organic development are central to its birth. Initially, the center will be bare bones: land of course is the biggest expense, a large yurt for yoga and meditation, five or six smaller yurts for living, another structure for food prep, composting toilets, hot tubs, a sauna, and that’s about it: simple, but nice. Once the land is acquired, it should only cost around $100,000 to complete the basic layout of these buildings and amenities. Once this ‘rustic’ version is completed, we’ll begin holding retreats, primarily for yoga instructors whom we know, but also beginning to offer the center to the greater mindfulness community. This will generate revenue, and word of mouth and marketing will generate contributors. These new funds will be used to grow and develop the center over time.
Thirty-Year Plan
The sky’s the limit. As a model, we’re referring to the Learning To Listen Yoga & Meditation Center as Spirit Rock meets Harbin meets Esalen; the long range goal is to develop this project into the a ‘mindfulness university’. We want to create a place where people’s dream of living free can come true, a place where people are drawn to instinctually, a place that awakens in people old feelings that seemed to have died away, and finally, we want to create a place so beautiful and peaceful and growth-supportive that people would be proud to die there. This is our wish. Make a Contribution (WHY INVEST?)
Mission Statement
Learning To Listen is a community committed to offering tools that promote conscious living. Learning To Listen Yoga & Meditation Center is a home where people can come to receive tools and teaching; teaching from others (study), from themselves (silence), from nature (simplicity), from community (service).
Sample Daily Schedule
noble silence (mornings)
6 – 7a: meditation
7 – 9a: yoga
9 – 10a: breakfast
11 – 12p: meditation
12 – 2p: lunch
2 – 5p: free time/working meditation
4 – 6p: yoga
6 – 8p: dinner
8 – 10p: meditation/talk/discussion
‘Degrees’ of Visitors
day visitor
weekend retreatant
weekly retreatant
resident (work exchange, sabbatical, long-term resident)
apprenticeships (budding teachers can live closely and learn from experienced teachers)
Why Invest in the Learning To Listen Yoga & Meditation Collective's Center?
There are many areas and people that Learning To Listen sees as underserved by the current expressions of mindful practice in our culture. Our vision of a retreat center will surely take some time to unfold, and while infrastructure is being established towards this end, we see our day-to-day efforts best focused in a few major areas. These fall into four distinct yet related categories:
1) Supporting Yoga & Meditation Teachers
2) Donation-Based Offerings and Classes
3) Family Mindfulness as Practice
4) A Collaborative Teaching ModelEach of these areas addresses specific needs that have far-reaching implications and countless 'ripple effects':
1) Mindfulness teachers for the most part are independent contractors, and thus they often do not receive support in the more traditional employee-based ways; things like group insurance and ongoing training support - we hope to address this need for our teachers. Learning To Listen also hopes to raise awareness around the growing disappearance of 'apprenticeship' in our culture - we plan on developing ways of offering newer teachers support via mentoring. And lastly, we hope to make it increasingly possible for our teachers to receive financial support via grants, and thus LTL makes its experience and resources available to both guide and represent them as a fiscal sponsor should a suitable need arise.
2) With the rising prices of yoga offerings, many folks simply cannot benefit from these time-tested teachings - donation-based offerings share the cultural responsibility of providing opportunities for the greatest number.
3) The healthy and natural cultivation of families is nearly absent from our culture's informal educational structures and the mindfulness arena as well - we hope to give familes a place where life no longer needs to be an 'interruption' of their mindfulness practice, but is instead held as an opportunity and expression of practice.
4) A collaborative teaching model 'spreads out' wisdom in a way that allows each student and teacher to truly begin to know and value their own direct experience and inner gifts - without one 'main teacher', the all too often tendency for community to come to mean 'community of [the teacher's] students' lessens, and thus the term community can instead reclaim its deeper value of: 'community of peers and friends' along the path of life and awakening.
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When the seed of Spirit Rock Meditation Center was planted over thirty years ago a vision was set into motion; a vision of service, of growth, of community, and this seed has sprouted into the meditation haven that Spirit Rock is today.
If the qualities Spirit Rock offers are similar to what Learning To Listen has in mind, then why not just leave these things up to a Spirit Rock, who is tried and true? The answer: yoga is the bridge of today, the catalyst that most Americans are using to span the gap between consumer/material society and inner/spiritual discovery and growth.
A center that offers a balance between mind, body, and spiritual practices is the vision of LTLYMC. Spirit Rock is wonderful, but their focus for the most part does not fully include movement elements of body practices (yoga). Harbin has wonderful soaking facilities, but it’s programs on mind and spirit seem somewhat inconsistent at times. Esalen is perhaps closest to our vision, but LTLYMC will focus all the more on yoga and meditation, and soaking wont be the main attraction, which sometimes seems to be the case at Esalen.
The world is ready for a yoga and meditation center. In fact, the world is screaming for it. I get requests for local retreats frequently, and my investigations into centers that are currently available – in the hopes that they support a combination of both movement and stillness practices – have been disappointing.
Also, to have a regular retreat location, a home, changes everything for a community. The community Learning To Listen has as its members yogis, Buddhists, artists, musicians, doctors, and the list goes on. LTLYMC will be the first center to offer a home to such a diverse range of mindful expressions. Too broad? No way – because the seed of all mindful expression is similar – a kindness, a desire to serve and be in community, a desire for family and kin. Please help support the propagation of tools that promote conscious living, this world needs each of us to do so: Make a Contribution
LTLYMC will grow slowly, but it will grow. We’re not looking for quick fixes, quick returns, stocks, or retirement. We’re looking for people that want to be involved because it’s an opportunity to live your dreams, to create a community and a paradise that you’ve always known is possible. So get ready, because here we go …
Simplicity Service Kindness Silence
