Sunday Gatherings are LIVE every week at 3:00 p.m. EDT
Donations are welcome!
A regular meditation practice helps us relax with our own mind. With that sense of relaxation, we develop kindness towards ourselves and towards others. We also learn to separate our experience from the story lines that we lay on top of our experience. We learn “what to accept and what to reject,” and in so doing, we can develop a deep trust in our experience, our senses, and our mind. In the same way that we develop a sense of self compassion that we extend out towards others, we can learn to extend this sense of trust to others. When we can do that, we can learn to elevate the voices of the oppressed and the marginalized around us. The trust that we extend outwards becomes a bridge between our experience and the experience of others.
About the Teacher
Jonathan Kirkendall grew up in Beirut and Tehran, returning to the US in 1979 for college at Wake Forest University. He first moved to Washington D.C. in 1985, and spent six years in an anarchist collective working with homeless families before moving to Boulder to work on his masters in Contemplative Psychotherapy at Naropa University. He and his husband Scott moved back to Washington in the mid 90’s. In 2006 Jonathan began volunteering his services to military families who had experienced the death the of the military member, and from 2015 - 2017 served as the clinical director for TAPS, the nonprofit which offers bereavement services to military members. He now splits his time between his private practice and as a board member for The Warrior Connection, a nonprofit that offers mindfulness retreats to veterans with PTSD. He has been teaching in Shambhala for over 20 years.