Thursdays evenings: Sept 18 – October 23, 2025
6:30 p.m. — 7:50 p.m.
This offering is both a class for beginners and for experienced meditators who wish to cultivate a more embodied, alive practice.
In this 6-week class, those new to meditation will learn practices that cultivate mindfulness, heart-centered curiosity, somatic intelligence, both expansive and focused concentration, kindness and other wholesome bodymind states. Experienced meditators will learn a distinctly somatic, deeply alive approach to meditation.
Reserve your place in the 6-week series by making a minimum deposit of $60 using the PayPal button to the left, along with your message with a short description of your interest in the class.
* Embodied Meditation is meant to be offered on a suggested donation basis of $10-$25 per class, which goes to covering the cost of space rental, first. If you wish to commit to the six weeks of class and cannot pay the $60 registration deposit, please contact me and we will work something out. No one will be turned away due to inability to pay. If you have extra resources and want to “sponsor” someone, simply add dollars to your registration deposit!
More description:
These bodies of ours are not obstacles to the development of love or wisdom: they are, in fact, great teachers and are the very way for both healing and spiritual growth. When we learn to meditate in a way that is rooted in the body, we become more integrated. Rather than transcending our bodies in order to realize greater peace, connection, and insight, we transcend with our bodies.
When we deepen our embodiment, we learn to feel the difference between arrived at stillness and imposed stillness: there is a world of difference between the two. When we bring more and more of ourselves to our meditation through increased embodiment, we make more and more of our energies and patterns available for complete welcoming: the first step in any authentic evolution.
Although this is not a specifically Buddhist meditation class — and participants do not need to have an interest in Buddhism to participate — it is rooted in two traditional meditation practices and associated teachings taught by the Buddha.
About Tārāvajrī:
Tārāvajrī’s uniquely embodied approach to meditation has its roots in her early years as a naturally contemplative, dancing, feeling kid growing up on her family farm. She has been practicing formal meditation taught by the Buddha and rooted in the body for roughly thirty years. With a background in modern dance, she’s been an authentic movement practitioner and a somatic psychotherapist for twenty years. In 2021, she was ordained as a Buddhist Dharmacharini (“Dharma-farer”). Tārāvajrī does not claim any particular level of awakening; however, she has experienced substantial effects of practicing over many years and wishes to share those fruits with others.
Bowing to my teachers:
My teacher and friend, Dh. Varasuri, has been my most profound, “close up,” and long-term Dharma teacher — both in formal study and through Varasuri’s remarkable embodiment of the teachings. My healing, embodiment, and path of waking up were and continue to be significantly supported by psychoanalyst and dance movement therapist, Zoë Avstreih, in the training and practice of authentic movement as well as through the exchange of poetry and dialog. Susan Aposhyan, founder of Body Mind Psychotherapy, has also imparted incalculable embodied wisdom to me over the course of many years. In a conversation with Susan in 2021, we agreed about the need for much more embodied meditation and embodied spirituality in our communities, so this class is a particular joy for me. I give thanks to these and all of my teachers, as well as to my teachers’ teachers and beyond.
May the fruits of our practices go to the alleviation of our own and all other beings’ suffering — particularly “second arrow” suffering caused by our confusion and fear — which we have the ability to do something about.
*Please visit my “events” page for upcoming events, including “Practice In Motion” — an urban retreat for helping us stay healthy and real as we engage with suffering in the world.
