Simplify Your Life from the Inside-Out
March 14, 7-8:30pm CT
Want to declutter and clarify your inner world? We will use a 500-year old spiritual exercise to do exactly that. Then, we’ll delve into how this clarity revolutionizes your outer world, including:
⁎ Why and how to say “no”;
⁎ Draw boundaries;
⁎ Deepen into our wholeness in a broken world;
⁎ Align our actions to our spirit’s deepest yearning.
You’ll have private time to reflect or journal, and we’ll process as a group to gain insights and collective wisdom. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to simplify and transform your inner and outer world.
I’m giving mini-retreats every month: Ongoing care for your ongoing life. With my tender, strong facilitation. For you.
Come on over! Equity rates, deep soul care.
A Tender Retreat for Exhausted Teachers
On Aug. 27, I am offering a gentle care retreat to help exhausted teachers of all levels. It’s designed to help them connect with their revitalization and agency, process grief, name their growth, and reclaim their joy.
Registration for this retreat is now open. If teachers register with people they know, they can request to be put in small groups together during the retreat, which could be a really powerful and integrative way to process these complex times.
Please pass this along. Additionally, if you would like to gift a retreat to a teacher you know and love or contribute to my teachers equity fund, let me know if you want more info.
Join my FREE healing retreat for the unemployed/underemployed: Aug. 12
For those who are struggling with the emotional roller coaster of being unemployed or underemployed, here is a gentle time to reconnect with your self-worth. Being un/underemployed is excruciating: On top of the emotional and physical isolation, you can feel the judgments of society, interviewers, loved ones, and self, on top of financial hardship, anxiety, and more.
It can be hard to lose sight of your intrinsic worth. Come reconnect to your deepest value.
What to expect:
You will be led through a gentle visual meditation of sending your roots deep into your intrinsic self-worth, your unmovable value. No matter the storms you face or the messages you receive from those around you, you will be led to a place of emotional independence from these external messages, to a place of tending, care, grounding, and interconnectedness.
When: Thursday, August 12
Time: 11 AM-12:30 PM CT
Cost: Free
Register: HERE
See you there, my friends. – Meisaan
Friends,
I am leading a free, online meditation on July 19. Theme: Being uprooted and rooting. Feel free to come join me.
Wherever you are, may your healing and transformation be deep.
Meisaan
Healing Writing Workshop: Finding the Essence
In these chaotic times, we can find ourselves drowning in words. Here is a way to find some clarity.
This workshop is for writers and those who consider themselves non-writers. It is for anyone who has a lot of words within them and wants to reveal their essence. You will have time to free-form write on a topic of your desire, then whittle it down into a moderately-sized poem. Then we will whittle it down again. And then again.
And you will see the magic happen.
Sometimes the words come out so fast we don’t even know the essence of what we are writing.
In this process of what I call a “reduction poem,” you will have the liberty to free-form write and then pare it away to find the essence.
This workshop is for anyone who wants to find the essence of their words and heart space within. What’s really going on inside? What really wants to come out? We will alternate between having private time for writing, sharing in small groups, and then in large group. Breakout groups will be gathered into People of Color and non-People of Color.
We will be digging into the questions:
How has your heart broken or shut down?
How have you grown (strange joys)?
What has made you come alive?
As Covid and the deep turbulence of these times affect people of all ages, this writing workshop is open to people of all ages. Of course, that includes youth! Especially youth.
It is intergenerational and open to all.
Suggested donation: $50/adult, $20/youth. No one will be turned away, give what you can: Healing is available to all. Come to write, come to heal.
When: Saturday, July 17
Time: 2PM-5PM CT
Cost: By Donation (Suggested amount: $50/adult, $20/youth, pay what you can)
Interspiritual Prayer Session
If you are like me, you might need a special time and place these days to reconnect with your humanity and inherent divinity. If so, come join me in this interspiritual prayer session.
I will start us out with a gentle, guided meditation to get us grounded, and then we can offer up our prayers according to the traditions and spiritual orientations that we desire. Yes, racism in all of its ubiquitous forms. But our divinity and the depth of our humanity is greater. Let’s come and remember this. Together.
When: Saturday, March 20
Time: 2 PM-3:30 PM CT
Cost: Free (see comments below if you wish to support this equity work)
Let’s return to who we are. Let’s not forget the essence of ourselves in these times. Let’s fill the cup.
To say these last twelve months have been challenging is not even the beginning.
But you can begin some layers of self-care.
Hope and Rejuvenation – that is the theme. Did your hope diminish or even die this past year? Are you weary and exhausted?
Come join us as we look at welcoming in a different kind of hope. It’s a new world, and we need a new hope – and that very well can look very different than before.
Come join us as we rejuvenate the heart.
Through meditation of the mind and body, we will be exploring these things – hope and rejuvenation. There will be breakout groups, POC and non-POC. There will be time for private reflection.
There will be time to breathe. To reconnect with the body.
Come on over. The cost is by donation only, thanks to my Patreon group which is supporting these endeavors – to effectively have no pay wall and make healing accessible to all.
Here’s the registration link.
Here is some information about an upcoming self-care retreats.
Self-care retreat: Journeying Through the Darkness
For those of you who are journeying through the unknown in these dark times, here is a self-care retreat I am designing and leading for you. January 2. It’ll go for two hours, and we will explore the paradox: How can you find clarity in the unknown? How can one best proceed?
We will be tapping into the elements and earth wisdom – because does not the earth also proceed in these dark times? We will be tapping into the wisdom of Spirit (God/Goddess/Ancestors/Earth), especially when our primary tool of knowledge (based on facts and the known) is no longer primary.
The retreat is donation-only, pay what you can – because of course for many of us, the unknown means the financially unknown future as well. No one will be turned away.
This event is public, feel free to share with others who are seeking sustenance in these dark, unknowing times.
Click here for registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/134278650057
***
The official description:
In this time of deep transition, pivoting, and darkness in our lives, so many of us are facing the unknown in every direction. Finances, employment, relationships, health – so many of these and more – many of us are now standing on very uncertain ground. What leads us when the intellect cannot? For our primary tool, knowledge – and its companions, predictability, certainty, stability – is gone. Plans that had seemed absolute have dissolved beneath our feet. How do we find an inner stability that is independent of the unknown? How can we find an internal steadiness in the darkness?
For this self-care retreat, we will engage in visual meditations and reflections to assist you journey through the darkness. We will draw wisdom from the earth elements (air, water, earth, fire) and the Spirit that undergirds it all. There will be time for guided meditation, personal reflection, and sharing.
Donation-only. No one will be turned away. Here is an invitation to journey together.
Fondly,
Meisaan Chan
Election Night and Pre-Election Night Grounding Meditation
If you’re looking for something healthy and supportive for your mind/body/spirit on Monday and Tuesday, here is an opportunity: Turbulent times are precisely the time to double down on your deepest values and who you want to be. Why? So that you don’t let external forces decide who you are. You don’t let the winds throw you. You stay grounded, anchored.
For these two evenings, we will re-focus on our deepest values and reconfirm the person who we want to be in these times, no matter what happens. For both events, we will be taking time by ourselves to identify what values we want to live by and who we want to be, then coming back as a group to reinforce this desire for anchoring. I’ll be leading us through an embodied meditation – that is, using our body to come back to our deepest center. There will be time for sharing and optional prayer time* at the end. Outside of the prayer time, the evening will also be spacious and grounding for people who do not practice any spiritual path.
You will have time to take a moment, breathe, and reaffirm your deepest values. No matter the headlines. No matter what happens: You are who you are. That’s what groundedness means. And you will be grounding on your values – not on any external. And thus coming to a power that no external can touch.
Come for Monday or Tuesday, or both. I am always a fan of acknowledging how the brain works – it remembers best through repetition. Neural pathways are reinforced and strengthened through repetition.
Cost: Donation. No amount will be turned away. (Suggested amount: $10-$20)
*In the prayer time, I will be using terms like “Ancestors,” “Spirit,” – you can substitute whatever words are most accurate for your path.
Come on over for Monday or Tuesday, or both: Monday, Nov. 2 (7 PM-8 PM CT): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/127197566345Tues, Nov. 3 (7 PM-8:30 PM CT): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/126619984783Cost: Donation. No amount will be turned away. I’ll see you there, my friends.
Self-care Retreats: Tending to Loss
An identical retreat will be given twice, one for BIPOC only (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color), and one Open To All. Click on one of the photos below to sign up.
This retreat is interspiritual. I will use words like “Spirit,” “Divine,” “Ancestors,” “God.” Feel free to internally replace any of those words with what is most accurate for you.
As the days go on, our losses mount up. So, it is really important to keep moving this loss through the body, mind, and spirit. One main approach I will be using is this: Loss is like water. Healthy water flows and is safe to drink. Stagnant water is not safe to drink. Such is with loss. Loss is natural and normal. And so we will be using the body, spirit, and mind to help move this loss through us, to keep loss healthy. We will be moving emotions and loss through the body. This is not yoga but using deep and tender somatic work for healing loss.
You will learn tools you can take with you and use for the ensuing months and path ahead. So it is a retreat, yes. But it is also a time and space for you to receive tools because this journey is far from over.
The topics we will cover are: Grounding, Soothing, Releasing, the Heart Breaking Open, Emptying, and Filling.
Cost: Donation. Recommended offering: $50-$300. No one will be turned away.
I am so looking forward to this. To journeying together with you.
Curving toward the center 