The Art + Science of Meditation – with Richard Miller (6 classes online)
Dates: Thursdays: 4pm-5:30pm PDT - October 16, 23, 30, November 6, 13, 20 - 2025
Recordings available for 6 months
Discover the keys to integrating ancient wisdom and modern science into a powerful, nourishing and transformative meditation practice and experience your innate center of wellbeing.
Science has unequivocally confirmed it: a consistent daily meditation practice is one of the most generous gifts you can give your body, mind and soul. Meditation can lower your stress, enhance your energy, improve your sleep, make you mentally sharper, ease negative emotions and enhance positive ones... it can even optimize your work performance.
And on the spiritual level, as you take your meditation practice deeper, you improve your ability to access higher states of consciousness and directly realize, integrate and embody the underlying reality of your essential nature so that you experience radiant health and wholeness. Through meditation, you can awaken to great love, kindness and compassion. More than that, you can awaken to unity consciousness and realize that there’s something within you that has never been hurt, never been broken, never been harmed, and has always been whole and healthy. This all-embracing sense of oneness makes you feel more intimately connected to yourself, to others and to the world around you. Indeed, the potential impact of meditation on your life is enormous.
The Overwhelming Options for Meditating The challenge is that there are just so many options for you to choose from, it can be hard to know where to begin. Are all meditation practices equal? What works best and when? How do I tailor my practice to my busy life? These and many other questions may be going through your mind when you contemplate starting or deepening your practice. And it would take a lifetime to study and master all the intricacies of the countless practices and traditions that extend back for millennia so you can know which is best for you. Luckily, neuroscience is now providing some clues, as cutting-edge research is revealing exactly what’s taking place in our bodies and mind as we engage in various meditation practices. With that information, the most effective, powerful practices can now be distilled and shared.
The Value of a Master Guide: Rather than sifting through and distilling this vast array of information (from neuroscience and from the various traditions) on your own, we invite you to join us for this journey with a master guide who’s been at the forefront of meditation research for 45 years. Such a guide can navigate you through the inscrutable mysteries of ancient traditions and modern science — and help you harvest the best advanced meditation practices from the Yoga, Taoist, Mahayana, Dzogchen, Zen and Judeo-Christian traditions, without having to devote years to learning highly complex protocols. Master teacher Richard Miller, PhD, the founding president and CEO of the Integrative Restoration Institute (IRI), and founding president of the International Association of Yoga Therapists, was named by Yoga Journal as one of the top 25 teachers of Yoga and Meditation in the West. He has consulted on over 25 research studies on the efficacy of the iRest Meditation program developed by IRI — a research — based transformative practice of deep relaxation and meditative inquiry that effectively reduces PTSD, depression, anxiety, insomnia, chronic pain and chemical dependency while increasing health, resiliency and wellbeing. Richard will share with you the insights and practices that can take you beyond effort and striving, into the ease of transforming your meditation from a hard-fought practice to an easeful way of life.
Whether this is your first experience with meditation or you’re a seasoned practitioner, this course offers you support in understanding:
· The underlying structure of meditation • The neuroscience of meditation
· The transformative power of meditation
· How to break free of compulsive thinking, emotional reactivity and negative beliefs
· The stages, phases, levels and practices of meditation so you can continue to progress into deeper realizations and great benefits
· Right relationship to, and functioning of the body, mind, senses and ego
· What lies beyond your sense of being a separate self — and how to experience it more and more
· Through taking your practice to the next level, you will come to no longer view parts of yourself as broken and in need of fixing; rather, you can welcome them into your wholeness. And in that welcoming, spontaneous healing arises.
· Meditation enables you to discover the peace that passeth all understanding, the peace that cannot be broken no matter what external circumstances you’re facing. You can confidently and courageously, as Indian yogi Paramahansa Yogananda wrote, “stand unshaken amidst the crash of breaking worlds.”
· Your meditation then moves beyond a sitting practice into something incorporated throughout every minute of your day, creating and sustaining an underlying sense of peace and joy.
· Before you can experience the bliss of a meditation practice that fits you as naturally as a child’s hand fits into its mother’s, it’s essential to understand both the art and the science of meditation so you can build your practice on a solid foundation and be completely comfortable with the principles and tools that will help you advance and deepen your practice.
What You’ll Discover in this 6-part transformational series. Richard will guide you through the fundamental skills and competencies you’ll need to successfully integrate direct practices into your daily life to experience your innate, unchanging wellbeing and wholeness, no matter your circumstances. Each contemplation and training session will build harmoniously upon the next so that you’ll develop a complete holistic understanding of the practices, tools and principles you’ll need to sustain your newly developed practice.
Dates: Thursdays: 4pm-5:30pm PDT - October 16, 23, 30, November 6, 13, 20 - 2025
Recordings available for 6 months
Time: 4pm - 5:30pm PDT Please use this time converter if you need.
Cost: Meditation Course Oct 16 – Nov 20 - (Online)- Early bird $145 / After Oct 1 $155
Or
Cost: Meditation Course + Retreat Nov 23 (In-Studio + Online). Early bird $195 / after Oct 1 $210
PLEASE NOTE: Those taking the Meditation Series -Oct 16 - Nov 20, may be interested to join the Meditation Retreat - Nov 23. See discounted prices above if you take both. Richard will be offering the Retreat at Yogakula in Berkeley - you can select to join in the studio or online. Please be sure to select the correct ticket.
Recording: the recording of each session will be sent automatically to you and will be available for 6 months after each session.
YogaKula Policy: No refund but you are welcome to give your ticket to a friend.
Richard Miller, PhD is a clinical psychologist, author, researcher, yogic scholar, and spiritual teacher who has devoted his life to integrating western psychology and neuroscience with the ancient nondual wisdom teachings of yoga, tantra, Advaita, Taoism, and Buddhism. Richard is the founder of iRest Institute, cofounder of the International Association of Yoga Therapists, and a founding member and past president of the Institute for Spirituality and Psychology. He is the author of iRest Meditation: Restorative Practices for Health, Resiliency, and Well-Being; Yoga Nidra: The iRest Meditative Practice for Deep Relaxation and Healing; and The iRest Program for Healing PTSD: A Proven-Effective Approach to Using Yoga Nidra Meditation and Deep Relaxation Techniques to Overcome Trauma.
Website irest.org
YOU CAN PAY WITH PAYPAL OR DEBIT/CREDIT CARD
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