"Hurry Up and Slow Down" retreat begins April 14

Hurry Up and Slow Down:
Spiritual Practices for a New Season

An online retreat
from April 14 to May 26, 2013

 
What

Hurry Up and Slow Down is a spiritual retreat accompanying your daily life. It will offer guidance, but it is not an academic class with a lot of reading. It is simple, accessible, and gently focused on practice -- the "how" of living every day mindfully and reverently, in a way that suits our own circumstances and takes into account how busy we are.

If you think you don't have time for "Hurry Up and Slow Down," you are exactly the person who will benefit from it. You are, of course, also welcome if you think you do have time for it!

Details

Each week will have a theme or anchor. The weekly themes will be rich and basic:

* mindfulness  *  breath *   place  *   time  *   community  *  earth *

These themes can be building blocks of spiritual practice whether we are religiously affiliated or not. The retreat is suitable both for people who are committed to a particular religious or spiritual path and for people who are not.

Every week, with the theme of the week, will include four components, offered each Sunday and accompanying you throughout the week:

1. Awareness of the week's anchoring theme:

Taking stock, naming, asking and answering questions, doing a little writing (or drawing if we are more visually inclined).

2. Inspiration:
A short reading, an image, an insight, a bit of wisdom about the theme for us to ponder during the week.

3. Practice:
An exercise related to the week's theme, a concrete how-to that we can incorporate into our daily life throughout the week.

4. Tradition(s):
Some insights into the week's theme from the experience and wisdom of religious traditions. We are not the first to grapple with the themes of our retreat and we are not alone.


When

The retreat begins Sunday, April 14, 2013 and runs till Sunday, May 26, 2013.

If you have 15 minutes a day to check in online (any time of the day or night from any time zone) you will benefit from the retreat. 

Registration

Registration opens on February 22 and will remain open till the first week of the retreat in mid-April.

To register, write Jane Redmont at readwithredmont@earthlink.net.

Cost and payment 
 
Cost: $150  ($125 if you register by April 2)

Sliding scale available for the financially strained. You are on your honor to decide whether this applies to you. Talk to me: readwithredmont@earthlink.net.

Payment:     

Payment is non-refundable and due upon registration, by check or money order. Write me at readwithredmont@earthlink.net for the mailing address when you write me to register.

How can you have an online retreat?
 
By offering the retreat resources (themes, quotes, images, videos, guidelines for spiritual exercises, and more) online on a blog. More specifically, a closed blog.

What's a closed blog? It's a blog like this, but open only to those whom the blog owner-administrator (in this case the retreat facilitator) allows in. In other words, it is not open to anybody wandering around the internet. Random web surfers will not be able to view either the blog or our conversations in the comments. Once you register for the course, I will send instructions on the one-time sign-in mechanism. After that, the blog will always recognize you.
 

Do I have to talk to other people on the retreat? I'm a very private person.

 
and/or
 

Can I get some support here? I'm not sure I can stick to this all by myself.

The retreat will offer you a choice in finding your preferred balance between the solitary and the communal, between privacy and solidarity.

1) You can be private and just read the blog and use the exercises, practices, and quotes on your own.  

or

2) If you are more extroverted and communal or in need of companions on your retreat, you can  share your thoughts, experiences, and questions via the comments function on the blog and engage in conversation with other retreatants and with the retreat facilitator.

Either way, in your participation on the blog, silent or speaking, you must respond respectfully to others and observe basic confidentiality about participants sharing of experiences and opinions: it's fine for you to say to people outside the retreat "someone in a group I'm in mentioned [issue, insight, dilemma]" but not the name or identifying characteristics of the person or the story.

This online retreat is meant to help you find time and opportunity to breathe and pause in your busy life, but not to make you feel guilty when you struggle to do so.  Begin where you are, not where you "ought to be."

Facilitator
 
Jane Redmont, author of When in Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life, Generous Lives: American Catholic Women Today, and more than 100 articles, is a spiritual director, retreat leader, and pastoral worker. Jane has given workshops on "Prayer in Our Busy Lives" and on  "Spiritual Practices for the Busy, the Harried, and the Overcommitted" as well as lectures, retreats, and workshops on praying with anger and depression; intercessory prayer; using body, breath, and voice in prayer and meditation; ecological spirituality; prayer and the work of justice; Jewish insights for Christians; Sabbath and time; Buddhist and Christian insights on anger; and Christian feminist spirituality, around the U.S. She has taught courses on the contemplative life and on prayer at the undergraduate and seminary/graduate levels. 

Jane was active in ecumenical healing services in communities affected by AIDS during the 1980s and 1990s, led weekly prayer services for peace in the early 2000s, and more recently facilitated weekly Centering Prayer and Taizé services. An American raised in France, Jane was educated at the Lycée de Sèvres, Oberlin College, Harvard Divinity School, and the Graduate Theological Union; she is an Episcopalian (Anglican) shaped by Catholic contemplative and social justice traditions, Jewish and Unitarian Universalist family roots, and the study of yoga and Buddhist (especially Zen) meditation.