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.
