Practice for Your Life, Practice for the World

For meditation practice to feel successful, it must do three things: provide stability, embrace what’s challenging, and promote ongoing growth, appreciation and liberation in life. In this series, we’ll aim to establish a meditation practice for a real lifetime, filled with awareness of the joy, confusion and difficulty in these particular times. We’ll give equal measure of love and attention to what’s personal, to our communities and to our shared, deserving world. Emphasis will be placed on brief, accessible methods for maintaining wakeful presence, engaged curiosity and wise relationship, both in formal meditation practice and throughout our days.

This class will be offered in a hybrid format: both in person and live-online. You may attend one or all of the sessions. Each session can stand alone, will include a series recap, and will build on earlier sessions. This class is open to all, both UU congregants and community members. This five-session class will be offered during the Second Hour time slot from 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. on the second and third Sundays of January, February and the second Sunday in March.

Pre-registration is not required.

Session 1 (January 12): Start Right Where You Are: Establishing the home of foundational awareness: the body, our community and this good Earth.

Session 2 (January 19): Resourcing Yourself for Resilience: Building confidence, appreciation and joy in meditation.

Session 3 (February 9): Meditation for Challenging Times: How to practice with pain, confusion and difficult thoughts and emotions.

Session 4 (February 16): Sustainability in Practice and Life: The power of immersive/expansive awareness.

Session 5 (March 9): Practice for a Lifetime: Bringing steadiness, resourcefulness, strength and sustainability together in practice; going forward in peace and power.

This class will be taught by UU Church member Margaret Fletcher, co-founder of East Coast Mindfulness, a certified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction teacher and teacher-trainer for almost 20 years.

Walking With Fear: Meditation with Rae Houseman 

Saturday, February 8, 2025, 9 am to 4 pm

Location: Friends Meeting House | 11 Oxbow Pond Rd | Canterbury, NH 03224  

$30 (Scholarships available). There will be an opportunity to provide a gift of dana to the teacher.
Register Here  

Though we are often unaware of it, uncertainty is part of our daily reality. We tend to assume that things will go as we are accustomed. We are likely to get upset or frustrated if things don’t go the way we had expected. Then at some turn, life circumstances unfold in such a way in which the experience of uncertainty is brought to the fore of our attention. When we open to the uncertainty of the unknown we may experience fear. It is a natural response. We can practice walking courageously with our fear, not trying to get away from it. We can learn to become intimate with uncertainty, recognizing that in every moment we are moving into the unknown. We may experience more connection to life through this process. 

In this daylong retreat, we will take time to explore the practice of walking with our fear and opening to the unknown, together in community. Rae Houseman, meditation teacher, mindfulness mentor, and trauma therapist, will lead us in a day of exploring questions together through lessons and meditations.  

Rae Houseman is a meditation teacher, mindfulness mentor, and trauma therapist. Rae holds a Masters Degree in Somatic Psychology and is a certified Somatic Experiencing Practitioner. Rae brings a kind and earnest sense of inquiry into her engagement with the practice and is passionate about integrating mindfulness into daily life activities in support of a more embodied approach to the practice. She has practiced extensively in both the Insight Meditation and Vajrayana traditions and finds the interweaving of these approaches to be complementary of a deeply compassionate and discerning practice.