Loch Kelly - Shift into Freedom: The Science and Practice of Open-Hearted Awareness

Below is a promo from Sounds True for the new book from Loch Kelly - Shift into Freedom: The Science and Practice of Open-Hearted Awareness (links to Sounds True page for the book - here is an Amazon link). There is also a CD available with 20 of the meditations from the book (There are CEUs available as well - 3.5).

Join this innovative teacher to explore more than 20 meditations including:

• Awareness Yoga—a foundational practice in moving awareness

• Embodied Presence—a practice for deeply feeling unity and acceptance

• Unhook, Drop, Open, See, Include, Know, Let Be—a way to shift levels of mind that culminates in living from open-hearted awareness  

“The goal of these meditations is not to transcend the human condition,” explains Loch Kelly, “but to discover how to live a fully intimate human life.” Shift into Freedom gives you the tools to navigate your life with clarity and unconditional love.

Interestingly, I spoke with Loch when he was beginning work on this book. More than a year later he contacted me again about doing some editing, but by then I was very busy with my editing work at the University of Arizona Cancer Center.

Recently, I heard from Loch again - the book was done and hitting the market. He had Sounds True send me a review copy, which I am reading right now. I will be posting my review in the coming weeks. I must that, so far, I am finding this an excellent book, and one I will be using with some therapy clients.

This is the email Sounds True sent out (with a brief bio from the Sounds True website):

Loch Kelly, MDiv, LCSW, is a teacher, consultant, and leader in the field of meditation and psychotherapy who was asked to teach by Mingyur Rinpoche and Adyashanti. The founder of the Open-Hearted Awareness Institute, he is an emerging voice in modernizing meditation, social engagement, and collaborating with neuroscientists to study how awareness training can enhance compassion and well-being.

Dear Sounds True friends,

I am delighted to share my new book and audio meditation program with you, Shift Into Freedom: The Science and Practice of Open-Hearted Awareness. I’m grateful to all of my teachers, students, and friends for their support in helping me bring this book and audio into form, and to Adyashanti for his inspiring foreword.

I was fortunate to stumble upon meditation early in my life after a series of losses. Meditation was a great help to me because it revealed the inner foundation of a naturally spacious and loving awareness. My heart’s curiosity then led me to graduate school and to India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, where I met many renowned meditation teachers who generously shared their lives and practices with me. The particular approach I was drawn to is one where we discover the solution to suffering by directly shifting into our awake nature that is already here. Then through the practice of “small glimpses, many times,” we can experience freedom from fear, shame, and worry, and live an embodied, open-hearted life. My life’s work and love has been to discover the essence of these advanced practices and bring them to you in contemporary and accessible form.

The book and audio provide a how-to guide for awakening. I have been refining these unique teachings and practices for many years, and have had wonderful results in sharing them with students.

This book presents a distinct and clear definition of awakening. My goal is to bring the process of awakening into the mainstream of our culture in the same way that mindfulness meditation is now embraced, studied, and valued by Western medicine and psychology. Shift Into Freedom offers unique and helpful pointers from developmental psychology, neuroscience, psychotherapy, and comparative contemplative traditions.

The audio program is a powerful series of short guided meditations, pointers, and “glimpses” designed to help you recognize and live from open-hearted awareness. While these practices are written in the book, I highly recommend that you listen to the audio. The audio meditations will make it easier to experience what is being pointed to within you. Experiencing the glimpses is what will transform you.

Awakening can be understood and learned—often through much unlearning and letting go. I am convinced that awakening is the next stage of our human development. You are more capable of discovering this potential than you may believe. Our mutual awakening is essential for our planet today.

I hope you enjoy this heartfelt offering!

With Love and Gratitude,

Open-Hearted Awareness Institute
New York City

This nondual way of “small glimpses, many times” takes basic mindfulness to the next level by introducing us to effortless mindfulness and heart mindfulness.
September 2015

Listen to my Insights at the Edge Podcast »

Guy Claxton - On Being Touched and Moved: Why Spirituality Is Really About the Body

This is a cool talk from the RSA on embodiment and spirituality. Guy Claxton is a psychologist and senior lecturer at King's College, London. He is currently teaching at Schumacher College, a new international centre for studies informed by spiritual and ecological values at Dartington, Devon. He is the author of many books on religion, psychology and education, including The Heart of Buddhism: A Simple Introduction to Buddhist Practice (2013, Kindle only in U.S.), The Learning Powered School: Pioneering 21st Century Education (2011), and The Wayward Mind: An Intimate History of the Unconscious (2007).

On Being Touched and Moved: Why Spirituality Is Really About the Body

26th Nov 2013

Listen to the audio
(full recording including audience Q&A)

Watch this event as a RSA Replay (above). RSA Replay is now a featured playlist on our Youtube channel, it is the full recording of the event including audience Q&A. There will an edited high-res video version of the talk available in a couple of weeks time, and if you subscribe to our channel on YouTube - you'll get automatically notified whenever there's a new video.

In the next in our new series of talks and debates opening up a new public conversation about spirituality in the 21st century, Professor Guy Claxton explores spirituality’s embodied nature.

The “felt” experience of spirituality is described in surprisingly common terms by those who undergo it. Though accounts are clad in all kinds of cultural tropes, its essence appears to lie in a spontaneous, and usually fleeting, transformation of bodily awareness; people describe a dissolution of separateness and loss of agitation, and report feeling suffused with energy, brightness and open-hearted concern. In his lecture at the RSA, Professor Claxton shows how new insights from the science of embodied cognition can help to make sense of this perceptual shift. Spirituality as a set of practices can be seen as bound up with people's desire to recapture and stabilise these tantalising glimpses of an inherent, untarnished capacity for physical vitality, peace of mind and loving fondness for the world. Can science also help to structure this quest?

Speaker: Guy Claxton, Co-Director of the Centre for Real-World Learning, and Professor of the Learning Sciences, University of Winchester.

Chair: Jonathan Rowson, Director, Social Brain Centre, RSA

Find out more about the project.

Find out more about the RSA’s Social Brain Centre