Grace Church to Host New Program to Bring the Benefits of Meditation to Everyone

Source: Grace Church

Since joining the Grace Church community in 2021, meditation instructor Kell Julliard has helped fellow parishioners develop meditation practices as a vibrant part of their spiritual lives through programs like “Moving Gracefully through the Holidays: A Meditation Workshop” and “Mindfulness, Meditation, and Epiphanies,” a series bringing mindfulness and meditation together with the Christian season of Epiphany and the liturgical service of Compline.

This November, Julliard will offer a more robust exploration of meditation through the program Anytime Anywhere Meditation, which is open to all in Amherst and surrounding communities and suitable for all religious and philosophical backgrounds.

This upcoming workshop is part of the Joy of Living program founded by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. Part of a family lineage of meditators stretching back over 1,000 years, Mingyur Rinpoche was already participating in years-long meditation retreats in India by the age of 14. As a teenager, Rinpoche suffered from disabling panic attacks until he decided to apply his knowledge of meditation to the panic itself. “Befriending the panic” transformed his life, stopped the panic attacks, and eventually led, as an adult and internationally known meditation teacher, to his creation of the Joy of Living program.

Although meditation alone may not resolve an individual’s struggles with panic or anxiety, the benefits of mindfulness meditation have been demonstrated scientifically: “major benefits include lowering stress, decreasing depression, improving memory, and strengthening your relationships. In a large-scale review of more than 400 previous studies, mindfulness was identified as an effective mental health practice for helping almost all people improve their physical and psychological well-being.”   

As part of the Joy of Living program, Rinpoche created Anytime Anywhere Meditation, an effort to teach 100,000 people to meditate over the next five years, through a yearlong teacher training course and an overview program designed to introduce participants to recognizing and working with their innate awareness, compassion, and wisdom through meditation. “If we want to help others and help our society, it is really important that we transform ourselves first,” says Mingyur Rinpoche.

Amherst has been selected as one of five sites internationally to pilot this approach, and those participating will have the opportunity to give feedback that can help the program be more broadly applicable.

Julliard is a senior facilitator for the Joy of Living Program and a certified meditation instructor who has taught at Omega, the Garrison Institute, and Kripalu, among other meditation centers. He has taught mindfulness techniques nationally and internationally, has trained hundreds of employees at large health systems in Massachusetts and New York, and has published peer-reviewed research articles on teaching mindfulness to health care professionals.

Registration
7:00 – 9:00 p.m., Friday, Nov. 10, 2023
9:00 a.m. – 4:30 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 11, 2023

Location: Grace Church
14 Boltwood Ave.
Amherst, MA 01002

Cost: $25 suggested donation, no one will be turned away for lack of funds
More information and registration.

About The Sponsoring Organizations
Founded in 1864, Grace Church is a vital and thriving Episcopal church on the town common in Amherst. It supports many programs related to the well being of its community and the larger society.

The Tergar Meditation Community’s Joy of Living program teaches practices that cultivate awareness, compassion, and wisdom, and supports a diverse, international community of practitioners at all levels of commitment and experience. This program is founded in both contemporary neuroscience and ancient practices for training the mind and heart.