Spiritual Traditions & Practices

Rita London

Step away from your busy life to quiet your mind and nourish your soul with a thirty-minute meditation experience in the warmth of a supportive community. Practice breathing techniques, simple mindful movement and meditations that will reduce stress, build resilience and cultivate compassion and joy. Feel refreshed and re-energized. Beginners and experienced meditators are welcome. Movement can be done standing or sitting in a chair.

“Rita’s lunchtime meditation felt like a vacation, but instead of going away, I came home.” – Gail (past student)

“No matter what I’m feeling, Rita’s meditation brings me into the here and now and in closer touch with my true self.”  – Lee (past student)

A Weekly Meditation (Online)*
Wednesdays
12:30 pm – 1:00 pm ET

*This online series will not be recorded.

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Rita London teaches Kundalini yoga, breathwork and meditation and is an energy and sound healer. She has taught in yoga studios, corporations, community centers and privately. She is passionate about sharing centering mind-body practices to help others calm their minds, open their hearts and connect with their deepest resources to live their best lives. She has led creative wellness retreats in New York, Mexico and Italy and plans to lead more in the near future.

Rita London

Step away from your busy life to quiet your mind and nourish your soul with a thirty-minute meditation experience in the warmth of a supportive community. Practice breathing techniques, simple mindful movement and meditations that will reduce stress, build resilience and cultivate compassion and joy. Feel refreshed and re-energized. Beginners and experienced meditators are welcome. Movement can be done standing or sitting in a chair.

“Rita’s lunchtime meditation felt like a vacation, but instead of going away, I came home.” – Gail (past student)

“No matter what I’m feeling, Rita’s meditation brings me into the here and now and in closer touch with my true self.”  – Lee (past student)

A Weekly Meditation (Online)*
Wednesdays
12:30 pm – 1:00 pm ET

*This online series will not be recorded.

MARK OUR EMAILS SAFE — Add our email address to your contacts to avoid us going to your Spam folder! Search for our “Confirmation” emails, if you can’t find our email receipt of your order.

Rita London teaches Kundalini yoga, breathwork and meditation and is an energy and sound healer. She has taught in yoga studios, corporations, community centers and privately. She is passionate about sharing centering mind-body practices to help others calm their minds, open their hearts and connect with their deepest resources to live their best lives. She has led creative wellness retreats in New York, Mexico and Italy and plans to lead more in the near future.

Mary Greer

This afternoon’s workshop will be led by the renowned tarot master Mary Greer, whose book Tarot for Yourself changed the field of tarot reading for a generation. In this workshop, Mary Greer will focus on how to raise your powers of clarity as a reader for yourself or others. Every tarot reading, whether for a client or for yourself, moves through recognizable stages — but most readers never learn to name or strengthen them individually. This workshop unpacks a six-step process that turns reading from something that feels mysterious or hit-or-miss into a skill you can consciously develop.

We’ll work through each stage: the initial gut reaction or sentient feeling a card evokes before thought intervenes; distilling the situation into a short headline; noting keywords, numbers, suits, symbols, colors, and positional meaning; weaving these into a story specific to the querent and their actual issue; the crucial skill of catching where your own bias or projection ends and the querent’s material begins; and finally choosing between offering prediction-advice or posing a leading therapeutic question that empowers the querent to find their own answer.

Through guided exercises, you’ll practice isolating each step so you can feel where your reading currently gets rushed, foggy, or hijacked by your own opinions. And you’ll learn techniques for staying grounded and open as you read. This structure works whether you’re reading professionally for others or keeping a personal practice for self-reflection; the steps are the same. You’ll leave with a concrete, repeatable framework, tools for separating intuition from bias, and greater confidence in your own reading voice. 

Note: This workshop is suitable for beginners who want a clear foundation and experienced readers looking to refine and deepen an intuitive process they may never have consciously broken down before.

Note:  A recording of this online workshop will be available for 1 month for students who register for this workshop.

Mary K. Greer is a renowned tarot expert with over 40 years of experience, known for creating inspired teaching methods. The author of 11 books on tarot and magic, her 1984 book Tarot for Yourself changed the field of tarot reading. It was the first to offer in-depth techniques for reading tarot as a practice of personal inquiry, not by memorizing someone else’s meanings, but by discovering your own relationship with each card. The approach was so influential that it reshaped how an entire generation learned to read. Her work has always been focused on personal insight and creativity in her tarot practice. marykgreer.com

A Positive Psychology Approach

Stephen G. Post, PhD, and Joanna Kaczorowska, PhD

“What if the love that changes lives isn’t just a feeling, but a force — a force that 80% of adult Americans report having directly experienced, yet rarely have language for?” 

Discovering how to tap into how the spiritual and transformative power of pure unlimited love can positively impact your well-being, especially in times of chaos, greed, hostility and violence. Drawing on over 40 years of scientific and spiritual research and his new book, Pure Unlimited Love: Science, Spirit and the Seven Paths to Inner Peace, Dr. Stephen G. Post in this workshop explores practical pathways to cultivate inner peace, strengthen human connection, and foster ethical, compassionate care in daily life not just through human love, but with the influence of a Higher Love.

In this workshop, you’ll learn to:

• Give and Glow — Experience the unexpected benefits of kind giving on your well-being.
• Heal with Kindness — Harness the power of compassionate interactions to reduce stress and enhance healing for yourself and others.
• Follow Your Calling — Identify and pursue your unique talents to live a meaningful and fulfilling life.
• Raise Kind Children — Apply science-backed strategies to nurture empathy, resilience, and flourishing in young people.
• Know the One Mind — Connect inwardly to cultivate awareness, oneness, and lasting inner peace through knowing the “one mind” (all individuals are interconnected) as the ultimate reality.
• Cherish Nature — Reconnect with the natural world to restore awe, wonder, and balance.
• Honor the Spirit of Freedom — Recognize that the Golden Rule is the basis of all successful individual and societal freedom, as it is founded in Pure Unlimited Love and gives rise to inner peace and cultural renewal.

The focus of the workshop will be as follows:

• The Wheel of Love — A practical framework mapping love’s expressions across family, schools, and workplaces, including psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s concept of care-frontation — and why it may succeed where confrontation fails.
• A leadership philosophy in action — How these principles have shaped compassionate care initiatives at Stony Brook’s Renaissance School of Medicine since 2008.
• Human love vs. Pure Unlimited Love — Distinguishing everyday love (real, but often unstable and myopic) from something researchers describe as ineffable, transformative, and startlingly common.
• Eight doorways to the ineffable — synchronicity, premonition, unbidden creativity, meditation, vision, flow, déjà vu, and deep prayer — illustrated through striking historical accounts, including a mathematical genius’ visions at the feet of a goddess and an artist’s dream of a descending angel.
• Community dialogue — Participants are invited to share their own encounters with this kind of love.
• Daily practice — Morning meditation as a way to set intention, and an evening practice for becoming soul conscious before sleep.
• Guided meditation — The workshop closes with a 30-minute meditation along the seven paths to Inner Peace, with space for participants to propose an eighth path.

Should we establish inner peace instead of fleeting happiness? The reframing of these terms sits at the heart of the workshop — an invitation to consider love not as an emotion to chase, but as a state of being to return to, again and again.

Seven Paths to Inner Peace

The workshop will open as participants are invited to share brief personal narratives about where these paths to love have brought benefit to them or their loved ones — grounding the session in lived experiences from the very start. Setting the tone, the internationally acclaimed violinist Joanna Kaczorowska, a Stony Brook colleague and veteran of the renowned Emerson String Quartet, performs live — offering a moment of musical meditation before the group turns to deeper reflection. This live performance will bring in an atmosphere of a presence into the room before a word of theory is spoken. From there, the workshop explores a question inspired by Sir John Templeton’s final challenge to Dr. Post: Is Pure Unlimited Love the ultimate reality underlying human experience?

Dr. Post will lead participants through a meditation on the difference between human love — with its natural fluctuation, myopia, and instability — and Pure Unlimited Love, a more perfect, ineffable form. Drawing on Dr. Post’s Wheel of Love, he will explore how love expresses itself practically in daily life: in families, schools, and workplaces, and as the foundation of the core virtues of positive psychology. Along the way, participants will examine the idea of “carefrontation” — a term coined by psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Traveled, and consider why a psychiatrist might feel we need a gentler alternative to confrontation.

The conversation will turn to definitions about human love, most simply, when another person’s security and well-being feels as real to you as your own. Pure Unlimited Love is harder to define — ineffable, yet remarkably common. A national survey research, featured in The Heart of Religion, suggests a striking majority of American adults have experienced “love” at least once, with a smaller but significant portion experiencing it regularly or even daily — often through synchronicity, premonition, unexpected creativity, meditation, visions, flow states, déjà vu, or deep prayer. Participants will be invited into open dialogue to share their own brushes with their experiences with love , or those of people they know.

The workshop will also explore contemplative practice: the special value of early-morning meditations a way to set intention and connect with the Supreme Being, and the practice of envisioning the people you’ll meet each day and asking what expression of love they might most need. Evening practice will also be explored — how to become soul conscious; even after a long, materially demanding day, using simple grounding phrases and deep breath to find inner peace.

The workshop closes with a guided half-hour meditation along the seven paths to inner peace, with an open invitation for participants to reflect on whether an eighth path belongs on the wheel.

Whether you’re a leader, healer, parent, or seeker of personal growth, this session will equip you with actionable practices to transform your life and your community. 

Stephen G. Post, PhD has spent four decades researching what love actually does to us — physically, psychologically, and socially. He is Founding Director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics at Stony Brook University School of Medicine, and President of the Institute for Research on Pure Unlimited Love. A bestselling author on the science of love, altruism, and human flourishing, his books include Why Good Things Happen to Good People (translated into several languages) and Pure Unlimited Love, with a foreword by the Dalai Lama. stephengpost.com

Joanna Kaczorowska, PhD is a Polish-born, internationally acclaimed violinist and Director of Undergraduate Performance at Stony Brook University Department of Music. She has performed with Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, and the New World Symphony at venues including Carnegie Hall and Suntory Hall, and is founder and Artistic Director of New York Chamber Musicians. A prizewinner at the 2009 Liszt-Garrison International Piano Competition, she was also awarded the Grand Prize to perform at the 2010 Richard Wagner Festspiele in Bayreuth. joannakaczorowska.com

Maria A. Basile, MD, MBA is a physician, educator, poet, and dedicated advocate for compassionate, human-centered healthcare. As Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Family, Population and Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University and Associate Director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care and Bioethics, she helps shape the next generation of physicians through teaching, mentorship, and leadership. She is an award-winning poet and published author whose work explores the human side of medicine and the connections that define healthcare.

Simcha Raphael, PhD

Across cultures and throughout history, human beings have sought to understand the great mysteries of birth, death, the soul’s journey, and what lies beyond the threshold of mortal existence. Within the ancient teachings of the Bardo Thödol (The Tibetan Book of the Dead) and the mystical traditions of Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) are visionary maps describing the unfolding journey of consciousness through life, death, the afterlife realms, and reincarnation. Although arising from distinct religious and cultural worlds, both traditions offer profound symbolic languages for understanding impermanence, divine judgment, the visionary dimensions of dying, and the mysteries revealed in near-death experiences.

Through the study and interpretation of sacred texts, guided meditation and contemplative practice, and group dialogue and shared inquiry, this workshop invites participants to explore these wisdom traditions as mythic and archetypal maps of the psyche and soul. Together we will discover how these medieval spiritual teachings illuminate the processes of dying, grieving, transition, and rebirth, while offering profound insights into the nature of consciousness beyond physical death.

Special attention will be given to practical applications for end-of-life care and spiritual companioning. Participants will explore how these teachings can inform contemporary approaches to hospice and palliative care, chaplaincy, pastoral counseling, funeral and memorial practices, trauma healing, and bereavement support, offering spiritual resources for those accompanying individuals and families through life’s most profound transitions.

This program is designed for chaplains, clergy, therapists, counselors, hospice workers, funeral professionals, healthcare practitioners, spiritual directors, and others engaged in end-of-life care and the helping professions. It is equally open to seekers, students of Buddhist Dharma and Jewish mysticism, and anyone navigating their own journeys of grief, loss, transformation, and spiritual awakening.