What Are Inspired Aliveness Gatherings?

Inspired Aliveness ® gatherings offer a unique and integrated approach to inner consciousness development, self-healing, and transformation. They also reflect the lifetime work of Jon Bernie, a spiritual teacher and former Zen monk ordained in the lineage of Suzuki-roshi with over five decades of practice in the Zen, Theravada Buddhist, and Advaita traditions.

Jon offers meditation gatherings and retreats online with occasional in-person events. Whether you work with him online or in person, you can expect a dynamic, highly engaged process that can support the awakening and flowering of consciousness in your own life and practice. 

At its core, Jon’s work can reveal how your habitual patterns of doing and thinking disconnect you from the sense of inspired aliveness that is always, already available. The result is greater ease, healing, and transformation in multiple dimensions of your life, relationships, and spiritual journey.

How Is This Different From Other “Awakening” Approaches?

Jon’s work has no rules, no dogma, and no followers. He seeks to de-mystify the rigid and highly spiritualized beliefs, concepts, and practices that can get in the way of simply being here and being human. 

Jon helps you be you, allowing the fullness of what you are to come into the light of conscious clarity and to express itself uniquely and authentically through you.

If you ever attend one of his gatherings or retreats, you’ll discover that Jon’s approach is like jazz: spontaneous, electric, and conversational. There is no easy way to outline or capture it in words, since the “teaching” is constantly changing and adapting to the needs of each moment. 

Unique Characteristics of Inspired Aliveness

Integrated, Holistic Approach
Jon blends Eastern spiritual traditions like Buddhism, Daoism, and Advaita Vedanta (nonduality) with Western scientific and psychological modalities.

Direct Transmission
Jon connects in an intimate, one-on-one way with students, deeply attuning to the energy and movement of consciousness through the physical, emotional, and psychological layers of experience.

Embodiment and Attunement
A focus on the bio-energetics of “awakening” or “enlightenment” and the physical and energetic processes that support opening into deeper dimensions of consciousness.

Trusting Your Own Guidance System
An emphasis on questioning inner and outer authority, as well as the internalized fundamentalism that gets in the way of true listening and sensitivity to your own intuitive guidance system.

Engagement With Modern Life
Jon’s work is profoundly engaged with ordinary life and the modern challenges, compulsive drives, and feelings of fear and disconnection that characterize our individual and collective experience on this planet.

The Ecology of Consciousness
Reverence for the natural evolutionary miracle of healing, growth, and transformation — free of “doing” — and the importance of recycling all aspects of our experience into the organic process of inner consciousness development.

Embracing Your Humanity
Whereas so many modern nondual approaches emphasize staying in a transcendent state of pure presence or awareness, Jon’s work is about moving toward and embracing the conditioned parts of our humanity and letting them come into full conscious expression.

Finding Humor in Life’s Challenges
Balancing serious, engaged practice with levity and humor is a hallmark of Jon’s work, helping people to see the freedom that is available in all states — including the freedom to smile and laugh in the face of life’s challenges.

What to Expect From This Approach

Getting Out of the Driver Seat

As Jon emphasizes, the process of spiritual growth and transformation really happens by itself, but it’s possible to cooperate with this process by how we give and cultivate attention. 

By gently attuning to how the energy of awareness unfolds through your mind, body and nervous system, a sense of inspired aliveness emerges spontaneously and by itself — free of beliefs, identities, and conclusions.

Through Jon’s guidance, you can gradually learn to step out of the driver seat and let go of the compulsive habits of fixation, avoidance and control that get in the way of what is and restrict the full expression of who you are.

Embracing Your Humanity

Awareness of what is typically reveals all the conditioned parts of your humanity, bringing trauma, unresolved emotional issues, and unmet needs to the surface.

As part of that unfolding, it’s natural to want to avoid the conditions that cause suffering. At the core of Jon’s work, however, is the invitation to encounter these parts of yourself fully and honestly — and with openness, tenderness, and humanity.

Inspired Aliveness gatherings are about stepping into the life you’re living, embodying what arises, and the freedom to live and express the human condition without getting totally lost in the worries, drives, and challenges related to survival.

With dedicated practice, this approach can enable you to see past the self-defense mechanisms of your survival programming and liberate you from painful patterns of belief, thinking, and identity that prevent you from living an inspired, happy, and fulfilled life.

Learning to Practice

In Jon’s work, practice has no goal. True practice is a deep listening and attunement, a way of cultivating attention and developing greater sensitivity to your own being. It’s a kind of bio-energetic entrainment that allows you to be fully present and authentically engaged with what is. 

As Jon often says, practice is about getting out of the way of what’s working. And while he emphasizes the dynamic and multidimensional nature of practice, it does have some core aspects that you are likely to encounter at gatherings and retreats:

Core Aspects of Practice

  • Stillness practice / meditation
  • Breath awareness
  • Somatic/body awareness
  • Attention to physical alignment/structure
  • Following the energy of attention 
  • Non-doing and “getting out of the way”
  • Beginner’s mind (“refreshing the browser”)
  • Active experimentation (“see what works”)
  • Questioning inner and outer authority
  • Questioning internalized fundamentalism 
  • Letting go of the knower/believer
  • Disillusionment (relinquishing stories, beliefs, identities, conclusions)
  • Trusting your own unique inner guidance system
  • Encountering and embracing your humanity
  • True listening and intuition
  • Asking for what you need 
  • Allowing, receiving and acceptance
  • Tending to the “garden” / the ecology of consciousness
  • Coming out of survival programming 
  • Energetic movement, opening and transmutation
  • The bio-energetics of “awakening”
  • Grounding techniques and practices
  • Healing, integration and transformation
  • Confronting the risks/dangers of power and unconscious spiritual ego
  • Finding humor in the midst of life’s challenges
  • Living life fully and authentically