A Year of Living Mindfully
A 12-Month Inquiry into the Nature of Awakened Heart and Mind
Led by Jonathan Foust
Starting September, 2025
Have you ever wondered what would happen if you held consistent focus on mindfulness and compassion for a full year?
If you are interested in bringing alive more awareness in your daily life through meditation, somatic inquiry, study and interpersonal support, please read on.
Life in the Fast Lane
Unless you live in a monastery or have managed to build genuine simplicity into your lifestyle, it’s easy to forget what’s most important and get enmeshed in the world of demands, stress and the impulse to go faster and do more.
The result is often a blend of anxiety and a vague sense that you’re missing something.
The more you feel separate from a full sense of presence, feelings of unworthiness, fear and anxiety begin to dominate your life.
You forget the mystery, love and awareness that is your source.
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Have you noticed the happiest times of your life were when you sustained attention on what was most important to you?
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The Alchemy of Transformation
How do you awaken full and compassionate presence? How do you live skillfully in the world?
Great traditions through the ages prescribe the following:
Daily Practice
Like-Minded Community
Contemplative Practices
Times of Retreat and Intensive Practice
Service
These elements are the core of the Year of Living Mindfully program.
The Year of Living Mindfully Program (YLM) combines these domains of spiritual life in an integrated format designed to support you in cultivating an awakened heart and mind.
You will:
Create and Sustain a Vibrant Daily Practice. You commit to a formal daily practice of mindfulness and heart meditations and focus on the daily actions that are most important to you.
Learn How to Bring a Healing Presence to Emotional Difficulty. Highly experiential sessions focus on how you can apply your mindfulness practice in daily life and support you in transforming challenges.
Learn Techniques for Self-Inquiry and Healing. You’ll deepen your skills with personal inquiry through Somatic Inquiry, a process of ‘co-meditation’ that cultivates your capacity to develop and draw on wisdom and compassion.
Connect with a Committed Community of Practitioners. Sharing the journey with fellow participants and experienced mentors, you’ll explore the challenges and insights that arise from your practice.
Develop Your 1:1 Interpersonal Skills. You’ll learn, practice and work with real-time issues through Somatic Inquiry, Non-Violent Communication, empathy and forgiveness practices and other communication tools that foster greater honesty and intimacy.
Deepen Your Practice through Retreats. Throughout the year you’ll immerse yourself in daylong retreats and a weeklong retreat of concentrated practice.
Tap into the larger YLM Community. You can join events and make connections with those who share the journey.
A Foundation of Practice: Somatic Inquiry
You’ll spend the first segment of the program learning and practicing Somatic Inquiry. This is a skill you’ll carry with you for the rest of your life. It’s a profound training in learning how to transform what is between you and feeling free.
This essential work draws on applying the two wings of mindfulness: Wisdom and Compassion.
Somatic Inquiry incorporates the practice of Focusing, developed by Dr. Eugene Gendlin that laid the foundation for Somatic Psychology. We will also explore practice in the context of RAIN meditation, an approach developed by Michelle McDonald and refined by Tara Brach.
Over the course of the year, you’ll deepen not just your understanding of Somatic Inquiry works, but you’ll refine your skills and move deeper into the subtlety of the practice.
Dharma Study: Main Topics and Themes
Cultivating Wise Intention: Great satisfaction arises when you know what is most important and you design your actions and lifestyle in alignment with your intention. Throughout the year you’ll learn skills for cultivating both clarity and resilience.
Somatic Inquiry: Training in the first foundation of mindfulness is the ground of our year-long program and includes instruction in mindfulness of sensation and feeling. This is a mind / body practice that is a cornerstone to developing a depth practice. More than just being in touch with your feelings, you will cultivate greater wakefulness and a sense of being vibrantly alive and at home in your body.
Healing the Emotional Body: Key to opening the heart is the willingness to explore obstacles to cultivating greater intimacy. In structured settings and homework assignments you will investigate the nature of self and other and how to skillfully work with difficult emotions. You will explore practices that cultivate your capacity for greater compassion, kindness, generosity and forgiveness.
Awakening the Mind: Delving into meditation practice includes both the application and understanding of skillful means, directly investigating the nature of mind, investigating how you can transcend limiting beliefs and exploring what it means to be free from suffering. Through talks, discussion and practice, you will explore essential practices that lead to greater freedom.
Awakening in Relationship: Through 1:1 inquiry, small group gatherings and community explorations, you will explore how you can cultivate greater empathy, compassion and kindness as an expression of the awakened heart. You will learn communication tools that will enhance self-awareness and transform your relationships. We will explore topics such as the Bodhisattva path of cultivating compassion, generosity and forgiveness and pragmatic tools such as Non-Violent Communication (NVC).
Cultivating Creativity, Imagination and Joy: Applying mindfulness principles results in the diminishment of greed, hatred and delusion. At the same time it can dramatically increase creativity, imagination, joy and new possibilities. A key element of this program is exploring creative expression and what it means to live fully.
Prerequisites
This program is designed for motivated and experienced participants who want to deepen their practice and more fully integrate wisdom and compassion into their lives. While this training is not limited to advanced practitioners, a sincere commitment to daily practice and full participation is essential for you and for the benefit of the YLM community. If your participation drops below 80% we will evaluate whether the program is a match for you and you may be asked to withdraw.
The following prerequisites are highly recommended and will be considerations for acceptance into the program:
Have at least 1 year of regular meditation practice
Attend or have attended a weekly meditation class or introductory series
Have participated in at least one residential retreat before the program starts. If you have not attended a meditation retreat, your acceptance will be on the condition you participate in our weeklong residential retreat or an equivalent retreat.
Sincerity is the most important attribute. If you feel called to take part but are concerned you may not have enough experience, contact me and we can talk more.
Our Year-long Program
In addition to daily practice and contemplative study, this program is designed to help you maintain focus on what’s most important to you. This includes:
Monthly Online Evening Classes
Monthly Spiritual Friends (small group) gatherings
Monthly 1:1 Learning Partner sessions
9 In-person Daylong Retreats
1 Week-long Residential Vipassana Retreat
Optional Monthly “Ask Me Anything” sessions with Jonathan
Optional Weekly Sunday Morning Meditation and Inquiry sessions
Optional Informal YLM gatherings
Retreat and Class Locations
Daylong retreats and the residential retreat will be held in the Washington DC metro area.
The Schedule
Retreats and classes are listed on the calendar below. We will have the April weeklong retreat dates soon.
You will set up your monthly 1:1 Learning Partner Session and Monthly Small Group Gathering on our own.
The monthly “Ask Me Anything” and Sunday Morning Meditation sessions are optional.
In addition to all these activities, we have an active group from previous years (YLMx) that offers meet ups and other optional gatherings.
Frequently Asked Questions
Let me start by asking what this program ISN’T.
The Year of Living Mindfully is not:
A academic course studying and analyzing Buddhist philosophy
A book club where you’ve got tons of reading to keep up with
A series of lectures where you passively take in information
Something you’ll get graded on
So then, what IS it?
The Year of Living Mindfully is:
A sustained, sincere exploration of what it means to cultivate an awakened heart and mind
Experiences and inquiries designed to cultivate and deepen a rich and alive meditation practice
Being part of a like-minded community of spiritual friends
Learning techniques and practices that enrich your capacity to be more conscious and alive in your relationships
Deepening your understanding of perennial truth through experiential practice and dialog
What’s the history of this program?
This is the 11th offering of the Year of Living Mindfully.
When I moved to the DC area I was looking for a community focused on waking up and sustaining practice. When I didn’t find it, I created and offered YLM. Since then, almost 300 people have taken part.
In addition to enriching their life and personal practice, many graduates have gone on to become meditation teachers, mentors, guides and are actively serving in all kinds of amazing ways. We have a wonderful group of past participants that continues to meet.
Somatic Inquiry, Focusing and RAIN are mentioned a lot in the course description. What are these techniques?
Focusing is a mind/body process developed over thirty years ago by Dr. Eugene Gendlin. He was completing his second PhD at that time with Carl Rogers at the University of Chicago. After studying thousands of hours of clients working with therapists, he discovered it was not the skill of the therapist or what the therapist was doing that resulted in successful transformation. What made the difference was what the client was doing internally.
People who checked in with a bodily 'felt sense' were much more successful in contacting and working through issues that kept them from being happy. Gendlin went on to extensively study and quantify how this process works. Focusing has had a huge effect in the realm of therapy and mindfulness in general as he laid the foundation for Somatic Psychology.
Somatic Inquiry is my adaptation of this fundamental technology with the practice of meditation and mindfulness.
RAIN has been developed by Dr. Tara Brach as a way to actively explore challenging issues. It draws on the following: R: Recognize what is present; A: Allow or Accept the moment as it is; I: Investigate the inner experience; N: Nurture what you find with empathy and compassion.
What does this have to do with meditation practice?
A lot.
The first foundation of Buddhist meditation practice is 'mindfulness of the body.' When you are aware of the body you are 'here and now.' Focusing and Somatic Inquiry helps you train your awareness to more quickly move from the cognitive realm to the direct 'felt sense' experience. They also train you to discern many more distinctions in the internal process, allowing you to more quickly and skillfully stay present to what is arising in the moment and in particular, to move through challenging experiences such as physical pain, emotional turbulence and mental agitation.
Many dharma teachers recommend learning Somatic Inquiry as a tool for understanding of Buddhist psychology and philosophy..
Do we do Somatic Inquiry the whole year?
Absolutely. You’ll find yourself deepening your skillset over the course of the twelve months. In so doing, you’ll develop not only your skills for self-inquiry, but your capacity for connection with others.
Dr. Gendlin, after many decades of teaching this technique, said that it takes about ten months of practice to really ‘get’ how this process works and to train the mind to shift to the ‘felt sense’ with more skill. Over the years I have found that when combined with a meditation practice, that timeframe is quite a bit less.
We’ll spend more time on the mechanics of somatic inquiry in the first part of our year and then rely on these tools as a core technique through the course.
The end result is that by the end of the year you’ll have a great tool for your meditation practice, for deconstructing what is between you and feeling free, for understanding the nature of the dharma and as a way of relating better to others.
Is there a lot of homework and reading to do?
No. I've done enough year-long and multi year-long trainings to know that life has extensive demands and the last thing we need is the stress that comes with keeping up with a long bibliography. The course does have a recommended reading list, but only a few key books are highly recommended.
However, throughout the year you will get regular updates with suggested short readings and resources you might find useful and inspiring.
What if I miss a session?
Life happens. But it is expected you will commit to all sessions to the best of your ability.
What if I get too busy to participate in the sessions?
Your acceptance into the program assumes you are making this program a priority in your life. If your attendance drops below 80%, we’ll have a conversation about your intention and what you need to stay engaged. If your participation remains low, you may be asked to withdraw.
Please carefully consider whether you can make this commitment. Please keep in mind that if you decide to drop out you will still owe the full tuition.
This sounds intense. What if these practice bring up old unpleasant memories and trauma?
I’m so glad you asked. There is no question that intensive practice will reveal what is undigested, unfelt, unseen and unprocessed in your life.
Consider having a therapist during the year for extra support, and if you know you are working with trauma, you’ll definitely want to have support systems in place. This program is quite supportive, but can’t take the place of a good therapist.
What is the monthly online evening class like?
Highly experiential and interactive. The online gathering generally starts with a group meditation followed by a short presentation. You’ll explore that topic either with a partner or in a small group. There is generally time for group discussion, questions and sharing.
While the monthly classes are online, we will arrange ‘watch parties’ where you might choose to take part in someone’s home.
What are the daylong retreats like?
These live and in-person retreats have a specific theme and are highly experiential. Here we have time for a deeper dive with longer meditations, exploring what’s between you and feeling free and taking time to explore the depth of different techniques and the power of somatic inquiry. They can be a profound way to deepen your practice and understanding.
Retreats will be held in the DC area.
What are the Spiritual Friends group gatherings like?
Spiritual Friends groups are a powerful part of the Year of Living Mindfully. Your group will be facilitated by YLM mentors and you’ll have time not just for group practice, but to share and hear from others what’s unfolding in your practice and how you are bringing mindfulness and compassion to what is arising in your life.
Many Spiritual Friends groups have continued to meet after the program had ended.
What is the residential retreat like?
Our residential retreat follows the structure of a classical Vipassana retreat. Your week will be in silence with alternating periods for sitting and walking meditation. Each day there is instruction, time for Q/A and through the week there will be a daily guided heart meditation, a dharma talk and mindful movement sessions.
If after this program you feel drawn to teach, completion of this retreat meets the qualifications for the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program led by Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach.
Can I do 1-1 sessions with a guide?
Some of the mentors will be available for 1:1 exploration.
How diverse will this group be?
This program welcomes all values and diversity. Some scholarships and mentoring are available to support and encourage broad participation.
Is it required I live in the DC area?
You must attend all daylong retreats. Because there is so much potential for personal transformation using our methodologies, it’s critical we do this work in person.
Daylong retreats will be in the DC metro area. The residential retreat will most probably be in Virginia.
We are exploring the possibility of a small pilot program for those not able to attend the daylong retreats in person. If you are interested, please reach out.
What does this program cost?
Benefactor - $3400.00
Support others while deepening your own practice. Your generosity will support those not as fortunate and will foster a more inclusive learning community.
Sustaining - $2600.00
This is the standard tuition that covers the cost of the course and supports the community.
Community - $1950.00
If you are facing financial challenges, this tier may make participation possible.
If you need additional support, please reach out.
This fee covers all tuition except for your room, board and dana for the weeklong retreat.
I’m interested. What’s next?
If you’d like to apply, you can download an application below:
Send an email to me at jonathanfoust@mac.com if I can be of help..