How to Awaken through the Five Levels of Mind
Self-paced Online Meditation Retreat
Join meditation teacher, psychotherapist, and Mindful Glimpses App creator Loch Kelly for this special self-paced online immersion into the Effortless Mindfulness Awakening Process.
Are you yearning for deeper insight and tools for how to effectively access and live from your innate and compassionate Awake Aware Mind?
In this immersive self-paced online retreat, you’ll take your experience of the Effortless Mindfulness map, method, and markers to the next level, with an intensive focus on navigating the three subtlest and most important expressions of our consciousness: Awake Mind, Unity Mind, and Heart Mind.
Effortless Mindfulness (EM) fuses ancient wisdom tools for awakening with contemporary psychological models like Internal Family Systems (IFS).
This self-paced online retreat will focus on this question: How can you start to consistently manifest the life-changing potential of these three levels of your own consciousness?
- Have you done some of the preliminary meditation practices and now want to learn how to do “nondual” glimpsing to relieve suffering at the root?
- Have you experienced a glimpse of your Awake Mind, but now want to move from experiencing it to consistently living it?
- Are you ready to move from seeking peak experiences to embracing a process of unfolding growth, healing, and thriving from awake loving flow?
- Would you like to know the main obstacles to embodied awakening and the ways to liberate those obstacles with tools from both EM and IFS?
- Are you ready to invite your inner teacher to lead so you can live a more compassionate, clear, and awake life?
A Note from Loch Kelly
I’m excited to share this special time with you on retreat. This immersive self-paced experience is for those of you who would like to go to the next level of your meditation practice and psychological growth with Effortless Mindfulness (EM).
I’ve been synthesizing the Effortless Mindfulness Awakening Process (EMAP) for decades and gathering feedback from students to bring the best of ancient wisdom and contemporary science into our lives and to make the experience practical and optimal for different types of learners.
Based on this work, I feel that I’ve distilled EM into a truly simple method and map with clear experiential markers that can help beginners and advanced practitioners alike to access their Awake Aware Mind. But it doesn’t stop there. EM helps you learn how to embody and live from this limitless dimension of your Self.
In this self-paced online retreat, we will focus on three essential, very subtle, and often perplexing nondual levels of mind: Awake Aware Mind, Unity Mind and Heart Mind. What are they exactly? And how do you access them with consistency and confidence? During this immersive experience, you’ll find the answers to these questions arising from your very own essential Self.
In Awake Aware Mind, we discover direct, valid, nonconceptual knowing (aka pure perception or the inherent awareness within you) that is deeper than thought. In Unity Mind, we awaken to a fundamental sense of interconnection and safety which allows our innate compassion to flower.
This seamlessly leads us into a new sense of identity and mind—Heartmind (or what IFS calls Self leadership)—which allows us to feel and live from a ground of profound open-heartedness and seamless flow.
Rooting yourself and your life in these three levels of mind is transformative. And what I’m proposing is nothing short of shifting your entire operating system to a ground of awake loving flow where your cup is consistently overflowing with calm, confidence, and buoyant compassion.
So this retreat will be a deep invitation and immersion into who you’ve always been—like coming home. And I’ll lead you through a tailored gamut of glimpses to help you further recognize, realize, and then abide in Awake Aware Mind.
Self-paced online retreats like this one are an incredible opportunity for you to learn how to access and then marinate in this awake consciousness in a sustained space so that you can step forth into the world and live in the inspired way you’ve always desired.
with a Grateful Heart,
Loch Kelly
In this Self-Paced Online Retreat, You Will:
- Learn to welcome all inner parts of us and outer situations that trigger us (rather than tensing up, resisting, or avoiding your sense experiences and creating more suffering in the process)
- Deepen your confidence in accessing your awake mind
- Drop into Awake Aware Mind by moving from content-based awareness to contentless awareness
- Unhook from thinking and move through the sense doorways of seeing and hearing, decentering our normal head-based awareness
- Identify the ever-subtle awareness of awareness between thoughts and words
- Avoid the common pitfalls of getting stuck in the mindful witness and the gap of no-self (detached pure awareness)
- Unburden the three common parts that most often block our access to Awake Awareness
- Embody the natural clarity and compassion needed to live from Awake Mind
- Learn and Practice specific glimpses that untie your knots of contraction so the natural freedom, clarity, and compassion of your Heart Mind becomes your new baseline
- Learn strategies and tools to resolve inner conflicts that stem from attachment wounds
Thriving Beyond Conventional Mindfulness
Most popular mindfulness programs begin with Everyday Mind and end with Subtle Mind, which is the second level in Loch’s model. Effortless Mindfulness continues to the next stages of awakening which are Awake Aware Mind, Unity Mind and Heart Mind.
This is the ever-present dimension within you that is always awake, calm, clear, and untouched by worry, doubt, shame, and fear. It marks the life-changing discovery of consciousness beyond thought-based knowing.
Effortless Mindfulness gives you simple ways to stabilize your access to that equanimity, buoyancy, and tender loving heart through all the ups and downs of daily life. And as you more fully embody Effortless Mindfulness through regular practice and consistent contact with your Awake Mind, you’ll find it easier to live from an awake loving flow of consciousness that helps you create and relate in an optimal way.
In contrast to conventional mindfulness, which helps you gradually calm the mind through sitting meditation, EM falls into the school of direct awakening. It’s not about rest. It’s about shifting, through engaged inquiry, into the awareness that becomes aware of itself. In that process, you’re not relating to your small self anymore, but to the inherent already-awake Self within you.
Why is this important? Because during the daily and dramatic ebb and flow of your engaged life—when it matters most—you can shift into the part of you that is already calm, confident, and filled with connected compassion.
And guess what? You don’t need to be an Olympic athlete of meditation to make this kind of shift. Instead, the Effortless Mindfulness Awakening Process involves many small glimpses repeated throughout your day until you slowly but surely forge an entirely new way of being based in Awake Mind, Unity Mind, and Heartmind.
Here's What You'll Get
Expert Instruction
8 Hours of expert instruction with Loch Kelly
Lifetime Access
Lifetime access to all course replays and media
PDF Support Materials
PDFs, charts, quotes, and other support materials
What Makes Effortlesss Mindfulness Retreats Different?
Retreats are a remarkable and time-tested way to accelerate your transformation. There’s a reason, after all, that spiritual seekers, practitioners, and realizers have done them for thousands of years.
The science of retreat is simple and effective. During these intensive immersions, you generate a highly focused atmosphere where you temporarily leave the world behind. For this time, you can let go of the relentless worldly worries, problems, and distractions that usually captivate your attention.
This allows you to give your whole attention to the process and practice of awakening. Without distraction, it’s much easier to drop into a deeper level of Being and explore the different dimensions of your own awareness and the Five Levels of Mind.
When you’re free to do this for consecutive days (ideally), it can yield dramatic results. All of us need periods like this in our lives to take a break from the daily grind and focus on that which is most important. And when you allow yourself to do that, you can generate the kind of momentum in your Effortless Mindfulness practice that helps you move to a completely new level.
And more than that, you can reconnect to that exquisite and fundamental space of sacred stillness, peace, clarity, compassion, and abiding confidence in the essential goodness of life. For so many of us, that connection is the rocket fuel that inspires us to do the work to manifest and express the character and qualities of Awake Mind, Unity Mind, and Heart Mind.
To this end, we’ve designed this self-paced online retreat as an integrating and immersive deep dive to help you fine-tune your practice, get more stabilized in Awake Aware Mind, and build your confidence in navigating into Unity Mind and Heart Mind.
Like mastering any new skill and habit, immersive and intensive practice is invaluable, giving you the space and time to cement all that you’ve learned in your practice while also tasting the fruits of your practice real-time in a supportive practice-accelerating space.
Loch specifically tailored this self-paced online retreat to practitioners who are familiar with the Effortless Mindfulness teachings and have tasted the promise and potential of Awake Aware Mind in their own direct experience.
What does that mean in this context? Loch teaches not so much to our everyday minds but to the awareness that then becomes aware of itself. He relates not to the small self but to the inherent already awake self within you to help catalyze that deeper and lasting shift into your Awake Aware Mind.
This Self-Paced Retreat Is for You If:
- You practice Effortless Mindfulness and want the kind of deep dive and engagement that will take your practice to the next level
- You want to reboot and refresh your Effortless Mindfulness practice
- You encounter blocks in your practice and want support navigating these obstacles so you can abide in the subtle dimensions of consciousness without getting destabilized or stuck
- You feel calm after your meditation but then get triggered during the day and you don’t know what to do to reclaim your equanimity
- You feel the openness of awareness but not the embodiment or the love when meditating or glimpsing
- You’re a healing and helping professional or therapist who wants to integrate EM more deeply into your work
- You’re a coach or business leader looking for new tools and skills to improve your leadership capacities (think leading with greater clarity, confidence, and compassion)
- You’re a therapist looking for tools to help you and your clients cultivate a compassionate relationship with the Self
- You practice Effortless Mindfulness and want fresh tools and inspiration to help you lead a more Self-led life from a ground of awake loving flow
What Thought Leaders say about Loch...
“With wisdom, clarity and care, Loch Kelly offers teachings and practices that directly evolve consciousness and liberate the heart.”
World-renowned psychologist and meditation teacher. Founder of Insight Meditation Community. Bestselling author.
“Awakening is moving your inner center of gravity from your protective parts to your magnificent essence. Loch not only makes you realize that such a shift is possible, but provides exercises to help make it happen.”
“In many years of knowing and working with Loch Kelly I feel that he is one of the clearest expressions of authentic awakened freedom and love that I know.”
What makes Effortless Mindfulness different from
other mindfulness approaches +
psychological interventions?
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Our unique methodology synthesizes ancient wisdom practices, neuroscience, and contemporary psychology (particularly Internal Family Systems). This distinct combination is designed to help you get the most out of mindfulness in this modern world (even if you’re busy, struggle with focus, or wear many hats in your life).
✔️ An effortless path to greater peace, clarity and calm
With Effortless Mindfulness, the focus is not on developing the skill of mental stability or concentration (which is the defining feature of many mainstream mindfulness systems). Rather, you’re shifting OUT of an unstable stage of adult development into a calm, clear and knowing awareness that can become the foundation from which you live more skillfully
This practice style essentially helps you unplug the computer and hit refresh on your inner system. Doing this consistently actually helps your system function more effectively for the long term, leading to strong resilience to face life’s joys and challenges with enduring balance.
✔️ Address the root issues
This practice style is about familiarizing yourself with a new stage of human development. You are updating the whole operating system, so the patterns that consistently play out in that operating system start to shift or dissolve. If you have a hard time going deeper with your meditation practice, we think you’ll love this feature of Effortless Mindfulness.
Stop trying so hard
We invite you to stop ‘focusing more,’ and tap into an effortless awareness. Thousands of our students are enjoying a deep meditation practice, as well as higher levels of compassion, calm, and clarity more often (without as much effort).
Student Testimonials
The Five Levels of Mind
In this self-paced online retreat, we’re going to focus on the three levels of mind that I refer to as: Awake Aware Mind, Unity Mind, and Heartmind. The goal is to help students of Effortless Mindfulness establish deeper confidence and consistency in accessing and navigating these advanced levels of mind. Here’s a quick review.
The first level of mind that we’re going to discover and explore together is one we all know already. It’s the basic, Everyday Mind of our psychology, our brain, and those parts of us that we call me. It includes our conditioned mind’s programs and our limited subpersonalities from which we try to manage our lives
The second level of mind is the Subtle Mind, where a lot of us have explored and developed insight into thought, energy, and emotions that come and go. This is the mindful witness and the subtle body. It includes our first attempts to shift out of everyday mind.
The third level of mind is Awake Aware Mind, which is foundational. This is a unique and important marker, and one of the most exciting on the EM path. At this level, you realize the subtlest and most fundamental dimension of your consciousness—a wordless, silent, and alert space that is forever free from anxiety, worry, and terror. My goal is to directly introduce you to this transformative level of your own consciousness.
And this then opens up into the:
Fourth level of mind, called the Unity Mind, where we come home from this pure awareness to a ground of interconnected embodied presence. A presence that allows us to feel safe without scanning for danger in our everyday mind. It also allows us to bring the natural compassion of self-energy into our life and to the inner world of our parts.
In the fifth level of mind we encounter the Heart Mind. This means living from a level of consciousness that I call awake loving flow. Like flow consciousness, you’re able to create and relate inside and outside in a way that feels safe, friction-free, and yet highly functional. You feel creative and bursting with inspired clarity about the purpose of your life.
Effortless Mindfulness + IFS Parts Work
I practice and teach an original synthesis of IFS-style parts work and Effortless Mindfulness. Taken together, these two models of Mind and Self offer a powerful path of healing that leads you to the deepest levels of the integration.
What is parts work? And why is it such a transformative healing modality when integrated with Effortless Mindfulness?
The IFS model of parts work describes the nature of the human psyche as organizing into subpersonalities, or parts, that all have Self as their source.
The approach is not to judge, minimize, or get rid of these parts, but instead to notice and lovingly embrace all of our parts from our interconnected Self, which is also within all parts.
This creates a middle path between most psychotherapies that regard a healthy ego as the goal and some meditative paths that call ego or small self an illusion.
Effortless mindfulness helps us access Self and the nature of Mind, directly giving us a new view and wise capacity.
As we get to know and distinguish our parts from Self—even the most difficult ones—we can discover that all parts are looking for love, and there are no bad parts.
In our growing up and waking up, we begin by recognizing and thanking our protective parts as a way to overcome reactivity and find the natural calm needed to shift into our ever-present Awake Aware Mind.
But how do you actually give that love to these difficult and burdened parts? This is where the fusion of parts work and effortless mindfulness is so effective.
Having collaborated and co-taught with Dick Schwartz, I’ve combined IFS insights with the liberating wisdom practices of EM to facilitate access to Self—the whole of who we are beyond any part.
Mindful glimpses give us the tools for embodying and living an awakened life. And I find that this is the most effective way of healing our shadows—those unconscious, repressed, or denied parts.
It’s also the key to embody awakening. The goal of both IFS and EM is to upgrade our sense of identity and mind to live a life of Self leadership with the ability to heal inner parts and live from an awake loving flow to create and relate to others.
Through the Effortless Mindfulness Awakening Process, you’ll get get a sense of parts work and how EM can help you begin to heal and unburden your parts on the path to fundamental wholeness, awakening, and flourishing.
Effortless Mindfulness Self-Paced Online Retreat
How to Awaken through the Five Levels of Mind-
8-hour self-paced meditation retreat
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Guided Mindful Glimpses to support immersive practice
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Practice anytime, anywhere, from the comfort of your own space
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Lifetime Access to All Recordings
FAQ
This virtual retreat recording is designed for more seasoned practitioners of Effortless Mindfulness. You are welcome to take the retreat, but you may find the practices and content challenging without some background in Effortless Mindfulness.
Yes, Loch is specifically tailoring this two-day retreat to more advanced practitioners who are familiar with the Effortless Mindfulness teachings and have tasted the promise and potential of Awake Aware Mind in their own direct experience.
We do not provide refunds for self-paced products and recordings.
As Featured In
Member of ASI
Effortless Mindfulness is brought to you by Natural Wakefulness Center, a 501(c)3 public charity. NWC is dedicated to teaching direct methods to access awake awareness, living from a flow state, nondual mindfulness, and heart mindfulness. It is the Center’s goal to make awakening learnable, teachable, and more accessible to everyone.
