Empowering women on their healing journey.
The Program
Meditation that fits the life you already have.
AAM is not about creating perfect conditions for meditation. It is about learning to recognize qualities that are already available to us and bringing practice into ordinary moments.
01
Awareness
Discover awareness as a natural capacity that can be recognized even when the mind is busy.
02
Love & Compassion
Explore our innate capacity for warmth, care, and connection toward ourselves and others.
03
Wisdom
Learn to relate to thoughts, emotions, and experience with greater curiosity and freedom.
Upcoming Offerings
Learn AAM with Sarah
Find online and in person Anytime, Anywhere Meditation Program offerings, and affiliated meditation programs with Sarah and friends here. Events are updated regularly. If you are interested in setting up a private workshop for your group or organization, please contact us directly by emailing info@mindfulisland.com.
September 26 & 27
E3 Gym
Chico, California
October 4 & 11
Sacred Sound
Chico, California
Designed by Mingyur Rinpoche
Ancient wisdom made practical
Mingyur Rinpoche is a world-renowned meditation teacher known for making contemplative practice accessible, warm, and deeply relevant to modern life. AAM distills essential meditation practices into a concise program designed to be used beyond the cushion — while walking, working, parenting, relating, and meeting the changing conditions of daily life.
“Because awareness is as present in our lives as the air we breathe, we can access it anywhere, anytime.”
Your Teacher
Sarah Sati
Meditation teacher, psychological science educator, and long time contemplative practitioner trained through Tergar and Mingyur Rinpoche's meditation teacher program. Sarah's teaching brings contemplative practice into ordinary human life — our relationships, difficult emotions, bodies, histories, and all the moments that are anything but perfectly peaceful.
“We don't meditate to escape the way things are. Learning to be with the way things are is meditation.”
A few questions
Is this for me?
I have never meditated before. Is this course really for me? Yes. Anytime Anywhere Meditation was specifically designed to be accessible to people who are completely new to meditation, while still offering something meaningful for those who already have a practice. You don't need to know how to quiet your mind, sit still for long periods of time, or understand Buddhist philosophy. In fact, one of the central ideas of AAM is that meditation does not require us to create some special internal state before we can begin. We'll start with simple practices and build from there.
I've tried meditation before and I'm not very good at it. What if my mind won't stop thinking? Then you have a mind — and you're in exactly the right place. AAM challenges the common idea that meditation means getting rid of thoughts or making the mind peaceful. Instead, we learn how awareness can be present alongside thoughts, emotions, sensations, distraction, and even discomfort. The goal isn't to manufacture a perfectly calm mind. It's to discover that we can relate differently to whatever is already happening. For many people, this makes meditation feel considerably more accessible than approaches that seem to require concentration, stillness, or silence before we're “doing it right.
Is Anytime Anywhere Meditation Buddhist? AAM was created by Tibetan Buddhist meditation teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, and its understanding of meditation grows out of the Buddhist contemplative tradition. However, AAM itself is taught as a universally accessible meditation program. You do not need to be Buddhist, adopt Buddhist beliefs, or have any particular religious or spiritual orientation to participate. The course explores awareness, love and compassion, and wisdom as qualities of human experience that we can investigate for ourselves. If you are interested in Buddhism, there is certainly a deeper tradition behind these teachings to explore. But that is not a requirement of this course.
Is Anytime Anywhere Meditation Buddhist? AAM was created by Tibetan Buddhist meditation teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, and its understanding of meditation grows out of the Buddhist contemplative tradition. However, AAM itself is taught as a universally accessible meditation program. You do not need to be Buddhist, adopt Buddhist beliefs, or have any particular religious or spiritual orientation to participate. The course explores awareness, love and compassion, and wisdom as qualities of human experience that we can investigate for ourselves. If you are interested in Buddhism, there is certainly a deeper tradition behind these teachings to explore. But that is not a requirement of this course.
What will we actually learn? AAM explores three foundational qualities: Awareness — learning to recognize the basic capacity to know what we are experiencing, and discovering that awareness can be found in many different situations rather than only during formal meditation. Love & Compassion — recognizing our natural wish for well-being and freedom from suffering and learning how that innate capacity can become part of meditation. Wisdom — becoming curious about how we experience ourselves and the world, and learning to see thoughts, emotions, and situations with greater clarity and flexibility. Throughout the course, we bring these together through three things: understanding the ideas, experiencing them directly in meditation, and applying them to real life.
What actually happens during the course? This is an experiential course, not a whole program of sitting silently for hours. We'll alternate between short teachings, guided meditations, discussion, questions, reflection, and opportunities to explore meditation in different ways. Some practices may be done sitting quietly. Others can involve sound, sensation, movement, thoughts, emotions, or experiences that arise naturally in the moment. An important part of AAM is discovering that the boundary between “meditation” and “the rest of my life” doesn't need to be as rigid as we often imagine. We'll practice together, talk about what you're experiencing, and continually bring the teachings back to situations you actually encounter outside the meditation room.
Do I need to sit cross-legged or be physically still? No. You are welcome to sit in a chair or another position that works for your body. Meditation can also happen while standing, walking, moving, resting, listening, or engaging with everyday experience. Please take care of your body during the program. You are welcome to change positions, stand up, take a break, or modify a practice when you need to. The point of AAM is not to become excellent at sitting still. It's to learn how meditation can become available in your life.
How is this different from a typical mindfulness course? There is certainly overlap: we learn to pay attention to present-moment experience. But AAM places particular emphasis on the view we bring to meditation. Rather than treating awareness as something we have to create through effort, we begin exploring the possibility that awareness is already part of every experience. We then extend that exploration beyond awareness into love, compassion, and wisdom. So the practice isn't simply about becoming more attentive. It is an invitation to investigate some of the fundamental qualities of our own minds and discover how recognizing them can change the way we relate to everyday experience.
Will I leave with something I can actually use afterward? That's one of the primary purposes of AAM. You'll leave with a collection of simple meditation practices, but more importantly, you'll understand how to practice when you're not formally meditating. You might begin experimenting with awareness while drinking coffee, walking, working, waiting in line, having a difficult conversation, experiencing a strong emotion, or simply noticing that your mind has wandered. The aim is not to add another demanding task to your schedule. It's to discover more and more moments in the life you're already living that can become opportunities for practice.