WHO ARE YOU BEING IN Your ONE PRECIOUS HUMAN LIFE?
A note from Jan:
Thank you for visiting my site.
I have been on a healing journey in 2025
I welcome the sacredness of your attention as I improvise a new site!
Living and Working Well
is a resource of encouragement and support
for you, and for those you love and serve.
Jan Cook offers guidance in mindfulness, meditation, embodied communication
and body-mind centering® in three structural formats:
Engaged instruction and practice within a class setting, and learning circles.
Focused personal mentoring.
Spacious pace in workshops and retreats.
Classes
Jan is organizing a new form of gathering to learn together
She recognizes the deep capacity everyone has to find an authentic practice that supports, nourishes, challenges, and transforms our collective awakening.
Beyond teacher/student, spiritual guide/ seeker and therapist/ client: we are all in this together.
Below is her first offering in 2025:
In partnership with Pachamama Alliance Rochester Area & First Unitarian Buddhist Fellowship
Completing Your/Our Week in Sacred Circle
When: Every Sunday Evening 8:30-9 (Virtual and Free)
Every Sunday from October 5th -Winter Solstice December 21st
For those of us who are tirelessly devoted to working for justice, peace, and civility.
A quiet, focused silent contemplative pause to turn inward to complete your/our week together.
Put down phones, to do lists, what didn’t get done lists, and your possible fatigue.
Get quiet as an act of resistance to the attention economy, and open to the beyond human and human realms that support you.
Radically recognize the cultural call of self criticism, insufficiency, reactivity and desire to go numb
Bring your practice**
Bring your devotion
Bring your appreciation of the power of collective intention
Bring your friends and colleagues on the journey with you
We will:
Pause for a few words to open to your individual and our collective sacred space and intention
Share 20 minutes of silence to connect with your own practice and the steady ground that nourishes you.**
Dedicate the energy of y/our quiet practice to our collective awakening and ground for restful sleep and the coming week’s intentions
Fall 2024
Resilient Activism
Embodied Practices for
Effective Systemic Change
A pilot to bring students and community members together during the election season,
to cultivate and support Effective Systemic Change, both inside and out.
This is a partnership between the Program of Dance and Movement , and UR Center for Community Engagement
CREATE A CONTAINER TO SUPPORT YOUR ACTIONS IN THE WORLD
🔺Experientially define your experience of resilience, stress, and burn-out.
🔺Identify and re-pattern your unhelpful stress habits toward nourishment and replenishment.
🔺Strengthen self-regulating resources you already have.
🔺Learn and integrate new and helpful body-mind resources.
🔺Move, breathe, and explore your body as part of the resilient, evolving, more than human world.
🔺Practice embodied dialogue skills with nature itself , your body as nature, and this supportive circle.
🔺Connect cross-generationally with committed activists.
TIME COMMITMENT :
Two Saturday immersion workshops :9/7 and 11/9 ( Saturday after election)
10 lab-classes Fridays 9/6- 11/22 12:30-1:45
with easy parking near O’Brian Hall
( optional class 11/15,29)
Small on-line cohort to support your integration of practice and results. Times will be determined by your availability
Optional mentoring opportunities from course facilitators
COST: FREE! including parking!
Space is limited to 8 students and 8 community members.
EXPERIENTIAL INTRODUCTIONs:-)
for community members
Monday July 8th on zoom 6:30-7:30
Tuesday July 9th in person 6:30-8
for students on campus
Saturday July 13th 1-2:30 or 20th 4-5:30
CONTACT JAN IF INTERESTED - janburkecook@gmail.com
Autumnal Body-Mind Centering®
with Jan Cook and Friends.
Dates and time TBD
Contact Jan in the box below, if you are interested.
All are welcome*
Learn and practice in community with others to
integrate a basic practice into your everyday life.
Through mindfulness, meditation and
body mind centering® you can:
Cultivate Resilience, Clarity, Renewal, and Encouragement
for the personal and collective challenges we are facing in
these times.Experience a more liberating, compassionate relationship
with your embodied self , for a world that needs your love.Transform your relationship with your body as a partner
Liberate stressful patterns of thoughts and emotions
for your life on and off the cushion.
Cost: Dana based
* If you are new to Jan’s teachings, please plan on having a brief conversation with her on zoom after the introduction and before the first session.
Ongoing Meditation
An ongoing energetic meditation community for
non-sectarian Buddhist practice and application.
This series is designed to support our practice of compassion and wisdom in these very challenging times.
We will be exploring practices that fit for you to:
Deepen more tangible aspects of Refuge/ Ground
Have a more compassionate relationship with your
body as nature itself.
Transform the energies of fear, doubt and confusion toward new pathways of expression and action.
Cost: Free
Tuesday mornings on Zoom: 7:30-8:30
7:30-8 Embodiment | 8-7:30 Meditation and Sharing
Dates in the fall TBD
Donations/Dana/Fees
Jan is now offering payment for her meditation classes on a donation basis.
There is a suggested tuition for Body-Centered classes, as well as fees for Private, and Semi Private sessions.
No one is turned away for lack of funds and your contributions make a difference.
PERSONAL MENTORING
“Jan Cook possesses a unique blend of knowledge, insight, compassion, and warmth. I always leave feeling more in-tune with myself and with the the world around me. Her presence has allowed me to deeply access my own intuition, and my potential for growth. You would be hard pressed to find a more gifted teacher, mentor, and guide.”
-Dr. Peter Thompson, Personal Development and Performance Coach
Private and Small Group Sessions
SPIRITUAL DIRECTION
For years people have come to Jan for this gentle and honest guidance,
to focus on what is most important and yet sometimes inaccessible in
their everyday life. Through deep listening and helpful inquiry,
you can illumine, articulate and integrate your deepest longings.
BODY MIND CENTERING®
Through personally effective embodiment practices,
you will learn from the inside out how to connect with your body’s
natural intelligence, and and re-pattern your stress response.
The result is a deep wellspring of renewal and capacity for clarity,
creativity, and resilience in the face of whatever comes your way.
PREPARING FOR SURGERY
Based in Peggy Huddleston’s Prepare for Surgery Heal Faster™
From her personal experience of childhood illness,
Jan has experienced Open Heart Surgery twice in the last 11 years.
The foundation of Peggy’s approach was invaluable for her preparation,
surgery, rehabilitation and recovery. She is now certified by Peggy
to facilitate you in your own personal journey to reduce anxiety,
use less pain medication and heal faster.
WORKSHOPS
& RETREATS
Jan has been awarded a grant to develop a course for social activists at the University of Rochester (F’24)
Through the Department of Community Engagement, this learning circle will be co-designed for students and community members to support embodied resiliency for those who face issues of burn-out, reactivity, discouragement, and stress in their busy committed lives.
Class size will be limited to promote supportive relationships between the students and community members. SEE THE ABOVE DESCRIPTION UNDER CLASSES.
If you are interested in participating or finding out more, please contact Jan below.
ABOUT JAN COOK
MS.Ed, Registered Somatic Educator and Therapist
Jan has explored, practiced, and mentored others through the experience of transformation for 40 years.
In her career of designing and facilitating leadership and organizational effectiveness programs, Jan saw the cost of stress and personal and collective trauma on her own and other’s lives. She became keenly aware of how stress could diminish one’s ability to contribute their gifts. She sought the best teachers and programs in somatic awareness and became certified as a somatic educator and therapist.
She founded Living and Working Well to coach, guide and support people facing the challenges and mind-body stress of deeply committed and purposeful lives. Her 12 year participation in the Program of Dance and Movement at the University of Rochester has recently opened an opportunity to bring this work to social activists on and off campus for a pilot in Resilient Activism.
In light of her calling for deeper awakening on her own spiritual path, she immersed herself in study, retreat, and practice within Buddhism, which is still the center of her life.
Jan has a reputation for listening deeply and guiding clients on their unique journeys with grace, clarity, humor, and steady encouragement.
JAN’S Credentials and APPROACH TO MEDITATION:
Jan Integrates the depth of Himalayan and
Southeast Asian Buddhist traditions with modern psychology, somatics,interpersonal neurobiology and the arts.
In 2008 she was ordained as a Buddhist dharma teacher by Anam Thubten Rinpoche , with whom she continues to study and receive guidance She is honored to be a Mitra/mentor and student with Lama Willa Miller, Lama Liz Monson and Natural Dharma Fellowship. Over her many years of study, she has been especially been influenced in retreats, empowerments, and live teachings with H.H. Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chodron, Tara Brach, Elisabeth Mattis-Nymgal, Stephen Batchelor, Lama John McKransky, Lama Rod Owens, and Garchen Rinpoche.
Classes integrate practical teachings, deep focus on daily practice, and loving support for students to connect with their own lineages and inner wisdom within the context of the bodhisatvha path.
She also integrates mindful awareness practices and self-care within a secular social justice context through embodied communication and peace circles.
JAN’S Credentials and training in Somatics and BODY- MIND CENTERING®:
Body-Mind Centering® is an integrated and embodied approach to movement, the body and consciousness. Jan has been a student and teacher of this work for 30 years, studying with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Mark Taylor,Emily Conrad, Susan Harper, Caryn McHose, and many colleagues and teachers on the leading edge of embodiment. She is currently enrolled in additional study after a 6 month training on Trauma Informed Somatic therapies.
She integrates embodiment at all levels of her teaching and facilitation. Students and clients are more able to:
- Connect with your body’s natural intelligence from the inside out.
- Discover your new adaptive capacity to move through your life with more freedom and ease.
- Re-pattern your stress response for clarity, confidence and resilience.
- Express and create through newly found space and ground.
- Enjoy a more powerful, loving, and respectful relationship with your body and the world of which it is a part.
- Rest at a cellular level
Listen to the audio file below for a sample of Jan’s Meditation Practice
Listen to the audio file below for a sample of Jan’s Embodiment Practice
