Our Core Values

Imagine a place where you were truly safe – emotionally and physically. A place where you could develop confidence, and feel true compassion for yourself and others. A place where you would grow, and where others would grow right along with you. Imagine all of this taking place on a foundation of mindfulness – learning to notice, savor, and learn from your life, while making wise choices rather than reacting to circumstances.

As you may have guessed, such a place exists, and that place is Red Mountain Colorado.

We have just described the core values of our program: Mindfulness, Safety, Confidence, Compassion, and Growth.

Mindfulness is the backbone of our program.  Our founders are sanctioned meditation teachers with over 50 years of experience practicing both ancient and cutting-edge mindfulness modalities.

Why is mindfulness important to us? So important, in fact, that we built a whole program around it?

Well, because we believe the majority of human suffering is caused by lack of mindfulness. Things happen to us, and we react – usually without thinking. We also create stories about what’s happening, and what we think should be happening.  This causes us to stay stuck in patterns of unproductive thoughts, feelings, words and actions.   

To maximize our potential, we have to learn to notice what’s happening – both within us, and around us, and deal with situations directly, freed from our old, compulsive narratives. This allows us to become non-reactive, and to create our lives, rather than having them passively happen to us.

At Red Mountain, we incorporate mindfulness into our program through classes, groups, private instruction, and therapy. Our students – and our staff – learn to “mind their minds,” notice and avoid old patterns, and proactively create a new way of being.  While a mindful life still inevitably includes suffering, the suffering is greatly reduced, for when we encounter it, we don’t automatically, thoughtlessly compound it through our non-working behavior. 

This creates a great opportunity to experience true physical and emotional safety. We no longer put ourselves in unsafe situations; tolerate unsafe behavior in others; or upset ourselves unduly. We feel calmer, our nervous system relaxes, and we can enjoy the present moment without stress or strain.

Out of our newfound sense of safety, confidence naturally arises. This is because we’re no longer doing the same old thing and winding up in the same old situations. As we have success handling situations which used to baffle us, confidence naturally becomes a default setting. Additionally, as we develop mindfulness, we naturally develop another kind of confidence – confidence in the process of our lives, and in the unfolding of events in the correct time and way.

From here, we develop compassion for ourselves and others. It’s very hard to have compassion if we don’t first have confidence, but once we are confident, it’s much easier to feel kindness, love, empathy and patience – in other words, compassion —  toward ourselves and others.  

From a place of compassion, we are able to grow. We grow in new and exciting ways, and sometimes in challenging ways. 

We now have the mindfulness, safety, confidence and compassion to push ourselves gently, and to guide our own journeys. 

We don’t stagnate, nor do we overextend.  

From this growth, more mindfulness emerges, thus begetting more safety, confidence, compassion, and growth, and the virtuous cycle continues.

These core values inform our choices at Red Mountain, our interview process, our hiring of staff, our students’ progression through the program, and our day to day interactions.  They create a truly transformative process, and a program like no other.