Unity Community of Ashland is a vibrant, expanding interfaith congregation serving Rogue Valley, Southern Oregon, Northern California and a broader international Zoom community.
- We aspire to be a spiritual center filled with unconditional love, an ever expanding light of consciousness, a place that feels like home, safe, welcoming and uplifting.
- We aspire to provide a spiritually uplifting gathering place rooted in the Interfaith and Unity tradition, where all may feel a sense of belonging.
- We explore the wisdom teachings from both New Thought and the major World Religions, finding what is relevant and meaningful for us in our lives in the world today.
- We celebrate the diversity and inclusion of all our congregants and warmly welome all who seek to join us including our LGBTQ+ community, inter-faith families, and spiritual seekers of every tradition.
With a focus on direct spiritual experience, attention to social and environmental justice, and the holistic needs of our community, we cultivate loving-kindness, meaningful connection and a spirit of selfless service.
Rev. Kathy Zavada
The founding minister of the Unity Community of Ashland combines truth teachings with wonderful music creating a heartfelt spiritual experience.
What We Offer
Dharma Talks
Our services are creative and filled with deeply inspiring music, meditation, and dharma talks that are often interactive and relevant to what is current in our life and our world.
Music & Song
Music is an important part of our services. In addition to Rev. Kathy's musical contributions, we enjoy the incredible talents of professional guest musicians such as Alice Di Micele, Daniel Sperry, and others. And, our choir blesses us with their collective voices once each month.
Rev. Kathy and Alice DiMicele perform Kathy’s new chant “Soul Awakening” with lots of spontaneous vocal improvisation.
Workshops, Retreats & Training
We also offer grief support groups, workshops, and retreats to deepen our spiritual growth.
Grief
Support Group
Heart Opening Retreat
Prayer Chaplain Training
Our Choir
If you love to sing and can carry a tune, consider adding your voice to our choir.
On Easter Sunday 2024, we enjoyed the first performance of our new choir. The UCOA choir performs once each month filling our service with beautiful song.
Mission
Unity Community of Ashland is a thriving, inclusive spiritual interfaith community dedicated to transforming lives to make a positive difference in the world. We come together to raise our consciousness, expand our hearts, cultivate inner peace, and awaken to our true divine nature.
Vision
We are a spiritual community dedicated to living mindfully, embodying loving-kindness, serving those in need, and supporting all beings in living our most conscious, abundant, and meaningful life.
Board of Directors
Four dedicated people join Rev. Kathy as the leadership of our community.
What We Believe
The Five Basic Unity Principles
- There is only one Power, one Presence: God/Universal Consciousness.
- This power that has no opposite is omnipotent (all powerful), omniscient (all knowing, all wise), and omnipresent (everywhere, there is no place God/Universal Consciousness is not).
- We are not separate from God/Universal Consciousness.
- Oneness is our true and natural state.
- Our very essence is of Infinite Love and Infinite Intelligence, and therefore, we are also inherently good.
- Jesus is our great example, our way-shower. He demonstrated what is possible when we live in awareness of our Oneness, consciously and willingly aligned with our Divinity.
- We are expressions of the divine in human form.
- Everything in the manifest realm has its beginning in thought/feeling.
- Our thoughts, feelings and beliefs have the power to create our experience of life.
- We create not just as individuals, but as groups. We are all connected in the One Mind, Quantum Field, or Universal Consciousness.
- We may not always know the larger meaning of our circumstances at the time we experience them. What may seem to be a terrible event may turn out to be the catalyst for our highest possible good. By using our free will, we always have the choice to align ourselves with love, goodness and possibility.
- Affirmative prayer is an activity that allows us to know our Oneness.
- Spiritual practice (prayer and meditation) is not something we do for God, but is something we do to maintain our awareness of the omnipresence of God/Universal Consciousness.
- Living the Truth means that we show up in all of the activities of our lives — work, play, family relationships — with a consciousness that what we do and how we behave matters.
- Living the Truth means that we do the personal and spiritual work necessary to remain conscious and aware of our Oneness.
- Living the Truth means that we recognize our Divinity and act in ways that express that Divinity.
The Five Basic Unity Principles
- God/Universal Consciousness is absolute good, everywhere present.
- There is only one Power, one Presence: God/Universal Consciousness.
- This power that has no opposite is omnipotent (all powerful), omniscient (all knowing, all wise), and omnipresent (everywhere, there is no place God/Universal Consciousness is not).
- We are not separate from God/Universal Consciousness.
- Oneness is our true and natural state.
- Human beings are endowed with consciousness and the ability to fully express the divinity within them.
- Our very essence is of Infinite Love and Infinite Intelligence, and therefore, we are also inherently good.
- Jesus is our great example, our way-shower. He demonstrated what is possible when we live in awareness of our Oneness, consciously and willingly aligned with our Divinity.
- We are expressions of the divine in human form.
- Human beings create their experiences by the activity of their thinking and feeling.
- Everything in the manifest realm has its beginning in thought/feeling.
- Our thoughts, feelings and beliefs have the power to create our experience of life.
- We create not just as individuals, but as groups. We are all connected in the One Mind, Quantum Field, or Universal Consciousness.
- We may not always know the larger meaning of our circumstances at the time we experience them. What may seem to be a terrible event may turn out to be the catalyst for our highest possible good. By using our free will, we always have the choice to align ourselves with love, goodness and possibility.
- Prayer and meditation heighten the connection with God-Mind/Universal Consciousness and therefore bring forth wisdom, healing, prosperity, goodness and spiritual awakening.
- Affirmative prayer is an activity that allows us to know our Oneness.
- Spiritual practice (prayer and meditation) is not something we do for God, but is something we do to maintain our awareness of the omnipresence of God/Universal Consciousness.
- Knowing and understanding the laws of life — also called Truth — are not enough. A person must also Live the Truth that they know. We aspire to receive Universal Consciousness and to then express and create from this divine/awake awareness.
- Living the Truth means that we show up in all of the activities of our lives — work, play, family relationships — with a consciousness that what we do and how we behave matters.
- Living the Truth means that we do the personal and spiritual work necessary to remain conscious and aware of our Oneness.
- Living the Truth means that we recognize our Divinity and act in ways that express that Divinity.
Definitions
God is synonymous with Universal Consciousness, the loving source of all that is. God is the one power, all good, everywhere present, all wisdom. God is divine energy, continually creating, expressing and sustaining all creation. In God, we live and move and have our being. In Unity, some other ways we name God are Life, Great Spirit, Source of All that Is, The I Am, Infinite Light, Unconditional Love, Principle and Universal Mind.
We are each individual, eternal expressions of God. Our essential nature
is divine and therefore inherently good. Our purpose is to express our divine potential as realized and demonstrated by Jesus and other master teachers. The more we awaken to our divine nature, the more fully God expresses in and through our lives.
Jesus expressed his divine potential and sought to show us how to do that, too. Jesus is the master teacher of universal truths and is our Way Shower. In Unity, we use the term Christ to mean the divinity in humankind. Unity believes that Jesus’ call to, “follow me,” and his assurance that, “these and greater things shall you do,” are central to his message that we are all called to awaken to, and to manifest, the Christ Consciousness within us.
Unity founders Charles and Myrtle Fillmore studied the Bible as history and allegory and interpreted it as a metaphysical representation of humankind’s evolutionary journey toward spiritual awakening. In addition, Unity recognizes that the Bible is a complex collection of writings compiled over many centuries. We honor the writings as reflecting the understanding and inspiration of the writers at the time they were written. The Bible continues to be a valuable spiritual resource for us.
We employ the wisdom teachings in the Interfaith tradition by using various sacred texts including The Upanishads, The Bhagavad Gita, The Vedas, The Dhammapada, Buddhist Sutras, the Tao Te Ching, the Native American tradition, the Christian Mystics, the Kaballah, the Indigenous cultures, teachings from contemporary spiritual leaders and mystics, and Quantum Science to enhance and awaken our spiritual understanding.
We recognize there is a greater reality discovered in Stillness/Silence. We practice quieting the mind, and use affirmative prayer as the highest form of creative thought. It includes the release of counterproductive, negative thoughts, as well as holding in mind statements of spiritual truth. Through meditation, we experience the presence of God/Universal Consciousness. Prayer and meditation heighten our awareness and transform our lives.