Description
Co-hosted with the Shantideva Center
Thursday, January 16 + Thursday, February 13
6:30-8pm ET
Hybrid | $25
Thursday, January 16, 2025
THE WORKSHOP IS IN THE MIND
According to Lord Buddha, we all have marvelous potential for clarity, contentment and love and the rest of the positive human qualities. In fact, he says, these qualities are our natural state, and that the development of them, for one’s own sake and the sake of others, is the job of a spiritual practitioner.
Our main stumbling blocks are the deeply held assumptions that, first of all, attachment, anger, depression and fear and the rest are innate within us and therefore impossible to eliminate; and, second, that suffering and happiness come from the outside. As long as we believe this, Buddha says, we’ll always remain victims.
During this series of teachings, meditation and discussion, we will investigate Buddha’s model of the mind, learning how to distinguish between the positive and negative emotions and how to eliminate those that break our hearts and to develop those that bring happiness to ourselves and others.
Thursday, February 13, 2025
UNRAVELING OUR EMOTIONS
The Buddhist view is that we’ve all got extraordinary potential to cultivate our minds, our consciousness. It’s not some special gift that only some people have; it’s innate within all of us.
But potential for what? Not something holy, like heaven in the sky, or next life, but potential to lessen fear, depression, anxiety, neediness, low self-esteem and to grow love, contentment, compassion, clarity, courage and the other qualities we so badly want.
The key to accomplishing this is to understand the deeply ingrained instinct of attachment. As Lama Yeshe says, “I could tell you about attachment for one whole year,” but we will never begin to understand it until we go deeply into our own minds, unraveling the complexity of the emotions, seeing them clearly and learning how to harness and transform them, thus becoming effortlessly in charge of our own minds and lives.
Scholarships and financial assistance are available, please email [email protected] with a request.
We gratefully acknowledge those who register as a sponsor. Your support makes financial assistance possible for others.
