Beyond The Suffering Self

One can practice meditation or yoga daily, take the right supplements, and exercise regularly, yet still suffer deeply. Even with relatively stable life circumstances, one might return again and again to a core-level dissatisfaction. Despite sincere efforts, patterns of unease repeat. The problem is that most suffering inevitably comes down to one, often-overlooked factor: how one defines the self. Join teacher Jared Featherstone for a 6-day course that will investigate the suffering caused by a narrow, limited view of the self and the liberation possible when one is able to experience an expanded, interconnected self. The course is designed to facilitate both a conceptual understanding and the direct experience of a spacious self through the following means: Vipassana (open awareness meditation), metta (loving-kindness meditation), dharma talks/discussion, and meditative self-inquiry. Day One: Sources of the Separate Self • Why do we have such a strong feeling of being separate? Where does this come from? • Darwinism, capitalism, consumerism, dualism, and other stories • Effects of internal rhetoric/inner speech Day Two: Implications of the Separate Self • What results from this assumption of separation? • Competition, fear, and the lack of compassion • Invisible ecologies at work • Emphasis on winning Day Three: Sources of the Unified Self • What is the basis of a unified, interdependent self? • Buddhism, Taoism, Vedanta, mystical traditions • ecology and quantum mechanics Day Four: Implications of the Unified Self • What happens if we accept interconnection, relationship, and wholeness as our baseline instead of disconnection, competition, and fragmentation? • Work, family, personal goals, purpose • Transformations of suffering Day Five: Decentralizing of Awareness and Care • Where are the lines drawn? How can we remove the boundaries to compassion? • Practices of expansion, inclusion, and nonjudgment • Opening and reopening of the heart • Mudita: the art of sympathetic joy Day Six: The Oceanic Self in daily life • How can we live from this unified place if our outer lives are based in separation? • The two truths: relative and absolute • Transforming work, family, goals • Shifting out of resistance and non-acceptance • Accepting the changing states of consciousness