Caring For Ourselves And The World Enjoying Conscious Wellbeing - by Gunaketu Bjørn Kjønstad

COURSE

Caring For Ourselves And The World Enjoying Conscious Wellbeing

With Gunaketu Bjørn Kjønstad

The intention with this course is to connect with our deeper values to become more conscious of them: express them better in our everyday life; and enjoy the well-being that follows. We call this conscious well-being. This is important for all, and can give strength to activists and people working for a better world. We start by connecting with our own body, mind and heart before I invite you to experiment with how you can make small - or larger changes in your life. We also reflect on the outcome to learn and enjoy. Enjoyment is very important if we are to change over time. We will also reach out to other beings, including the whole Earth. By finding and living more in accordance with our values we can find a deeper well-being. This conscious well-being makes us more resilient in life's ups and downs in general, and our work to make the world a better place in particular. Each lesson will contain an introduction, a led meditation and a suggestion for practice until the next lesson. You can also write questions that I will respond to. In lesson five, I will lead a meditation that focuses on our experience of being cared for and protected. If you have traumatic experiences in this area, I suggest you arrange to have someone to talk to afterwards, either a trusted friend, family member or therapist in case deeper issues should surface or be triggered. In this way the lesson and the course can contribute to important healing. Conscious well-being is a term Anna Trede and I are developing both through www.pustepause.no, www.naturkontakt.no and www.oslobuddhistsenter.no

ConfidenceHappinessResilienceContemporary BuddhismMindfulness MeditationHealth & HappinessSpiritualityMindfulness

Meet your Teacher

Gunaketu Bjørn Kjønstad
Oslo, Norway

Gunaketu Bjørn is one of the main teachers at the Oslo Buddhist centre and the general secretary of the Buddhist Federation of Norway. He started meditating in 1989 and started teaching meditation when he was ordained into the Triratna buddhist order in 1996. He is also a certified mindfulness instructor through the IMTA - International Mindfulness Teacher Association. Gunaketu trained and qualified as a gestalt psychotherapist in 2008, and supervisor of therapists in 2013. He runs a private clinic in Oslo and online through pustepause.no, and coaches coach-students through The Norwegian Gestalt Institute. He also teaches social workers at OsloMet University. He has written a number of articles on mindfulness, gestalt psychotherapy and Buddhism, as well as a novel, in Norwegian, about gestalt therapy and love. Gunaketu is also a part-time activist. In 2019 he organised and led an interreligious climat-pilgrimage in Norway, with Annette Dreyer and Hanna Barth Hake.

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6 Days

40 students

4.7 stars

23 min / day

Confidence

English

Lesson 1

Explore And Enjoy Your Body – You Are Alive!

Lesson 1 gives an overview of the course of conscious well-being. We will then ask "who am I?" A good way to explore this is to notice our habits. Our habits show who we really are - rather than who we like to think that we are. Meditation is a good way to discover our habits: When we sit down without having to do anything, our habits will play out. This is a good starting point for cultivating what benefit us and limit what does not. You will get tips for setting up a practice for noticing your habits through the week - both in meditation and outside. As an experiment you will be invited to reduce input and discover new sources of happiness.

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Lesson 2

A Body With Values - Breath With Your Deeper Values

Lesson 2 helps you explore your deeper values. There are many ways to talk about values and I point to a couple of research that has looked at values globally. I then talk briefly about my perception of the values of caring, fairness, wisdom and freedom, and help you identify some of your key values. We will use a variation of mindfulness with breathing to explore this theme.

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Lesson 3

Connecting With Your Heart And The Heart Of Others

In lesson 3 we explore the heart and our emotions. It is our emotions that run our lives and our habits, and not as most people think - our heads. So what do we feel? And how do we respond to grief and joy or pleasure? Our response to grief and joy will determine how open we are to live in accordance with our deeper values. This in turn will condition how openly and creatively we engage with life. We will end with a version of meditation on loving kindness (metta bhavana).

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Lesson 4

Beyond Mindfulness - Dreaming With Open Eyes

Lesson 4 is about imagining how you could live more in accordance with your values, and finding ways to do that. With a growing awareness of our habits, feelings and how we live our lives, there will also emerge impulses to change. This may start as private dreams of what we could do, and sometimes we start talking about it. This is usually met with objections, either from ourselves or those around us. Rather than listen to or brush the objections aside, I invite you to match them with your deeper values and see if you want to listen to them - or not. Then you start living in accordance with your deeper values. We will explore this with a guided contemplative meditation. I then invite you to experiment with this in your everyday life until the next lesson. Good luck ;-)

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Lesson 5

Hello Sentient Beings… Hello Gaia

Lesson 5 broadens out the horizon to connect with all living beings so we can relate to them based on our values. You may already have experimented with contacting another human and noticed how that went. Now I invite you to connect with other living beings – potentially the whole earth, or Gaia as it is sometimes called. We will look at how we can feel held and protected, and how we can hold and protect others. We will do this with a variation of the meditation on loving kindness (metta bhavana) which includes touching the earth and being touched by the earth. This can be a strong practice triggering deep sorrows, or traumatic experiences. If you are aware of such traumas or are in active therapy, you might want to talk about this with a therapist before the lesson. If something comes up during the meditation, you might want to stop half-way to give your whole being plenty of time to digest and integrate this new learning. You can come back and complete the lesson later. I then also recommend speaking to a friend or therapist about what you experience. If you have no one to turn to send me a message.

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Lesson 6

Manifesting And Enjoying Our Deeper Values

In lesson 6 we will look at how we can manifest what we have explored in this course - and enjoy it! One way to do this is to look to our heroines and heroes, and learn from and be inspired by them. If you don't know of any - find one or several heroes or heroines! This can be real people or fantasy figures. It can also be abstract symbols or sounds. To live in accordance with our values the values must find expressions. If we make a beautiful little 'alter' or 'shrine' with a symbol of our value(s) on it, it can serve as a reminder and inspiration. If we keep this 'alive' by adding to it, changing it, beautifying it, it will nourish our desire to manifest this in our life. If we then make small changes to express these values in our daily life, and sit down in front of our 'alter' to reflect on and enjoy the effects of this, we are creating a positive spiral in our life that will bring us deeper and deeper into what we value and how we want to live our lives. This is a deeply satisfying process and what Anna and I call 'conscious well-being'. We will explore this with an open imaginative meditation. If you have questions about how to do this, don't hesitate to ask questions or get in touch. Good luck ;-)

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