Every day is a new day, and a fresh start
9:55 - 10:30
Read The Obstacle is the Way; Finding the Opportunity
1:1 breakout rooms: What traits or tendencies of yours are keeping you from being your best self and better fulfilling your core values?
10:30 - 11:15 The power of mindfulness: Take responsibility for your faults, but don't identify with them. Identify with the awareness by which you're aware of them.
11:15 - 11:30 Break
Read Stillness is the Key; Heal the Inner Child
11:30 - 12 The power of honesty and what defines you is how you respond
12 - 1 Self-Compassion Quiz, discussion, and Loving Kindness Meditation
Worthwhile purpose. To grow as a person.
In this lifestyle, the only problems are our own shortcomings. The only enemy is an undisciplined mind and senses.
This is an important lesson. Please listen and take notes as if you'll need to teach this class yourself when it's done.
The problem with attributing our problems to anything external is that it’s ultimately disempowering. Of course, it's not that there aren't external obstacles. But without those external obstacles, there would be no meaning to acting in alignment with your highest self. The real hero’s journey is conquering oneself. We need to focus on our own tendencies - conditioned, and sometimes unconscious.
The power of confessions:
“The first step is to admit you have a problem.” - AA
The second that you acknowledge the problem, you’re no longer fully under its grips. First of all, you’re noticing it, which requires some distance. Second of all, you’re humbling your ego and inviting accountability.
Individual Journaling: What tendencies of yours are keeping you from being your best self? What would benefit from having accountability for?
Breakout rooms to discuss.
Open group discussion.
Self-Compassion Quiz and group discussion
Guided Meditation: Bring to mind a tendency you have that you're not proud of. Loving Kindness Meditation. Synthesize.
When you can acknowledge your faults or mistakes while simultaneously encouraging yourself, it means you’re bigger than them.
How is that possible? By taking responsibility, but not identifying with your faults or mistakes. This enables you to acknowledge these tendencies in a way where you’re empowered to choose how to respond when they come up. This is possible when you identify yourself as a conscious being.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” - Viktor Frankl
How to expand that space
A person who is not disturbed by the incessant flow of desires – that enter like rivers into the ocean, which is ever being filled but is always still – can alone achieve peace, and not the man who strives to satisfy such desires.
Primary experience, feelings about experience, attitude towards experience, and choice in response.
Ego gets in the way. Trauma responses get in they way. Same approach. Notice it, label it, work on it.
Seeing the opportunity in the Obstacle.
Read Mindful Self-Compassion Program
Perfectionism, comparison, shame, blame, pride
Dharma
Taking ownership of faults and mistakes
3 types of determination