Month: May 2015

The Psychology of Loving Awareness with Jack Kornfield

The Psychology of Loving Awareness with Jack Kornfield, PhD
A Two-Day Training in Transforming Difficulty into Ease and Well-Being

Loving awareness, mindfulness, and compassion have enormous power to benefit every human life. These time-tested tools of Eastern psychology are widely supported by modern neuroscience in more than 3,000 studies and research papers from the past 25 years. With The Psychology of Loving Awareness, master teacher Jack Kornfield invites professionals and meditators alike to join him in a retreat-like setting in San Diego, California to discover the transformative practices from Buddhist psychology that are now being applied in therapy, education, medicine, business, law, athletics, the arts, and in the personal lives of millions.

This two-day training will offer the theory and practice of age-old methods for transforming difficulty into ease and well-being. Through guided practices, wisdom teachings, experiential exercises, case studies, healing stories, dialogue, and inner training, Jack Kornfield will provide an immersive demonstration of the most important principles of Buddhist psychology for awakening the heart and mind—offering skills to aid professionals and deepen the practice of meditators, including:

  • Directed healing
  • Inner witnessing
  • Compassion and forgiveness
  • Refining clarity of intention
  • Composure in stressful circumstances
  • Mindfulness towards the body, thoughts, and emotions
  • Fostering resilience, adaptability, and a gracious, wide perspective

When we see the spirit of a leader like Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, or Aung San Suu Kyi, we come to realize what is possible when we meet the world from a place of loving awareness. By cultivating our capacity for balance and attunement, we can experience joyful embodiment of inner liberation, no matter what the outer circumstances.

Join us for two days of powerful practices, heartfelt reminders, clear teachings, personal skill-building, and clinical tools—shared in a warm, retreat-like setting with a loving and open community.

jacksandiego

The invitation of intimacy

If you choose intimate relationship as the crucible for your own awakening and healing, you extend an open invitation to *everything* that is unresolved within you to come to the surface – to show you in excruciating detail those areas of your heart that have been numbed and abandoned, and are now calling for your love, attention, and awareness. There are parts of you that have been crying out for your holding for so many years now; it is your beloved that will reveal these to you.

The beloved, like no other, will take you right into the unknown. She will root out all of your hiding places and reveal your nakedness. She will show you that even those most scary and disturbing parts of yourself are pathways home. This is her gift to you.

It can be helpful to look into each of your relationships to start to see the landscape of the (unconscious) agreements you’ve made with “the other” to avoid the experience of too much exposure, vulnerability, and uncertainty. It is quite natural to unconsciously start to define a “good” relationship or a “great” partner or “my one and only soul mate” as one who doesn’t really question these agreements, and who supports your enacting of the survival mechanisms which arose in your early environment. It doesn’t take much – just a few words or not returning a phone call or a particular glance or some apparent distance or simply seeing how your needs are just not getting met – and you are raw, tender, vulnerable, unprotected, and unsure; the ground has fallen away. The beloved has arrived, bearing gifts from beyond.

The survival-level panic comes rushing in, the anxiety has returned, confusion has filled the space between. Where did the beloved go? Where is the love? Am I safe? I have given so much; will I be met?

This is the opportunity of a lifetime, to metabolize that which the beloved has activated. By entering the unknown with your beloved, by stepping into the groundlessness together, you will meet these orphaned pieces of your own heart. They only want one moment of your holding, your care, and your touch. Be naked, be willing to fall apart, be willing to break open, take the risk that love always demands! Let love take you apart and put you back together again, over and over.

Love is not safe. The beloved’s touch is the end of your world. There is nowhere to hide for you have now come to see that your heart is everywhere! You will always be touched, you will care so deeply, you will remain vulnerable forever to the transformative movement of love. You are left as a transparent vessel through which love can pour out into this universe, reorienting everything it touches; everything that is less-than-whole within is burning away, friends, and the beloved is revealing your translucence.

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