This program is part of a eleven-month long Path program.
From a Tibetan Buddhist perspective, our buddha nature is the boundless space of awareness, warmth, and wisdom that is always present beneath our conditioned patterns of thought and reaction. This eleven-month program introduces three modes of practice of Sustainable Compassion Training—receptive, deepening, and inclusive—drawn from Tibetan Buddhism and supported by insights from modern psychology. These practices are designed to help us realign with our innate buddha qualities, making us into a profoundly healing environment for all parts of ourselves and others, from which to hold all in a sustaining power of compassion and wisdom.
To be truly seen in our deep worth and held in unconditional acceptance and love awakens our capacity to see and hold others in the same way. In receptive mode, we open to this field of care, allowing us to experience the love and wisdom that arise naturally from the depth of our awareness. In deepening mode, we let these qualities guide the mind into their source: the vast openness, clarity, and compassionate warmth at the heart of our being. From this depth, we enter inclusive mode, recognizing others in their deep worth and extending those unconditional qualities outward. This process helps dissolve reactive patterns that obscure our natural compassion, allowing love and wisdom to flow more fully and freely into our lives and world.
This Path program includes three residential retreats and monthly online group discussions with John on Zoom. In retreats, teaching sessions led by John will include explanation of key principles, guided meditations, Q and A, and group discussion. Between teaching sessions, noble silence will be maintained. This program is open to practitioners who have already completed at least three sustainable compassion training retreats with John Makransky (whether in-person or online), and who have at least three years of regular contemplative practice. The aim is to support experienced practitioners in learning more continuously to access and embody qualities of awakening throughout their daily life.
Retreat I Description:
In the first retreat, we deepen in the three modes of meditation of sustainable compassion training (SCT). The receptive mode helps us find access to unconditional qualities of love and wisdom from the ground of our experience—our buddha nature. In the deepening mode, we let those unconditional qualities help the mind settle into the source of the qualities—the non-conceptual openness, simplicity, clarity, peace, and compassionate capacity of our buddha nature. In the inclusive mode we come from that depth of being to recognize others in their depth and to include them in those unconditional qualities of openness, love and warmth. This contemplative process also empowers our ability to discern the empty, constructed nature of our perceptions of self and other, a wisdom that frees the mind for further access to its awakening capacities. Throughout this process, we draw on all three modes to make us into an unconditional, deeply healing environment for all parts of ourselves from which to become a more unconditional and healing presence for others.
Retreat II Description:
The three SCT modes of practice that we learned in the first retreat provide a foundation in this second retreat for generating a power of compassion that can embrace all sufferings of ourselves and others in a deeply healing way, without getting overwhelmed by empathic distress or compassion fatigue. We explore meditations for generating empathy and compassion that are designed to generate a healing power of compassion for all parts of ourselves and for all other beings in a sustainable and inclusive way. This is supported by learning how to let unconditional love, compassion, and wisdom increasingly empower each other.
Retreat III Description:
The third retreat provides an opportunity to deepen further together in the practices introduced in the prior two retreats. We explore how the unconditional qualities accessed in the receptive and inclusive modes of practice can help the mind (in deepening mode) settle more fully into the ground of our experience, the buddha nature of non-conceptual openness, clarity, peace and vast capacity. We’ll explore how settling more fully into that deep nature, in turn, can free up its capacities of unconditional love and wisdom to make us more fully into a healing environment for all parts of ourselves and for others. And we’ll explore how all three of these modes of practice provide a secure foundation to generate an increasing energy and attitude of compassion that can embrace all sufferings of self and others with healing powers of openness and warmth. We will also explore how ongoing familiarization with all these practices can inform our lives and ways of being with others in family, work, relationship, and action.
Program Format: In retreats, teaching sessions led by John will include explanation of key principles, guided meditations, silent meditation, Q and A, and large and small group discussion. Between teaching sessions, noble silence will be maintained.
