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Awakening Awareness through Unconditional Love and Compassion

Residential Program
Dates: Feb 13, 2020 - Feb 16, 2020
Days: Thursday - Sunday
Number of Nights: 3 nights

Instructor(s): John Makransky

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Program Description:
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This program will explore ways of accessing and settling into our innate awakened awareness through practices adapted from Tibetan Buddhism. By participating in an empowering field of loving, spiritual connection, we can become increasingly receptive to the unconditioned openness, wisdom and compassionate energy of our buddha nature. Yet parts of us, often unconsciously, may prevent us from becoming more fully receptive to such qualities of awakening. This is true even for long-time practitioners. To address that, we will focus on ways that the healing powers of our buddha nature can help realign all parts of ourselves with that nature. Then our innate awareness can increasingly manifest of itself, unleashing powers of discernment and creative responsiveness for action, while empowering all other practices of awakening. This program is both for practitioners who identify as Buddhists and for people of all faiths and backgrounds who seek an accessible way to cultivate unconditional powers of love, compassion, and discernment for action. Guided meditations, explanation of key principles, and group discussion will clarify and empower our collective practice.

Learning Intentions:

To enter into a process of awakening that draws from the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism; to find access to the loving and compassionate qualities of our buddha nature (our primordial awareness); draw on those loving qualities to help us reunify with the openness, clarity and energy of our buddha nature; rediscover our relation to others and to the natural world in light of those loving qualities; embrace protective parts of ourselves and our emotions with the same qualities, so they may heal and be incorporated into this process of awakening rather than impeding it.


Noble Silence:
Noble silence will be observed following each evening session through breakfast the following morning.

Experience Level:
Suitable for beginning and experienced practitioners.
    About the Instructor(s):
  • John Makransky, PhD, is a professor of Buddhism and Comparative Theology at Boston College, senior advisor for Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche’s Centre of Buddhist Studies in Nepal, a fellow of the Mind and Life Institute, and developer of the Sustainable Compassion Training model for accessing innate capacities of compassion and awareness. John's scholarly writings have focused on connections between practices of devotion, compassion and non-dual wisdom in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, on adapting Buddhist practices to meet contemporary minds, and on theoretical issues in interfaith learning. In 2000, John was ordained as a Lama, a meditation teacher of innate compassion and wisdom, within the Nyingma Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.  As a meditation teacher, John is known for guiding participants in their discovery of underlying powers of unconditional love and wisdom. For the past twenty-five years, John has taught meditations of innate compassion and wisdom, adapted from Tibetan Buddhism, for modern Buddhists, those in other spiritual traditions, and for people in caring roles and professions.