Sean McGovern (Choden)
Categories: Cape Town
Mindfulness in Relationships
Tuesday 24 January @ 7pm
Cost: Public R90 Members R70
Relationships are a source of stress and suffering for so many people. Huge amounts of time and energy are invested in them, so it helps to find skilful means to work with our bad habits and patterns of emotional reactivity. Mindfulness can help us get some distance, so we can stand back and see clearly the patterns that rule us and cause us suffering, and it provides an opportunity to view our relationships as vehicles for growth and transformation.
Compassion
Thursday 26 January @ 7pm
Cost: Public R90 Members R70
Compassion is hugely misunderstood and is often seen as being a soft option – becoming a doormat for others to walk over. In fact compassion requires courage and strength to face our minds as they are and to cultivate patterns that serve us. We will look at both the evolutionary and Buddhist models of compassion. In the evolutionary model we will look at the 3 types of emotion regulation – threat, drive and soothing – and see how compassion arises from our soothing system and has the capacity to calm our stresses and regulate our compulsive drives to do things. In this respect it is a source of balance and healing. We will also look at the various Buddhist models of compassion that focus on easing up self-preoccupation, and orienting our lives more to the welfare of others.
Insight Training
Tuesday 31 January @ 7pm
Cost: Public R90 Members R70
Mindfulness training is learning to rest in the moment and see what is going on. Compassion training is based on acceptance, and seeing how non acceptance makes things worse. Compassion softens, broadens and relaxes our internal world. Insight training creates the conditions for recognising what is going on. It exposes the unrecognised forces that hold us in an iron grip. It initiates a journey into our internal environment and introduces us to the magic of the ‘seeing is the doing’. In particular, we learn how we buy into thoughts and emotions without realising it, and how the subliminal part of our mind then says: ‘this is how it must be’.
Compassion Module Two
Sat 28 & Sun 29 January
9am to 4pm
Cost: Public R600 Members R500
Special discount if attending both days (pay upfront) Cost: Public R500 Members R400
On the basis of having cultivated some compassionate capacity we then move on to doing the work of compassion. This is also the point where we move from self compassion towards compassion for others, although in fact we always place self compassion at the heart of our practice because this is what gives us our authenticity and enables us to relate to others with empathy. In this module we focus on the four limitless contemplations and of equanimity, love, compassion and joy. They bring a sense of balance and perspective to our practice of compassion by helping us step outside our narrow preferences, by generating love and friendliness to our inner and outer worlds, by responding appropriately to pain and suffering, while also appreciating the good things in our lives. We will also introduce Tonglen, the practice of taking and sending, that is practice for actively engaging with and transforming the suffering we encounter in our lives.
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