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Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet
What if engaging with our fear surrounding death could help awaken us to the gift of life?
Join the preeminent teachers on mindfulness, compassion, courage, and end-of-life care for a course to help you embrace birth and death in every moment.
Many Western societies encourage us to sweep death under the rug, but what if coming face-to-face with our aversion to death could actually transform us into more resilient, courageous, and compassionate beings for ourselves and for those we love?
Sitting in the truth of what arises in our lives - including grief, fear, and anger - helps us to break apart the quality of our defensive hearts, allowing boundless unconditional love to emerge.
So how can we create a space where the possibility of finding freedom amidst discomfort can arise?
This course features the wisdom teachings of Ram Dass, Roshi Joan Halifax, Frank Ostaseski, Robert Thurman and Krishna Das.
Sample the course below...
What you'll discover during the course...
- Opening ourselves to love and death requires a certain type of surrendering. How can we learn to bear witness to each moment as it arises, rather than fixating and grasping onto life which only causes more suffering?
- How does grief give us an opportunity for our hearts to become more permeable and boundless? How does grief humanize and liberate us?
- What is real enlightenment and how can we bring it into our daily lives?
- How can suffering and grief serve as a catalyst for transformation and liberation on the spiritual path?
- Why is it important for us to find inner peace, happiness and true bliss in order to serve as loving rocks for those who are in need?
- How can we use the truth of suffering to alchemize our capacity for radical inclusivity?
- How can we break out of our bubble of privilege in order to truly serve those in need and to mitigate suffering in the world?
What's included with this course?
- Access to an easy-to-use course dashboard that contains weekly teachings and practices from our wisdom teachers.
- Weekly emails that lead you to audio and video teachings and transcripts for each week's teachings. Each week's content is broken up by topic, making navigation easy and clear.
- Access to a private Facebook community for course participants where you can share your experience and discuss with others, make friends and build community.
- Transcripts of the audio and video sessions from the course in case you'd rather read than listen or watch.
Meet Your Teachers...
Ram Dass was one of the first teachers to bring Bhakti Yoga to the West through his book "Be Here Now". He continues to share his enormous heart with new generations of seekers through his retreats, online workshops, and new books.
Ram Dass now makes his home in Maui and teaches world wide through his website RamDass.org and continues the work of Neem Karoli Baba through the Love Serve Remember Foundation.
Roshi Joan Halifax is a Buddhist teacher, Zen priest, anthropologist, and pioneer in the field of end-of-life care. From 1972-1975, she worked with psychiatrist Stanislav Grof at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center with dying cancer patients.
She has continued to work with dying people and their families, and to teach health care professionals and family caregivers the psycho-social, ethical and spiritual aspects of care of the dying.
Frank Ostaseski is a Buddhist teacher, international lecturer and a leading voice in end-of-life care. In 1987, he co-founded of the Zen Hospice Project, the first Buddhist hospice in America. In 2004, he created the Metta Institute to provide innovative educational programs and professional training that foster compassionate, mindfulness-based care; training healthcare clinicians and caregivers and building a national network of educators, advocates and guides for those facing life-threatening illness.
Robert Thurman is a recognized worldwide authority on religion and spirituality, Asian history, world philosophy, Buddhist science, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He is an eloquent advocate of the relevance of Buddhist ideas to our daily lives. In doing so, he has become a leading voice of the value of reason, peace and compassion.
Raghu Markus has been involved in music and transformational media since the early 1970s when he was program director of CKGM-FM in Montreal. He is currently the Executive Director of the Love Serve Remember Foundation and has been an associate producer for on-line events for Ram Dass and Eckhart Tolle. He now hosts the Mindrolling podcast on Be Here Now network.
Layering traditional kirtan with instantly accessible melodies and modern instrumentation, Krishna Das spent the late ’60’s traveling across the country as a student of Ram Dass, eventually leading him to his guru, Neem Karoli Baba. KD now travels the world sharing his kirtan practice and stories of the Path.
Weekly Course Syllabus
Week 1
Finding Freedom where Fear and Courage Meet
Ram Dass, Roshi Joan Halifax & Frank Ostaseski
Roshi Joan explores her own experience of dropping into the mystery of death, and how she finds the cultivation of compassion helpful in nurturing her own hope and faith as she considers the truth of her own mortality.
Frank shows us that becoming intimate with fear is actually the way we cultivate fearlessness and breed courage of heart – but faith gives rise to the energy we need in order to practice these things.
The group discusses the Buddhist view of emptiness and boundlessness, form and formlessness, illuminated with personal stories from the path of ways that compassion can help us to find freedom from fear.
Week 2
Leaning into Truth: Finding Points of Connection Through Love
Roshi Joan Halifax & Frank Ostaseski
How can we remain open to love while still embracing the reality of impermanence?
The truth is that we have access to an endless supply of love, and it grants us the power to bring peace to every experience, including those that involve illness, death and yes, even suffering.
How can we begin to address the questions like, "Am I loved, and did I love well?" We shouldn't have to wait until we're close to death to face these important topics.
“There's no one way to go through this process. One of the ways that we learn about timelessness is by studying time. One of the ways we learn about the deathless is by studying death”.
Week 3
The Soul Complex: Moving Beyond the Meat Puppet
Robert Thurman, Ram Dass, Krishna Das, Duncan Trussell and Raghu Markus
It’s easy to talk about the ways we can lessen our fear towards death, but when it comes down to it, most of us still have a healthy skepticism about our ability to face the loss of our loved ones.
Robert allays our fear of nothingness, and Ram Dass illuminates the importance of viewing death from the soul perspective.
Duncan shares his fear of losing the physical body of a loved one, and not being able to speak to them anymore, and Ram Dass brings his unique perspective to the table.
Week 4
How Can the Presence of Death Help Us to More Deeply Embrace Life?
Robert Thurman
How is bliss the antithesis of fear, and why is it so critical that we experience it on a recurring basis?
When you think about evaluating how much you have, you’re unhappy. What is the source of your unhappiness? Is it the lack of anything you could possibly want in the moment? No. It is that you are not appreciating everything that is there. You are not seeing the bliss in your fingertips.
Robert dives into bliss, comparison between death and sleep states, and the actual definition of enlightenment that is sure to shift your perspective on death.
What people have to say about our courses...
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