Hosted by Tibet House US
Saturdays, September 10 through October 15; 11am-1pm ET
“We need a sense of universal responsibility as our central motivation to rebalance our relations with the environment and with our neighbours.”
His Holiness the Dalai Lama
Contemplative traditions of the world provide us with ample resources for dealing with the global ecological crisis, both on the personal and on the inter-personal level. However, those resources need to be actively explored from our side, and for that we need to actively ask ourselves some of the key questions at hand. How do we maintain inner equilibrium when the news seem overwhelming? How do we make ethical choices about our private lives and our participation in local and global politics? How do we connect with nature and indigenous cultures that protect it, all without bringing harm?
This 6-part course with Lobsang Tenpa will be centered around the metaphor of breathing in and breathing out: sustaining our inner balance and then using it to protect the natural world. For “breathing in”, we will explore nature-centered Buddhist practices that can contribute to greater levels of inner balance, compassion and wisdom; for “breathing out”, will explore various ways of engaging with the environmental and social dimensions of our reality in a way that can contribute to the world’s healing.
Most practices used in the course would come from the Tibetan Buddhist contemplative tradition, with some additional methods drawn from Pali texts and modern psychological research.