Contemplative Studies Program Blog
We all agreed in the workshop that we are living in a time where there is tremendous polarization and a tremendous upsurge of negative emotion.
People's hostilities are on a scale unprecedented. I don't spend a lot of time on Facebook, but all you have to say is one word and people are ready to...
The cosmos and the psyche mirror each other, as above, so below, thus humankind has long looked to the stars for greater meaning and clearer direction on our collective journey of awakening.
2020 saw the great conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter that spelled the dissolution of old structures,...
My dear friends,
As the new year dawns I offer my reflections on this year we will never forget.
Despite challenges unseen in a hundred years we remained steadfast together on the gradual path and never faltered a single step. We made no excuses. Wasted no time. We forged ahead in the face...
I'm calling this 'Juice Press'. You haven't heard me say this yet but this is where it fits...
Take an orange in the juice press. You lay it up in the capsule. You lay a theme up on the 'squeezer'. Your theme will be the preciousness of human life.
How many of you are musically inclined? You have...
Think about the worldly refuges first. The worldly things that we take as our refuge, as our sources of comfort, our sources of guidance.
The iPhone... food... the doctor... Netflix... friends and family... fishing... leisure activities...
How well a source are they for the ultimate or...
One of Tsongkhapa's big critiques is that you cannot arrive at enlightenment without a good start. Don't throw out your conceptual knowledge. Don't throw out your ability to reason your way to enlightenment.
Go back for a second to the image of meditation in our culture. What does it look like?...
The four features of trauma are rubrics to help you frame your own personal experience. If you start thinking about them very deeply, they will also lend themselves to antidotes or remedies. If you know these four features you also know what the antidotes are, the remedies. The hallmarks of...
The spiritual seeker sees our oneness with all and interconnectivity but it's only the true student of the mind that understands that if we're all one, we're also one with the ugly bits. Dr. Miles Neale explains in this clip from Return with Elixir.
We said that for each of the preliminary...
The Hero needs to a find a mentor but they also need to know when to leave the mentor. In this clip from Return with Elixir, using the example of Jung's departure from Freud, Dr. Miles Neale discuss what that might look like.
This class is on the Departure. This dream I raise because it is a...
In this excerpt from Return with Elixir, Dr. Miles Neale introduces Joseph Cambell's monomyth, how it can be applied in our own lives and what to expect from the course.
It became clear that another level was necessary the progression to rise above the personal and enter the transpersonal...
When we add this visualization system to the hero's roadmap that we'll unpack in the course, the two coming together is articulating the roadmap of your own development. You have to remember wherever you are right now, as an ordinary person, you and I, we both feel very stuck. To really get the...
