Training Elements introduced in the Karuna Basic
Mindfulness Awareness
In Karuna Training, we become familiar with our own mind and how it works. Through training in meditation and mindfulness awareness, we discover that compassion is a natural and healthy component of the human mind and learn to recognize and nurture these innate qualities. This is the basis for working with others in a wakeful, compassionate manner. It is also the basis for the healing and transformative processes that are part of the contemplative psychology journey.
Embodiment Training
Embodiment Training and practices teach us how to drop out of the head and into the body—this increases body awareness and cultivates embodied mindfulness. Learning to anchor one's awareness in the body is key to working with thoughts and emotional energies. In Karuna Training, we learn to feel emotions directly in the body first and practice staying with the energy of emotions rather than our thoughts and discursive contents. In this way, we learn to transmute the pain and confusion of emotions into their innate wisdom.
Community Process
Karuna Training takes place in community. In fact, the journey of our own personal transformation is dependent upon our cohort and the personal transformation of all its members. We call this Mutual Recovery—meaning the path works on us through our interactions in our relationships with others. After the training begins, no new participants will join the cohort community after the first online module. This fosters deep trust and intimacy within the cohort. In community, we begin to realize all the relationships in our lives are worthy of love, respect and openness. We see that the quality of our relationships are a reflection of our own minds. These relationships act as a mirror that supports us to discover the diamonds within us.
"I feel appreciation beyond measure for the privilege of having access to the resource that Karuna Training has become."
Candace Peterson-kahn
Compassionate exchange
Compassionate exchange is a mindful encounter that facilitates mutual healing. Exchange is the natural, present-moment capacity to feel another person's feelings. Working with exchange is enhanced through contemplative training and learning to navigate the terrain of our own difficult emotions. Along the way, we become skillful in offering ourselves to others in the aspiration to grow our "bodhicitta", our awakened heart. Compassionate exchange is the act of opening fully and completely to another as a vehicle of basic sanity and compassion. It can occur in a micro-moment or be incorporated into skilled sessions of deep listening and reflection.
Main Training hall at Ari Bhöd
The Five Buddha Families
In Karuna Training we study the tantric mandala of the Five Buddha Families. Mandala is a Sanskrit word that means circle and fringe. It presents a way of viewing the many elements of the world as being interdependent and in continual relationship with one another. The Five Buddha Families offer a tool for understanding and working with the emotional energies that arise in ourselves and others. Each Family relates to a different color, an element (earth, water, fire, air and space), a conflicted emotion and the wisdom potential of transmuted emotional energies. Like the facets of a crystal, the Buddha Families and the elements are working together to comprise the brilliant sanity we naturally possess and experience in the world.
Maitri Space Awareness
Maitri Space Awareness (MSA) is a practice that corresponds to the mandala of the Five Buddha Families and deeply engages the physical, emotional, and invisible energies as a transformational tool. Maitri space awareness helps to reveal the habitual tendencies that obscure our brilliant sanity and intrinsic health by refining our relationship with the world and its energies. MSA broadens our perspective by introducing the magic ingredient of space. Ever-present, both in and around us, relating with space in MSA practice, points us toward the Buddhist concept of nonduality and brings us into the potency of the present moment.
"Karuna gatherings, retreats, and community are a place where I have been able to "try on" more authentic ways of living, loving, and interacting with others."
Amy Kemp
Social Action and Societal Awareness
Karuna Training offers several methods for opening and strengthening our hearts and minds. We mainly apply our methods to social action and society's woes, which include discrimination against race, sexual orientation, disability, and other areas like our implicit biases, where we may not see the more profound implications of our cultural conditioning. Body, Speech, and Mind is a group mindfulness-based practice that deepens our understanding of the patterns that replicate in our relationships, personally and intergenerationally. Speaking from the Heart is another group practice that helps us grow deep listening skills and expand our capacity for profound awareness of ourselves in relationship to others. The Four-Step Practice is a method for investigating, befriending, and transmuting difficult emotions into innate wisdom.
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