Course Resources
Updates on the Course
- Learn more about the newest version of the EcoSattva Training, available now.
- Materials for all eight sessions are available now.
- Thanks to the generosity of Intersein Stiftung (Interbeing Foundation), German subtitles are now available for all core videos in this version of the training.
Resources for Your Journey
As you move through training, we invite you to explore ways of working with the materials that are nourishing and effective for you (and your group, if you belong to one). If you are looking for guidance, our Resources for Your Journey page provides:
- Two guided meditation videos specifically for participants in the training, courtesy of Catherine McGee
- Detailed instructions on inquiry practice created by Adam Lobel
- Shared agreements and a sample meeting format for groups
- Container practices to open and close your exploration of each session
Session Template
Each session includes the following components:
- Opening ritual
- Welcome from Kristin Barker or Lou Leonard
- Core Dharma offerings: video teachings from the session leader(s)
- Contemplations, inquiries, and other practices to help you internalize the teachings with body, mind, and heart.
- Resources for groups and individuals to make the most of the materials.
- Supplemental articles, videos, and Dharma sources relating to the content of the Session.
- Closing ritual
Session Resources
Available Now
- with Kaira Jewel Lingo
In this opening session, groups will be gathering and all participants will be keen to know what they’ve signed up for. We’ll begin by gathering and reflecting on our global situation and the changes that are rapidly underway. We’ll map out the journey, ensure satchels are packed, and facilitate connections among travelers. In particular, we’ll be seeding psychological safety, essential to risk-taking, inside the course framework and among group members.
- with Thanissara
In this second session, we will especially make space for difficult emotions, especially fear, grief, and rage. We can investigate the narratives that support these emotions and how they might be loosened, meeting our habitual defensive responses not only with kindness but with clarity, courage, and determination. This is an ambitious journey, one that requires not only safety and compassion, but also a certain boldness. We are challenging massive forces and patterns; Mara doesn’t go down easy (and gets back up). So we can also purposefully discover and nourish our wholesome ambition.
- with Sensei Kritee Kanko
Our ultimate goal is transformation at depth but we can’t get there unless we recognize ourselves with compassion. We need to understand how it is we found ourselves in this astonishing situation. In a process that involves not just mind, but heart and body, we are looking back, remembering both for ourselves and our people the causes and conditions that led us here. With great care and attention, we begin to untangle the tangle.
- with Noliwe Alexander and Pennie Opal Plant
Having opened up internally and individually, we rise to the collective and historical, understanding how objectification accumulates over time in the form of dominant institutions, how delusion is codified and how domination spreads that delusion. Participants are invited to explore, with compassionate accountability, how the dominant cultural body conquers, colonizes, and exploits not only Earth and other peoples but its own members. This is where we let it all in, the full catastrophe.
- with Lama Willa Blythe Baker
To be thoroughly aware of the dramatic changes underway and to set ourselves up to be authentically helpful is to learn to stay with profound uncertainty, to metabolize a mind-boggling and heart-breaking situation to the point of compassionate clarity. This session takes on that spiritual task. Here at the apex of our journey, we will support practitioners as much as their system will allow, an opening of view, heart, and identification. Earth, as each of us, is moving into radical change and can do so with as much wakefulness is available to us. With mind, heart, and the sense of who I am more open than ever before, we can learn to stay and be with, attending to the wordless and unfamiliar. Participants will be supported to listen at depth. We can begin to listen to sense what wants to emerge.
- with Adam Lobel
Continuing in the relational spiritual task, attunement with the unknown, we’ll open further to so much more than the conventional holding of that truth. We’ll welcome whatever arises, from nothing to mystical everything.
- with Yanai Postelnik
Equipped with a deeply rooted sense of our belonging and calling, we turn outward. In earlier sessions, we opened up some of the habitual but limited ways that we engage with others around social transformation. Now we’ll look at what does work supported by research and our own honed wisdom. We’ll clarify in particular our agency in relationships (implicit and explicit) and groups (social norming) as well as what sabotages that agency.
- with Myokei Caine-Barrett
In the closing session, we’ll how the process of letting go, going deep and reforming ourselves can become a regular part of our practice. We’ll also look at how we can create sacred and nourishing spaces in our Sanghas that support authentic investigation and diverse forms of engagement. We might take our own EcoSattva Vows together and discover how connections we’ve made here can go forward.
Course Survey
If you have finished the EcoSattva Training, or if you have gone as far as you plan to go, we would deeply appreciate your feedback on the course. Please complete our brief, five- to fifteen-minute survey about your experience.
Questions?
We have answers … or at least we’ll try! Be sure to check out our Frequently Asked Questions and if you can’t find what you’re looking for there, send an email to . We’ll do our best to get back to you quickly.
One Response
A little earlier today I provided some feedback about the training. The one about open hand, candle on a boat, blah blah. I wanted to mention a highlight, which is the guided mediations with Catherine McGee. I’ve never encountered meditations like that so actively use the imagination, and I’ve never seen a meditator spontaneously experience so much feeling and joy. My actual experiences meditating with others are few and far between, and I don’t think my nature inclines me toward the same experiences she has. And I definitely don’t want to try to force myself to feel that way. But it really opened my mind and helped me meditate with a lighter mind.
Also, I hope my earlier message doesn’t cause any concern with the design of the training. Each of us realizes the dharma in our own ways, and it’s impossible to design something that’s perfect for everybody. It’s not a problem that I’m struggling my way through it. That’s OK too.