A warm welcome to The Dharma of Relationships: The Paramis in Action! Let's learn more about what the course will involve, how it will be taught, and what benefits we can expect from putting it into practice.
| The seven paramis developed in this course | |
|---|---|
| Mindfulness | In this first parami, mindfulness, we're simply bringing more awareness to how we are in the dynamic of relationships. |
| Courage | It takes courage to look at our patterns and conditioning. We can also understand this as a quality of soft effort, of persistence, of interest in what's happening. We keep looking, we keep showing up with curiosity. |
| Generosity | In the parami of generosity, we're bringing in a different attitude: an attitude of open-mindedness and open-heartedness towards our patterning, towards our habits of relating. And this attitude supports us opening in the moment to where we are. It works in tandem with the first parami, mindfulness. |
| Ethics | Ethics involves exploring our foundational principles in relationship. Whatever our guiding principles may be, we act congruently with them. |
| Wisdom | Wisdom means bringing more discernment to where we take ourselves to be in relationship; more curiosity about self: who we take the self to be, who we take the other to be. It means questioning the tendency to put ourselves in boxes or freeze our ideas about ourselves and others. We bring attention to the emotional affect of these views. We build resilience amidst the challenging feelings that relationships can evoke and also appreciate the positive feelings relationships can evoke. Wisdom also includes the capacity to feel our way more fully into consciousness. |
| Patience | To inquire in this way, and to relax deeper into consciousness, we need patience. Patience is the parami that supports us to abide with our experience—a fuller connection with experience. We receive experience more fully into consciousness and listen beyond what we already know. With patience, perhaps we will find a response to a situation that's more closely aligned with what we deeply wish for in our relationships. |
| Skillful means | For the final parami, we will explore skillful means: how do we develop all of these paramis in our lives? What creative, appropriate methods will we discover for bringing them into our lives and the lives of others? |
