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, of mindfulness, we're simply bringing more awareness to how we are in the dynamic of relating. |
| Courage | It takes courage to look at our patterns and conditioning. And 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 this parami, of generosity, we're bringing in a different attitude, an attitude of open-mindedness and open-heartedness towards our patterning, to our habits of relating. And that attitude really supports us opening in the moment to where we are, which again is coming back to the first parami, mindfulness. |
| Ethics | I see this parami of ethics as exploring our foundational principles in relationship. Whatever our guiding principles may be, we act congruently with them. |
| Wisdom | Wisdom is 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, and how we can tend to put ourselves in boxes, tend to be a bit fixed about how we see ourselves, how we see the other. Then we bring attention to the emotional affect of those views and how we build resiliency with the challenging feelings that relationships can evoke, and also appreciate the power of 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 it, to receive it more fully into consciousness, and also listen beyond what we already know. With patience, perhaps we will find a deeper response that's more closely aligned with what we deeply wish for in our relationships. |
| Skillful means | In the final parami, we will be exploring skillful means: how do we develop all of these paramis in our lives? What creative, appropriate methods will we discover for bringing their benefit into our lives and the lives of others? |
