Now available as a 3 CD set.
Finding Freedom through Seeing How We Get Hooked
We all know what it’s like to be triggered—to have said something we wish we hadn’t, or reacted in a way that wasn’t helpful. What if there was a way to interrupt our knee-jerk responses and make a different choice? These are the Tibetan teachings of shenpa, as taught by bestselling author and American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön.
In the Getting Unstuck six-session online course, Pema shares the liberating wisdom of an approach that she uses in her personal daily practice, along with tools for putting it to work in our own lives. Join her for six hours of video teachings and two Q&A sessions recorded live. This complete learning experience includes weekly practice tips, reflection questions, and guided meditations for learning how to recognize the moment-by-moment choice points in our lives.
Highlights
- Shenpa, an ineffable Tibetan term that attempts to describe the quality of getting hooked, and a practice for getting unhooked
- The Three Difficult Practices, and Pema’s expert guidance on how to use them for positive transformation in your life
- Ways to unravel patterns of self-denigration
- How to cultivate acceptance of your irritability, insecurities, and other “less noble” human traits
- The power of pause, a simple practice that makes a big difference in our daily lives
- How staying with discomfort can help us uncover our innate wisdom and confidence
- The dynamic, fluid nature of groundlessness and how it can help transform your habits, addictions, and behaviors
- Guided contemplative practices for cultivating the awareness of shenpa in everyday life
Sessions
Session One: Positive Groundlessness and the Three Difficult Practices
The road to personal transformation isn’t always easy. Pema refers to this approach of getting unstuck as The Three Difficult Practices. Opening our first session together with her warm and engaging style, Pema helps us see how we can use these practices in our daily lives for better flow and acceptance. We begin by reviewing the first step of noticing how we get hooked, followed by the second step of choosing a fresh alternative. To help us interrupt the momentum of these moments that keep our suffering alive—a courageous and challenging task for anyone—Pema shares her personal story and a guided meditation. Finally, we’ll explore the last step of making this exploration a way of life.
Highlights
- Positive groundlessness and how it’s critical to the process of getting unstuck
- How to relax into uncertainty
- Delighting—rather than despairing—in discovering where we are hooked
- How we “feed” our habit of resentment and anger
- The value of sitting meditation in helping us get unstuck
- A mindful-awareness practice for helping us understand and realize these teachings at the deepest level
Session Two: Shenpa and the Power of the Pause
What’s your preferred “hooking style” and method of dealing with discomfort? In this session, we’ll delve deeper into the first of The Three Difficult Practices in order to help answer this question and explore our patterns of habituation. Pema will explore the meaning of the Tibetan term shenpa, which refers to the quality of being hooked or caught, and then illustrates shenpa with a classic story of what getting hooked looks like. We’ll discuss how this chain reaction of events works, and how the power of the pause can help us.
Highlights
- Physical, mental, or emotional signs to recognize when you’ve been triggered
- How shenpa is like poison ivy—and how our first instinct often makes matters worse
- Ego clinging and how it affects our ability to be present
- How to let go of a story line and stay with the underlying energy
- The war of the itch—to do it or not—and how meditation helps us access a peaceful inner space
Session Three: Sowing the Seeds of Freedom
When we act in ways that are habitual and derived from following our desire for comfort and security, we create the potential for future suffering and confusion. Instead, we can act in new ways that arise from our own fundamental intelligence. This ultimately helps us create the potential for future happiness, love, and joy. In this session, we continue our process of getting unstuck by discussing how we can do something different and sow the seeds of freedom.
Highlights
- How sitting in the fire of your direct experience can help burn up old karmic seeds and cultivate new ones
- The courageous act of not doing
- Finding your unique wisdom by staying with what is
- How groundlessness can actually help support our transformation
Session Four: Being Kind to Yourself
In this session, we’ll begin discussing some of the keys tools that can assist you on this journey of transforming your relationship with your mind. In particular, we’ll explore the value of loving-kindness, or maitri, and how it helps lighten the process of getting unstuck. We’ll also discuss how cultivating full attention, gentleness, and honesty can help us on the path to liberation.
Highlights
- How to become aware of the underlying energy of a feeling
- Noticing a hook as neither good or bad
- Letting the reality of a situation soften your heart
Session Five: The Practice of Meditation and Its Relevance to Shenpa
As we go deeper into shenpa, our minds can develop innovative ways to keep us stuck. Drawing on her years of practice, Pema offers guidance and tools for navigating these situations. With a special focus on meditation, we can learn how this practice bring us back to the present—a vital aspect of working with shenpa.
Highlights
- How breathing through the heart can help us choose something different
- Thoughts in meditation as the most subtle form of shenpa, and how to unhook from them
- Tips for reconnecting to our direct experience and coming back to the present
Session Six: Choosing a Fresh Alternative
We’ve learned how to notice when we get hooked and the ways that we try to deal with our discomfort. But what does it really mean to pause and choose “something different”? In this session, we uncover more complex layers of the act of choosing a fresh alternative so that we can learn how to make our exploration of shenpa a way of life.
Highlights
- Exploring your unique flavor and moods of being hooked
- The most common ways we repress our experiences
- Being curious about what being hooked feels like
- How to weed out the seeds of resistance
- Guidance for continuously moving toward an experience rather than away from it
