The Compassionate Living Workshop is a hybrid of a contemplative retreat and a training workshop, in which we will explore the core principles and practices of a life of informed and engaged compassion: to understand, to care, and to act. This includes both the inner and outer aspects, providing a broad conceptual overview and deeper topical explorations supported by hands-on practice.
Overview
Program type: Intensive workshop-retreat (residential)
Topic: Designing a life of compassion in action, integrating personal and professional development with a lifestyle of sustainable thriving
Dates: 17 July 2023 (10.00 am) - 29 July 2023 (4.00 pm)
Facilitator: Surya Nimmagadda and other members of the Dharmalaya faculty and community
Language: English (with Hindi translation if requested)
Building a Better World?: Yes, this programme qualifies as a module in the Building a Better World programme and provides two weeks of credit toward certification in that programme.
Description
Twelve-day residential workshop-retreat focused on creating a more compassionate life, through opening the heart, informing the mind, developing our innate qualities of sensitivity and compassion, and putting that compassion into practice by reducing our harm footprint and increasing our help footprint in all spheres of life.
The primary emphasis in this programme is on identifying areas of our lives where we can evolve and grow in order to become more compassionate citizens of the world and more effective agents of positive change. Thus, the main requirement for this workshop is deep self-honesty and willingness to examine our life choices and their positive and negative impacts, to discuss these issues in a group context, and to make commitments to transform ourselves and our lives for the betterment of ourselves and the world.
On a practical level, the workshop will combine explorations of outer practices (such as organic gardening, earthen building, solar cooking, DIY projects etc.) with inner practices (such as mindfulness, deep listening, meditation, and conscious movement, e.g. yoga/chi kung/nature walks).
“I have found that the greatest degree of inner tranquility comes from the development of love and compassion. The more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of well-being. Cultivating a close, warmhearted feeling for others automatically puts the mind at ease. It is the ultimate source of success in life.” — The Dalai Lama
What is this all about?
Are you a person who aspires strongly to live your life with compassion and kindness, to live sustainably in harmony with nature, and to develop your full potential as a catalyst for bringing positive change to the world? If so, this intensive workshop-retreat is designed especially for you.
The Compassionate Living Workshop is a hybrid of a contemplative retreat and a training workshop, in which we will explore the core principles and practices of a life of informed and engaged compassion: to understand, to care, and to act. This includes both the inner and outer aspects, providing a broad conceptual overview and deeper topical explorations supported by hands-on practice.
The inner practices and qualities to be explored include:
Opening the heart: heart-centered awareness, allowing ourselves to feel, living from the heart
Mindfulness: cultivating deeper and steadier awareness of self, others, and our surroundings
Sensitivity: developing balanced sensitivity toward self and others, living more gently
Joy and peace: finding true and lasting joy and inner tranquility
Wisdom: moving beyond our limited conditioned perceptions and learning to see self, others, and the world more as they truly are, and thereby learning to navigate life more skillfully and effectively
Personal development: looking honestly at ourselves to see where we need to grow and evolve, and learning to become the best people we can be — amplifying our virtuous qualities while overcoming our shortcomings and limitations.
On the outer level, topics will include:
Food: how we grow, prepare, and consume our food, and how that affects us and our world
Water: understanding water and watershed issues, and how we can preserve this vital resource
Shelter: exploring different approaches to sustainable housing, and their benefits
Energy: how we can power our lives on our world in more sustainable and compassionate ways
Consumption and waste: examinging our consumption patterns and their consquences, and exploring more sustainable and compassionate alternatives
And important skills and qualities that require successful integration of the inner and outer aspects include:
Communication: Deep listening, healthy debate, giving constructive feedback, and more
Leadership: Developing the qualities that enable us to inspire and empower others
Changemaking: Exploring the most effective ways to effect meangingful and lasting change, starting with ourselves and leading by example (“be the change you wish to see in the world”), collaborating more effectively with others, and identifying the best strategies for impacting society in positive ways.
The overarching goal is to rise above our social conditioning and develop our full potential as compassionately engaged global citizens and changemakers leading the world toward a state of what we call ‘sustainable thriving.’
Workshop-retreat structure
This programme is a workshop-retreat. The “retreat” part means that we’ll be coming together for a focused experience, turning off our phones and devices, and turning on our awareness to the present moment in everything we do. The “workshop” part means we’ll be using hands-on activities as a way to gain deeper understanding of the topics we’re learning about, and also (even more importantly) as a way to strengthen our practice of mindfulness and compassion during our ordinary daily activities, thereby integrating our inner and outer practices. The ideal is that every moment becomes meditation, every act becomes yoga.
After the introductions, orientation, and general overview of the programme, we will begin with a big-picture exploration of the theory and practice of compassionate living, with hands-on sessions during the day and conceptual/philosophical explorations in the evening (including presentations and discussions).
The hands-on sessions will include various projects around the Dharmalaya campus, including organic gardening, work on our earthen structures that are in various stages of construction, and indoor work during the rainy periods. We will provide very basic training in various techniques, and then step back and give everyone time and space to practice them by working alongside our local team. The point of these hands on activities is not so much about learning new skills or getting a job done as it is about paying closer attention to who we are when we’re working, how we engage with our work and with those around us, and how we can approach all of this more compassionately and effectively.
The evening sessions will focus primarily on deepening our understandings of ourselves and our world, particularly with regard to recognizing how we can make more compassionate choices in each of the major spheres of life. Every evening, we’ll reflect on our experiences of the day. Some of the evenings sessions will include presentations on a variety of concepts related to compassionate living, including sustainability issues, food and water issues, earthen building, consumption and waste management, etc. But the main focus will not be on facts, but rather on examining our own choices to understand their harmful or helpful consquences, and identifying ways we can make more compassionate choices in the future. This will require courageous self-honesty — because we have to be willing to recognize the harm we cause before we can change it — and also the willingness to share openly with the group about all of these issues, so that we can find connection, inspiration and support in one another’s journeys.
“The heart is the perfection of the whole organism. The soul’s ability to nourish itself lies in the heart.” — Aristotle
Activities
Specific activities will include the following (depending on weather and circumstances):
Group meditation sessions in the mornings and evenings
Conscious movement (e.g. yoga or chi kung) in the mornings
Lifestyle design and personal development work, including:
Exploring our strengths, weaknesses, and skill sets, with a view to enhancing our capacity to serve as effective agents of change
Explorations of personality, leadership, and conscious communication.
Examining our lives in terms of our overall ‘harm footprint’ and ‘help footprint’
Identifying areas where our lives can be made more sustainable and compassionate, and using the support of the facilitators and the group to find solutions for those areas.
DIY activities and upcycling - such as making planters for young trees, making baskets, making our own soap, etc.
Natural landscaping and organic gardening (weather permitting):
Planting cuttings of bamboo, rose and other deep-rooted flora that help with soil erosion remediation.
Turfing work for landscape remediation.
Weeding, harvesting, pruning.
Some aspects of permaculture design.
Water works: rainwater harvesting systems, water storage, and irrigation
Hands-on education in the neo-traditional earthen architecture of the Himalayas, which might include (depending on weather and the needs on site at the time):
Other natural building materials and methods such as earthbag construction, green roof construction, etc.
Possibly one outing to explore the local village life
A part of the ‘Building a Better World’ series
‘Compassion, Community & Creativity’ is a freestanding programme that also serves as a module in the Building a Better World series, a long-term programme specifically for caring people like you who want to make a positive impact in the world. The long-term modular programme series is designed to empower you as an insightful, sensitive, and effective agent of change, and to help you develop your skills for making inspirations into realities.
Among the many different areas of focus the Building a Better World series syllabus presents, ‘Compassion, Community & Creativity’ will focus specifically on finding joyful ways to embrace our responsibility to conduct ourselves as informed and compassionate local and global citizens.
It takes a certain courage to be a sensitive person in a desensitized world. Fortunately, empowering ourselves with the right tools to understand and embrace the world as it is (including both the beauty and the suffering), and then moving to make it better, can be an endlessly nourishing, expansive and life-affirming process. Through putting compassion into action, finding balance in our sensitivity and committing to action from a grounded, restful place, the path of acceptance and healing, the self and world around us, can become an infinite source of energy, creativity and inspiration for all the good work waiting to be done.
The ‘Compassion, Community and Creativity’ programme will serve as an introduction to some of these tools and topics through self-reflection, discussion, film screenings and presentations. Most importantly, the majority of our time will be spent seeking to embody this sense of global responsibility through putting these ideas into practice.
The BBW series is a joint project of Dharmalaya Institute in India and Earthville Institute in the USA. Participation in the Compassion, Community & Creativity programme qualifies for four months of credit toward certification in that programme. For more information, see the Building a Better World series page.
What to expect
Two of the keys to happiness are: (1) to have realistic expectations to begin with; and (2) not to be too attached to those expectations, but rather to stay flexible as life unfolds. Both of these keys to happiness will be especially useful during this unusual period, when the pandemic often impacts life and work in unexpected ways. So, with that in mind, here are some of the things participants should expect (while remembering to keep a flexible attitude):
Full-time programme focus: This programme is called ‘immersive’ because the point is to be completely focused on the programme. While there will be some time for rest, reading/journaling, and personal reflection, there won’t be much time for pursuing other activities unrelated to the programme. While you’re here, the expectation is that your full attention will be focused on the programme experience from start to finish.
Plenty of physical work: Most of the work to be done is physical, and some of it requires physical endurance, so it’s best to be prepared both physically and psychologically for a lot of hard work. One key to happiness here is to keep a very positive and enthusiastic attitude about the work, knowing that you’re making the world a better place in a small way, which makes it a joy.
Supportive routine: A daily rhythm of contemplative practice, outdoor activities, discussions, and silent meditation time.
Natural simplicity: Rustic accommodations in natural earthen buildings or comfortable tents in a beautiful forest setting.
Yogic lifestyle: Clean and simple ashram-style lifestyle in which everyone contributes to the running of the place, including cleaning, washing dishes, etc.
Healthy food: Natural and mostly organic, purely vegetarian meals (100% plant-based, vegan). No junk food or packaged snacks, etc.
Digital detox: There will be no use of mobile phones or internet from 9-5 or during evening sessions so that everyone stays focused on the group tasks, and present with one another — and with our own experience. For those who are normally glued to your phones, it may take some adjustment at first but soon you’ll be amazed how much better you feel engaging with nature and good work with good people rather than the screen.
Special note for those seeking training in natural building or organic gardening: It’s important to understand that this workshop is not designed primarily for training, but rather for reflection, contemplation, and integration. Though there will be hands-on work almost every day, we approach this work as ‘meditation in action’ and provide support for staying mindful and relaxed while working in a focused and productive way. Accordingly, you will gain a very basic, introductory level of practical training in this workshop, but that isn’t the main goal and should not be your primary motivation. For those who are serious about learning and practicing the techniques of earthen building and/or organic gardening, we recommend attending one of our other workshops that is more specifically focused on skill development (or one of our Volunteer Work Periods), so that you can deepen your understanding and improve your skills by doing real-world, hands-on work here on the Dharmalaya campus. Please specify in your application whether you might be interested in this opportunity.
Note for those looking to stay for longer than the workshop period as a volunteer or intern: Please check out our four-month Compassion, Community & Creativity programme. This workshop also qualifies as a prerequisite for the Internship in Sustainable Project Development programme. Please mention your interest in your application.
Cost
Recognizing that our participants come from diverse backgrounds, we are providing a sliding scale with three tiers, to make it possible for everyone to donate according to their means.
Total fees for the two-week minimum commitment for the program,e (including tuition, shared accommodation, three meals daily, and tea) are as follows:
Standard rate: Rs. 9,000 per week, totaling Rs 18,000 for two weeks. For transparency: This standard rate is essentially a break-even rate, just enough to cover the Institute’s total average monthly costs in providing this service-learning opportunity.
Subsidized rate (for low-income participants who can’t afford the standard rate): Rs. 7,500 per week, totaling Rs 15,000 for two weeks. For transparency: This subsidized rate is approximately 33% below our break-even rate, which means it is not enough to cover the Institute’s costs in providing the service-learning opportunity, but generally that shortfall can be covered by participants who choose to pay the ‘Supporter rate’ below.
Supporter rate (for those who can afford to give more to help subsidize the participation of lower-income participants): Rs 12,000 per week, totaling Rs. 24,000 for two weeks. For transparency: This supporter rate is approximately 33% above the break-even rate, and 100% of that surplus will be used to support lower-income applicants to be able to participate at the subsidized rate. We thank you sincerely for your generosity in choosing this rate if you can.
We do not want cost to be a barrier to a sincere applicant’s participation, so if you have exceptional financial hardship and cannot afford even the lowest subsidized rate, you can contact us to let us know your situation and your needs, and we can discuss work-study discount options (subject to limited availability).
*Explanation of non-refundable prepayments: A participant’s prepaid deposit guarantees that participant’s place in the program (thereby blocking a space that otherwise could be given to another applicant) and allows the Institute to plan accordingly, including purchasing provisions in advance. Prepaid deposits are nonrefundable because the funds received before the program will be spent on food provisions and supplies well before the programme begins.
Application, registration & payment
STEP 1 — APPLY: Submit the application form here on our website and wait for our reply. We may email you to ask follow-up questions if necessary.
STEP 2 — INTERVIEW: If your application is selected for the shortlist, the next step will be for us to schedule a time to do an interview on a video call. During this interview, you’ll have the chance to ask whatever questions may be on your mind, and we’ll have a chance to get to know you a bit better. If necessary, there might be a second video interview for final candidates.
STEP 3 — ACCEPTANCE & DEPOSIT: If you are selected for the programme after your video interview, then at that time we will send you more detailed information about the programme and how to prepare for your time at Dharmalaya Institute. You will then have one week from the date of acceptance to make your nonrefundable deposit to hold your place in the programme. The minimum deposit is 50%, but it is also possible to prepay in full.
If you have any questions after reading all the material here on our website, feel free to contact us and we’ll be happy to address your questions.
We look forward to connecting with you!