NEW COURSE MARCH 2025 – Shadow work with the 16 Guidelines

This will be a three part series that will help you go deeper into transforming the shadow side of good a good quality. We will explore how fear, anger and other hidden motivations can cause suffering that masks seemingly good intentions.

2025, March 17, 24, 31 – Mondays, 10:00am-12:30pm Eastern Standard Time (Toronto, Canada). Via Zoom.

Session 1: Preparing for transformative work: connecting with a healing space, grounding in compassion and wisdom, acceptance of pain and the root causes of suffering.

Session 2: Approaching and transforming our relationship to the shadow: welcoming the negative aspects into a healing space, encountering resistance, introducing wisdom and compassion, asking for help and letting go.

Session 3: integrating and healing the transformed shadow: welcoming and encountering resistance, applying and integrating new insights and feeling, next steps and embodying transformed shadow.

So often in mindfulness practices, for participants and facilitators alike, deep discomfort and distress can arise. Having a toolkit to encounter stress, pain, trauma, childhood wounds or resistance of any kind is essential. This course will introduce participants to a framework and practices that will help them meet blockages to their highest embodied potential through transformative mindfulness.

The 16 Guidelines are an indigenous set of embodied virtues that originate from Tibet. In their modern iteration they comprise a virtue based framework (for example Respect, Kindness, Patience) that can be universally accessed through our own experiences and inner wisdom. Laid out in 4 wisdom themes of how we Think, Act, Related and Create Meaning, each corresponding 4 guidelines (e.g. Humility, Patience, Contentment, Delight for how we Think) can be used to meet challenges and transform suffering.

With each good quality also comes the potential for a shadow to arise – something that resembles the qualities but is not (semblance), a misuse of the quality (unskillful) that is tainted by unclear motivation or malicious intention, and the opposite of the quality (contra). Each of these shadow aspects has the potential to be transformed through introspection and healed by introducing wisdom and compassion.

Transformative Mindfulness Methods provides the perfect framework to dive into transforming a specific shadow that may arise.

In this workshop, participants will be encouraged to pick a specific quality with which they wish to have a deeper relationship. Over three weeks they will participate in transformative work through visualization, group discussion and didactic instruction.

Pay what you can, suggested at $100 (CAD). Receipts available for psychological services/social work available.

Participants should be familiar with either the 16 Guidelines or Transformative Mindfulness Methods.

Contact craig@essentialchange.net for registration.