Content: The meditation training in these retreats and workshops is for all who serve others, whether professionally or in home or community—such as teachers, parents, counselors, social workers, therapists, pastors, health-care providers, hospice workers, community organizers, and volunteers. In these workshops, participants are guided into powerful meditations of compassionate connection and wisdom that have been adapted from the natural ease tradition of Tibet in newly accessible ways for people of all backgrounds and faiths.

ABSTRACT: Teachers and others in helping professions or social service are taught the importance of listening with full attention, relating to students and clients in their deep worth, and discerning their hidden strengths.

Family can act as a charged arena within which all such ordinary thoughts and feelings, clinging and suffering can arise. And the family is an intimate matrix for the exchange of self and other, the heart of training. Shantideva, the eighth century father of this practice, wrote: “All the joy in the world comes from the wish for others’ happiness… Whoever wants to protect self and others should practice the great mystery: Exchanging self for others.”

Jonathan (nine years old) reads to us from his favorite comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes. First panel: Young Calvin’s teacher gives him a math problem. Next panel: Calvin stares at the problem, dumbfounded. Final panel: Calvin, dressed in private eye’s hat, looking tough, declares: “It was another baffling case. But then, you don’t hire a private eye for the easy ones.”

A moment of enlightenment is a moment in which we newly notice such “blessings” as having been all around us, and within us, from the beginning. Whenever we are ready to notice, we can sense their healing, liberating energy pouring forth right here, right now.