Five Wisdoms Institute

Have you been longing to make a radical change in you life? Give a powerful boost to your current work or change careers? Wisdoms@Work can do just that. We engage in a variety of ways to bring out the best of who you are.

Benefits

• Having a deeper understanding of yourself and others
• Being mindful in everything you think, feel, say, and do
• Awareness of where you shine and where you get stuck
• Tools for empowering yourself and embracing who you are with loving kindness
• Working with where you get stuck, the places that scare you
• Understanding the dynamics in your relationships
• Practicing verbal and nonverbal engagement to enhance effective communication
• Bringing compassionate understanding into all aspects of your life
• Ability to sense the dynamics of a situation and act accordingly
• Tuning in to a subtle energy dynamics that is the heartbeat of our world
• Engaging with a group of people interested in putting their wisdom to work

Modalities

• Mentoring and Experiential Learning sessions with Irini Rockwell on Zoom
• Recorded talks accessed through Dropbox
• Wisdoms@Work Infographics and text sent by email
• Peer-led Reflection Circles
• Individual coaching sessions with Irini
• Everyday life practice, study and activity, at least 3 to 4 hours per week
• Having a practice buddy to support your practice

Technology

You will need access to Zoom (through a link from Irini), Dropbox, and PayPal.

Training Materials

We will send you:

• Wise Eyes (colored glasses)
• Photos of the Five Wisdoms postures and Instructions
• Wisdoms@Work Infographics
• Dropbox Talks access link
• Reflection Circles Guidelines
• Coaching Guidelines

You need to provide:

• A computer with a camera and preferably a headset
• The Five Wisdom Energies and Natural Brilliance by Irini Rockwell
• Art materials: art paper and oil based pastel colors

Module 1:
To Know Yourself
Discovering the Energetic Dynamics of Your Personality

“We all have our own style and our own particular nature. We can’t avoid it. The enlightened expression of yourself is in accord with your inherent nature.” — Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Discovering your unique way of perceiving and interacting with the world yields enormous insight into how you color what you think, feel, say and do. Your personality has the potential for five energies—simple presence, clarity, richness, passion, and activity. Through Five Wisdom posture practice you become familiar with your personal mix of energies: where you struggle as well as your unique style of brilliance, intelligence, and effectiveness. By developing a sense of self-acceptance and compassion toward yourself, you uncover your strengths, reduce stress, and move towards energetic balance, personal integration, and embodied wisdom. You learn how, moment-to-moment, to align with the best of who you are, an authentic person full of confidence and potential.

We will work with the Five Wisdom postures devised by Trungpa Rinpoche and sourced in tantra to activate our subtle energetic body, which invoke the five patterns of energy of our inherent nature. Meditation, personal process work, creative expression, talks, discussion, and community all come together to guide us into embodied transformation.

Module 2:
Understanding Your Emotional Life
Discovering Natural Brilliance in the Darkness of Your Confusion

Discover how your deeply rooted confusing emotions can be transformed into your natural brilliance: clarity, warmth, insight, and effectiveness! The Five Wisdom energies are key to emotional transformation. They reveal the profundity of Buddhist psychology and the transformative power of tantra: when you are most emotionally intensified, your wisdom is close at hand. Your constricting emotions—in patterns of aggression, grasping, ignoring, pride, and jealousy—can be transformed into awakened insight. When you embrace your energy with unconditional positive regard, the apex of your struggle is the apex of your brilliance. Over time, you learn to align with your wisdom rather than getting caught in your constricting confusion.
We will engage in personal and group process and experiential learning including meditation, posture practice, experiential exercises, and have talks and discussion.

Module 3:
The Dynamics of Relationships
Engaging in the Challenge and the Opportunity

Have you noticed that mystery underlies all your relationships? Why they are both predictable and surprising? Why you feel awkward or comfortable, tense or friendly, aggressive or engaged with different people? Why with some you become confused and with others awakened?

The teachings on the Five Wisdoms have great insight into human dynamics, giving you a language to work with others which recognizes five types of intelligence with infinite variations and combinations. You learn to read the energetic dynamics of people, places, and situations. First, you need to know yourself, where you shine and where you get stuck. Then, you can discover the dynamics of how you interact with others. This brings about deeper self-awareness and more authentic communication. Moments in your relationships—with romantic partners, family members, and coworkers—become opportunities to align with your inherent sanity, rather than perpetuate your mutual confusion and conflict. Instill a motivation to have more conscious and genuine relationships!

We will do meditation, posture practice, and a profoundly transformative interactive practice to cultivate unbiased perception and heart-felt resonance in relationships. We are able to see and feel another in both their confusion and intelligence. The practice of tonglen, compassionate exchange, is introduced.

Module 4:
Contemplative Approaches in Working with Others
Establishing Core Practices

This module begins the training in being of service to others. It includes teachings on Buddhist dharma as a path to awakening and a deepening understanding of mindfulness and awareness meditation. This prepares you to guide another person’s meditation by giving accurate and practical instruction. Instruction in coaching combines teaching, training, and supervision. You cultivate the heart opening practices of loving kindness and compassion and the skillful means of the Five Wisdoms tantra. You train in supporting another in achieving a specific personal or professional result or goal.

Module 5:
Engaging Effectively
Honing Your Interactive Skills

In this module you train in experiential learning modalities. These include clarifying your intention in working with others, the six transcendent actions, tools for skillful communication, working with negativity and conflict facilitation, creating change, and measuring success. Participants commence work on a Fieldwork Project.

Module 6:
The Call to Action
Manifesting the Five Wisdoms Mandala

In understanding the mandala principle you see from an energetic perspective: there is a predictable dynamic between energies: an energetic matrix. What happens happens. It’s just energy, sometimes constricted, sometimes flowing. This is the profundity and ultimate skillful means of the Five Wisdoms. To show your understanding, you prepare and present talks on the basic principles of the Five Wisdoms using View, Practice, Experience and Result (VPER), present descriptions on each of the Five Wisdoms, facilitate sharing circles and experiential learning, and respond to questions. Fieldwork Project are presented.

Training Objectives

• Verbally articulate basic principles of Five Wisdoms teachings and practice
• Describe each of the Five Wisdoms in a 10-15 minute talk
• Provide practice instruction in mindfulness and awareness
• Demonstrate and provide practice instruction in the Five Wisdoms yoga postures
• Create energy exploration for each energy
• Design experiential learning exercises
• Facilitate sharing circles and respond to questions
• Coach people in individual interviews
• Use multimedia: music, visual art, photos, PowerPoint, film, games