Praise for Irini and the Five Wisdoms
With so many people now experiencing trauma, both psychological and physical, who better to rely on than the great Vidyadhara Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, whose teachings remind us so clearly of our basic sanity? His wisdom lineage is alive and well in his students - but their challenge now is to bring direct experience of this wisdom to younger people. Irini Rockwell is doing just that: showing us how the Vidyadhara’s incredibly creative teachings on the Five Wisdoms can be directly applied.
Irini Rockwell’s book, Unfolding the Mystery of Your Life on the Five Wisdoms Path, is a valuable contribution to the field of personal development and spiritual growth. As a student of the great master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Irini received his teachings of Tantra directly, and has taught these practices and techniques for many years. The book offers readers a powerful tool for self-discovery, helping them identify their Buddha type and distinguish between neurotic tendencies and innate wisdom. This comprehensive guide, born from years of invaluable experience, has the potential to become a significant resource for those seeking healing, restoration, and a deeper connection with their innate Five Wisdoms, fulfilling its destiny as a source of great benefit to many.
— Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, Mangala Shri Bhuti
This rich and important book , Unfolding the Mystery of Your Life on the Five Wisdoms Path, offers a remarkable map of the human mind and heart and explores patterns of relationality that influence our lives.
— Roshi Joan Halifax, Abbot, Upaya Zen Center
Irini Rockwell has made a great compassionate gesture to digest and present one of the greatest wisdom fruits of Tibetan Buddhism—the teachings on the Five Wisdom Energies—in a way that is accessible, meaningful, and workable. She rightly refers to it as ‘a human path.’ She has made a great contribution to bring these higher teachings down to earth and into the hearts of people.
In an act of sustained devotion, Irini Rockwell has preserved and elucidated Chögyam Trungpa’s teaching of the Five Wisdom Energies, making them accessible and pertinent to anyone doing spiritual practice today.
Irini Rockwell offers a beautiful and powerful vehicle to navigate the complex subtle energies of our lives. Her insights serve as luminous guideposts that invite us into a more engaged relationship with each moment, within and without.
Irini has done an amazing thing. She has taken the pith of the wisdom teachings of Tibetan Buddhism, called the Five Wisdoms, and placed them in an accessible format for immediate application in one’s own life in the modern world.
Irini Rockwell is a brilliant mentor in human dynamics, and a trusted personal and professional development coach. In her lifelong work, and in her two books on the Five Wisdoms personality system, Irini shows us how to engage with the people around us in ways that transform ordinary workplace stresses, conflicts, self-doubts, and communication failures into opportunities for insight and growth. She shines a light on the often hidden dynamics that drive personality conflicts, and helps us to regain trust, insight, and passion in our life and work.
Irini has done a fantastic job translating these profound Buddhist teachings into practical applications for everyday life…[she] points us to our innate authenticity where we can learn to wake up to life’s colorful display, dance with our ever-changing circumstances and open to the richness of being human.
Thank you so much for the Five Wisdoms work. It is completely transformational. I seem to get the challenge I need right when I am ready for it and then this work gives me the tools to really dismantle conditioned response. I love it!! I learn so much from your non-defensiveness and transparency. The way you handled the energy today was masterful. I learned SOOOOO much about just working with what’s right here/there. I’m so very appreciative of this work, and of YOU!
My life-long desire has always been to discover what is deep inside me. Irini’s coaching sessions—based on the Five Wisdom Energies and including very practical exercises—have been an invaluable help for my journey. She helps me to find answers to questions like Who am I? How am I at work? How am I in my family? I find that what I most need is openness and curiosity. The energies provide a system for that to happen.
This work enables me to see new aspects of other people as well as working with loving kindness, compassion and nowness. I sense more and more that what I do is an expression of who I am. I cannot rely anymore on tricks and techniques.
I feel so alive, vibrant, open, aware. I see, feel, and hear myself, and others, flowing in and out of wisdom and stuckness. My sense organs are wide open and I connect with myself and with other people to see what I need and what they need, by way of energetic exchange and unbiased perception. Aligning myself with myself and with others. The play of energy in full bloom.
The presentation of the Five Wisdoms is clearly the fruit of years of working with people. Recognizing these wisdoms in our lives, including their possible shadow aspects, yields both the recognition of who we are and the potential to let go of unhelpful behavioral patterns.
This work is a vehicle for building something more profound in education, a fundamental approach. Learning is only possible in an open and free, ‘here and now’ environment.
The paradigm of integrative education through Five Wisdoms is powerful and effective. It helps ground the education process in a meditative model that brings out the whole person. The Five Wisdoms encourage us to see that meditative intelligence is not an ‘add on’ to the education process, but its very core.
In the two retreats Ms. Rockwell led for us, we learned a great deal about our organization’s group dynamics. The insights gained gave us more understanding of how we structure work for a key team member and how she communicates with our colleagues. These retreats were a key reason why she stayed with the firm. That alone has made the training exceptionally valuable.
It’s very, very valuable what you are doing…business is about relationships-it’s a very difficult thing to remember.
The Five Energies work creates a practical approach to optimizing workplace relationships.
My intelligence has never been so acknowledged and utilized in a work situation… I truly believe you are making the world a better place by teaching this model.
The program material continues to reveal itself to me… it directly relates to my interest in conflict resolution.
Irini Rockwell’s coaching provided me the wise guidance and gentleness I needed to sift through my intentions, explore options, and clarify my personal goals. She brings a depth of experience to her coaching that allowed the process to unfold organically.
At any given time in my never-a-dull-moment life, I can–and frequently do–dip into my Five Wisdoms treasure trove for insight, inspiration and support. My intensive two years studying with Irini and the others in my group was salted with ‘aha!’ and ‘ah, so…’ psychophysical experiences… I utilize my vocabulary of the colors to identify and capitalize on talents I see in myself and those around me and also recognize and respect confusion.
The Five Wisdoms training has helped me learn how to be the best I can be so that I can better be of service.
I have so much more energy: for my patients, my kids, everything.
I feel a deep gratitude for our work together, touching deeply into learning and exploring my own experience and looking into the Five Wisdoms: the buttons that push me to my core (where I ‘’grind my teeth’’), my habitual patterns/propensities so I can understand my actions/reactions and causes/effects, to help me liberate myself.
Heart-wrenching, heartfelt, heartwarming to be gently drawn through the eye of the needle so to speak. To be able to feel, in a safe space, the inner lightening storm and cold rain of events in a relationship that weren’t what I had hoped brought a storm of tears and scrunched up face that I totally did not expect. To then look at my reaction as something common to me and identifiable as a familiar repeated energy did allow a transmutation as Irini described it. Now feel like the earth after a good rain, ready to do some growing. Thanks again Irini!
Irini Rockwell’s teachings also spoke to me in a very powerful way. While listening to our meditation, I felt such a visceral sense of love and tenderness towards various darkened corners in my being. And that feeling spread out words towards other beings towards home I have built small fortresses to guard against aspects of them that I found undesirable Countless times today each time I felt the belly tightening around any given situation, involving the need to hold it together or as any sense of judgment/disappointment arose, I was able to connect again to that felt sense of loving kindness and dissolved those hard and borders. What arose as a response was a palpable vulnerability and openness, quite raw and quite beautiful.
My drawings are a form of meditation: the line draws itself; it flows with little preconception. That was a big breakthrough for me in my art, which was previously always very conceptual.
I learned how valuable meditation and space are for working with our creative energies.
Personally, it was a profound experience. The isolation of each color led to the saturation of each energy. I found this so exhilarating and so freeing. It was everything and much more than I expected.
The Five Wisdoms Institute offers trainings internationally.
Inspired by Naropa University, Contemplative Psychotherapy, and Authentic Leadership,
our trainings are proven to enhance self-awareness, communication, and effectiveness.
