Clinical work of all kinds—nursing, psychiatry, psychotherapy, palliative care, occupational therapy—are more like callings than professions. Although our clients come with emotional or cognitive troubles, we are usually doing work that is existential just as much as it is methodical.
Privately, therapists acknowledge that our work looks a lot like spiritual practice: one-on-one relationship, confession, internal awareness, forgiveness of oneself and others, and being awake to what’s really happening in our lives.
What is Living an Intimate Life?
Taught by Michael Stone, Living an Intimate Life: Integrating Buddhism & Psychology is an inclusive eight-week online course that links common psychological symptoms and their spiritual dimension. We are born with the tools to avoid suffering; we need to develop tools to embrace and work with suffering.
Underneath most common symptoms are raw existential questions about life, love and death—what it means to age with dignity, how to deeply forgive those who have hurt us, and primarily, how to engage in an intimate life while at the same time not holding on to anything.
Everyone is destined to experience not only the exhilaration of life, but also its inevitable darkness—disillusionment, aging, illness, isolation, loss, meaninglessness, painful choices, and difficulty letting go. As clinicians—as people in the helping professions—recognizing and transforming suffering is at the heart of everything we do. Teaching how to do this is the goal of this course.
Who is Living an Intimate Life for?
This course is for you if you are an education, mental health, or healthcare professional, in a profession supporting behavioral challenges and complex learning needs, or interested in the integration of Buddhism and Western psychology.
You’ll learn how:
- to link common symptoms with people’s deeper existential and spiritual lives
- to help people let go of rigid narratives and rumination
- to include forgiveness practices in your work
- illness, death and dying can be brought into clinical conversations
- to manage our relationship with technology
- to translate empathy into moment-to-moment awareness
You’ll finish the course:
- with a better understanding of who are you as a therapist
- understanding three key themes in psychology and spirituality
- knowing the primary importance of the therapeutic alliance in client change, and how an existential approach might foster or strengthen the relational domain between the therapist, the person seeking therapy, and their communities.
How does the course work?
You’ll receive weekly video teachings with Michael via our easy-to-use custom-built online learning platform. Videos are available for streaming or download. You can also listen to an audio-only MP3 version.
Should you run into any problems, friendly and helpful technical support is available.
Sliding scale spaces are available by application. Please note, it can take up to a week to receive a response.
Syllabus
Week 1 – Spirituality and the Helping Professions
Week 2 – The Three Characteristics of Life
Week 3 – Embracing Life
Week 4 – Letting Go
Week 5 – Stopping Reactivity
Week 6 – Loving Action
Week 7 – A Spiritual History
Week 8 – Forgiveness
