An Online Course
October 17 – November 13, 2022
Mondays: 7:30pm-9:00pm MDT *Click here to see your timezone
* Recordings available for those who cannot attend live
* Optional: Sunday Master Classes & a Weekend Home Retreat
“We don’t think full liberation is possible any more without an understanding and an integration of the stages”
–Qapel and Sensei
Do you experience a gap between traditional wisdom teachings and the complexities and challenges of the 21st century? Would you like to integrate all aspects of awareness, including body, mind, spirit and shadow? And what does that really look like in practice?
Discover new dimensions of awakening in this course on Integral Spirituality.
Integral Spirituality: New Dimensions of Awakening
Applying Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory to modern spiritual practice.
Do you experience a gap between traditional wisdom teachings and the complexities and challenges of the 21st century? Would you like to integrate all aspects of awareness, including body, mind, spirit and shadow? Perhaps you are feeling like your meditation practice is in one box, and the rest of your life is in another. How do you bring them together as a complete, integrated, aware human being?
Discover new dimensions of awakening in our four week online course on integral spirituality. Integral spirituality is based on integral theory, developed by Ken Wilber, who is often regarded as “the Einstein of consciousness”.
An integral spirituality approach combines authentic Buddhist or other spiritual lineage teachings with the latest insights in psychology, consciousness, business management and other fields. It helps to provide a vibrant and comprehensive framework for 21st-century awakening.
This course is about what an integrated spiritual practice looks like, when we take it beyond theory to walking our talk. Qapel and Sensei draw on examples and lessons from years of Dharma teaching focused on an integral approach. Their home, Clear Sky, is a living lab for integrating the spiritual path into every aspect of life, community, shadow work, and functionality.
Basic Course Schedule
Integral Spirituality Class Dates, 7:30pm Mountain Time:
- Monday October 17th
- Monday October 24th
- Monday October 31st
- Monday November 7th
To deepen and integrate your experience, we are also offering three optional weekly Master Classes (Sundays October 23rd, 30th, November 6th) during the course and an at-home Flash Retreat November 11-13th).
"Only death would have prevented me from attending this course, and even then, my consciousness would most likely have been eavesdropping from another realm/bardo." -Brendan R.
Course Learning Goals
- Learn a framework that integrates your meditation/spiritual practice with your everyday life.
- Learn a tool set that allows for deep transformation in your work, relationships, intimacy/sex, the shadow, and other areas of your life in need of growth and development.
- Learn how to skilfully combine traditional wisdom teachings with the latest discoveries in science and psychology, to foster a well rounded spiritual practice suited for the complexities of the 21st century.
- Explore real-life examples of the integral path of spiritual training to help guide how you can recognize stages directly in your language, body and behavior.
Meditation is essential – but there are parts of us, such as, how we show up with others, that aren’t touched by this alone. Meditation can help us get in a good state but doesn’t necessarily lead us to higher stages of maturity. Stages reflect hard-won growth of understanding, emotional and social range and depth, integration and functionality in the world, and incorporation and transformation of the shadow. Without transformative work that touches every part of our lives, our spiritual growth and our capacity for compassion is incomplete.
Only by working on our stages, in parallel to developing a clear radiant meditative state, can we truly blossom on our spiritual paths. This means learning how to recognize how stages are ingrained in the subtleties of our lives, bodies, language and behaviors, so that we can highlight the areas for development. Ultimately the stages work presented in integral spirituality helps us find the strength and wisdom we need to flourish in difficult times, to be of service to the world.
Integral spirituality is a comprehensive approach of transformation working with body, mind, spirit and shadow. Planet Dharma’s training path consisting of the 4 pillars of karma yoga/meditation-in-action, study (of Dharma, science, psychology, etc), meditation, and shadow – embodies this integral approach.
Qapel and Sensei’s 30+ combined years of training work with students shows the great power of this work of developing stages, both for deepening a student’s Dharma practice, as well as their functionality and flourishing in life.
Case Study on States and Stages – Duncan Cryle
Much of my life I’ve been a nice guy on the surface, and aggressively competitive underneath. On one hand, I wouldn’t like to hold people accountable or get into conflict. And on the other hand I would roll over people to get what I wanted. Working with the Teachers and inside the melting pot of sangha at our meditation centre, I eventually hit a point where this ego strategy simply stopped working.
Despite having a strong meditation practice and experiencing clear meditative ‘states’ I had to finally witness these blind ‘stages’. I started to see the huge cost this was having to me and others. This was immensely healing as I began to see how these unseen ‘stage’ related patterns drove so many unhelpful and unhappy patterns in my life.
Video: The Fourth Turning (Integral Spirituality and Integral Buddhism)
Ken Wilber, the founder of integral theory, describes the ‘fourth turning of the wheel’ for the world’s great spiritual traditions, including Buddhism.
Wilber describes the need to make a new spirituality – one that transcends and includes the old traditions, while also adding new material. These new additions should be compatible with the old, but brings paths like Buddhism up to date in the modern and post-modern world.
"World class teachings from world class people! Doug and Catherine Sensei are the real deal and they ultimately want one thing for you - to guide you toward awakening with totality and intelligence." -Nishta M.
Meet Your Teachers
Qapel Doug Duncan and Catherine Pawasarat Sensei are Dharma and meditation teachers who founded Clear Sky Meditation Centre, BC, Canada.
Achariya Doug Duncan received lay ordination from Namgyal Rinpoche in 1978, and is a lineage holder in that teaching. Known for his direct, humourous and compassionate engagement with students, Doug embraces various traditions, contemporary psychology, and science, to mentor all beings to a more awakened state.
Catherine Pawasarat has trained daily with Acariya Doug Duncan since 1998 in an intensive spiritual apprenticeship that is rare in the modern West. She received lay ordination from Namgyal Rinpoche in 2003. In addition to Buddhist philosophy and its applications to daily life, Catherine also draws on generative living and the arts. With Doug she is co-founder of Clear Sky Retreat Center in the BC Rockies.
Catherine Pawasarat Sensei
Qapel Doug Duncan
Course Details
Time and Location
Each of the four weekly classes in this online course will be video streamed live at 7:30pm MST. The recording will be available for one week after each class.
Study and Meditation Opportunities in addition to the classes include Master Classes on three Sundays at 3pm MST, and a weekend Flash Retreat following the final Monday class.
What Does the Course Cost?
We offer this course on the basis of dāna, as well as an admin fee of $100 (USD). The admin is to cover the costs of running these online courses – for equipment and software to provide you the teachings online.
For our teachings itself – You may have come across this is the form of “pay from the heart”. Dāna is a Sanskrit term meaning “generosity”. With dāna, we give as a mutual exchange of generosity. It’s our joy to offer this course, and we trust you’ll match our time, energy, and passion by giving an amount of money that feels good and healthy to both you and us. We suggest a range between $120 and $500 for this four week course.
Master Classes
Three Sundays
There are weekly Master Classes (akin to online Q&A Office Hours) during this online course to support your deepening learning and practice, on the following dates at 3pm MST:
- Sun. October 23
- Sun. October 30
- Sun. November 6
You can elect to attend all three or individual dates.
Flash Retreat
November 11-13, 2022
Elect to deepen your practice via a Flash Retreat during the last weekend of this course. The retreat provides practitioners a valuable opportunity to integrate and seal the learnings from the online course, in a format well suited for our contemporary lives.
The retreat will include instructions, online check ins, and a Master Class on the Sunday.
We encourage you to attend this weekend retreat at Clear Sky Centre, or together with your local sangha, or if those not available to you, in your home.
Why We Study Integral Spirituality
We use and study integral theory and spirituality because it is our lineage’s mandate to take the teachings of awakening to new places.
Namgyal Rinpoche was known for incorporating diverse teachings of awakening, and we continue to do so – whether from traditional Buddhism, western mysteries, psychology, science and even business management.
We aim to co-create a universalist and 21st-century framework for international students of Dharma. Planet Dharma’s four pillars and five principles for bringing depth practice into every aspect of life – embodies a very integral approach. Our home meditation center, Clear Sky, is a living lab for integrating the spiritual path into every aspect of life: community, shadow work, and functionality. In short, integral spirituality is not a textbook to us, but something we are actively embodying every day.
Part 2: Integral Spirituality Workshop
February 2023
A follow-up Workshop series starting February 2023 will dive deeper into applying and developing integral spirituality lines and stages to real-life scenarios.
The Integral Spirituality Workshop will combine further teachings along with working groups to explore different lines of development around topics such as: work, career, karma yoga, generosity, money relationship, community relationships, sangha health and more.
Sangha power – consider organizing or joining regional in-person or online sangha groups to support one another during the online courses and Flash Retreats.