Date: Friday, October 4, 12:00 – 5:00 pm; Saturday, October 5, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
Instructor: Ben Connelly
RSVP: Sold Out

How can we heal ourselves and our communities?  How does our personal conduct, wellness, suffering, and trauma relate to interpersonal and transpersonal systems?  How can we give our lives to universal liberation without sacrificing our own well-being? These questions are at the heart of Yogacara Buddhism, which brings Early Buddhist and Mahayana thought and practice into an integrated approach to joyful, compassionate, altruistic living. This course focuses on the phenomenology and practices upheld in the Indian Yogacara master Vasubandhu’s Thirty Verses on Consciousness Only.  We study and engage in mindfulness practices for healing patterns of emotional reactivity, and non-dual teachings to heal our alienation from ourselves, our communities, and the vast, ineffable universe.  Students move towards a deeper knowing of the fact that in every moment we are participating in the whole of the world in all its beauty and harms, and that in every moment we can act for the liberation of all.

This course is one in a series of courses offered as part of Thich Nhat Hanh Program for Engaged Buddhism.

Ben Connelly is a Soto Zen teacher and Dharma heir in the Katagiri lineage. He also teaches mindfulness in a wide variety of secular contexts including police and corporate training, correctional facilities, and addiction recovery and wellness groups. Ben is based at Minnesota Zen Meditation Center and travels to teach across the United States. He’s the author of Inside the Grass Hut: Living Shitou’s Classic Zen Poem and Inside Vasubandhu’s Yogacara: A Practitioner’s Guide. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.