A Six-Month, Mentored Course
With Mary Elizabeth Lynch
This six-Module, cohort-based virtual course can profoundly enhance your life. Through a series of written, video and audio lessons plus monthly Zoom meetings, you will learn how to make wise decisions that reflect your best self.
A primary feature of this online program is the monthly three-hour cohort Zoom meeting in which Mary Elizabeth will guide the group through sharing about experiences with the Module just completed. She will also provide an introduction to the material in the upcoming Module.
Just think about how practical and helpful this could be for you. Consider how you make decisions every day about your life that affect you and others, as well. Life is largely about learning how to make good choices.
Each one of us can build the capacity to make life decisions – large and small – that arise from a deep union with our spiritual values. We can learn and practice the skills that strengthen and integrate the highest functions of the analytical mind, the courageous heart, and discerning intuition.
It all comes down to practical spirituality, to a way of living in which mindfulness permeates all the big and little decisions you make daily. You can tap into and activate the force of healthy will. It carries with it the courage and compassion needed to reach and follow-through with mindful choices. You can learn how to connect with an ever-present inner space of clarity and understanding.
This six-Module online learning experience is designed to help you:
- Experience a profound bond with your personal values and Ideals,
- Cultivate attention-building skills that will help you to make significant life-choices in a deliberate, reflective and Ideals-center way,
- Deepen your understanding and experience with meditation and mindful living,
- Implement a process for mindfully facing a current life challenge or opportunity. This will allow you to arrive at an inspired, Ideals-centered decision.
This online, cohort-based learning experience will be mentored by Mary Elizabeth, and it will help you see that many of your decisions arise out of your fears or self-judgments. You will complete exercises that will help you recognize how some of your daily decision-making is done rather haphazardly, without the illumination of mental clarity, insight, and understanding. The course will provide you with meditation and mindfulness practices that can ground you in heart-centered reflection, inner connections, and life-transforming courage.
Many features of personal engagement are built into this online, mentored course:
- A steady pace for moving through the course materials, with new material introduced monthly.
- Each Module will have a lesson that will help you to expand your understanding of yourself, your mind and your body.
- The course will draw upon the best from Eastern and Western wisdom traditions. These conceptual teachings from spirituality, transformational psychology and neuroscience provide a solid foundation for the practices in each module.
- For each Module there will be guided meditation practices, designed to help you connect with a clear mind from which decisions in life can be made with surety.
- Each Module will begin with a cohort Zoom session with Mary Elizabeth Lynch, the president and senior course leader of PTCI. In this three-hour learning time together, you will have the opportunity to share your experiences and questions with Mary Elizabeth and the group. And Mary Elizabeth will guide the group in getting ready for the next Module, as well as lead meditation practices to build even greater capacity for healthy decision-making in your daily life.
Join us in this group-based adventure, all done conveniently with online learning and directed by a steady, monthly pacing.
Module One – Catch a Vision of Your Best Self
PTCI courses always begin with catching a vision of and remembering your most treasured values and Ideals. The qualities of your personal Ideal are the energies that you are here to share in the world in both large and small ways.
In Module One, you will be led through a simple, yet powerful exercise that will help you recognize, clarify and commit (or recommit) to the array of qualities that are always present and ready to inspire and guide your daily life decisions. Those are the very qualities out of which mindful decision-making can come.
Module Two – Remembering Your Personal History of Good Choices
Everyone has experienced success in making decisions from a place of integrity, wholeness, and strength. If you are like most people, you tend to forget these moments and/or diminish their importance in your life. In Module Two, you will be invited to re-imagine and re-experience effective decisions from your personal history, even if it is only in retrospect that you can recognize their value. You will discover your own track record of making sound, Ideals-based choices.
Module Three – Deepen Your Meditation and Mindfulness Practices
For Modules Four and Five, you will be completing a Vision Quest experiment. You will intentionally prepare for and then embark on an inner journey to make a mindful decision about a current, real-life issue. But for that experiment to work effectively, you need to review and recommit to what mindfulness meditation is all about. This Module is designed for those who are new to the fundamentals of mindfulness and meditation practices, as well as for those who have had considerable previous experience with these practices. Everyone can benefit from engaging “beginner’s mind” and from renewing a personal contemplative practice.
Module Four – Mindfully Recognizing Your Question
Decision-making that leads to transformative growth is as much about mindfully choosing a Question as it is about mindfully arriving at an Answer. In Module Four, you will focus on honing-in on exactly what issue feels “ripe” and ready for a deep exploration. Not every challenge, opportunity or issue in your life is equally set-up for a decision right now. Some are still incubating and unfolding, and it would be premature to force a decision. Mindful living means to carefully and patiently sense when you truly have a Question that can be addressed in the mindful decision-making process. In Module Four you will be led through exercises and meditation experiences to help you arrive at a choice of one issue to use as your Question for Module Five.
Module Five – Embark on Your Personal Vision Quest
Like ancient, traditional practices of vision questing, you will be guided through a reflective process to eventually arrive at an Answer to the Question you formulated in Module Four. Exercises in Module Five will create opportunities for your intuitive insights and your analytical understanding to integrate into an Ideals-centered decision about how to move forward with the specific challenge which you have chosen to address. This is essentially what mindful decision-making is all about.
Module Six – Integrate Your Insights
There is one final step to mindful decision-making because the process needs to extend further than merely realizing what you “ought to do next.” Mindful decision-making requires application. In Module Six, you will commit to a specific application plan. Alongside your commitment, you will be encouraged to stay open to on-going insights that will continue to flow into your awareness, refining and extending the Answer that came from the vision questing.
Integrating Body, Heart and Mind to Guide Your Life Decisions
Course Dates TBD
