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Joy! Fuel for Awakening
April 13 - May 4
Joy! Fuel for Awakening
Online Course | Four WeeksThe spiritual path is the hardest—yet most worthwhile—path one can undertake. To walk the path and meet our challenges, we need serious sustenance. Joy is a vital treasure that can feed us and put the air under our wings.
In what can be seen as a dark time for our whole planet, joy is vital to cultivate for ourselves and for each other, in our aspiration to benefit all beings. This online course with teacher Catherine Pawasarat Sensei throws open the door to joy, and revitalizes it as a resource for the journey of awakening.
Fueling our Awakening
If you want to live a life of joy, live as if you are on a roller coaster. Ride the dragon of sheer awe and ongoing question, rather than the merry-go-round of safety and fixed answers.
—Qapel Doug Duncan and Catherine Sensei Pawasarat (“The Mystical Life: Right View” webinars)
What’s the seeming catch-phrase of our 21st century? “I’m so busy!” Between juggling a million balls, and everything going on in our world today, many of us struggle giving ourselves permission to take the time to nurture joy.
On top of what seems like a faster and busier pace of life, it’s a common experience to feel inundated with bad news and strife. It seems most people these days have some experience of chronic anxiety or depression; around the globe, people are struggling.
Unfortunately, what may commonly happen with this struggle is inaction—sitting on the couch, watching videos, and diving deeper into despair and fear. But sitting on the couch isn’t going to make anything better. The same old patterns won’t work. True self-care is much deeper.
The good news is that joy is ever-present as an antidote to suffering. Joy is a matter of choice.
So what is the joy that you can choose, create, nourish? How do you choose joy?
With utmost delight, we invite you to embark on this adventure together in a 4-week course on bliss, and discover how to cultivate joy as that universal antidote to suffering.
Dive Into the Joyful Mystery
Here at Planet Dharma, we have a lot of fun. Our lineage, through Namgyal Rinpoche’s empowerment, offers Buddhist insights on joy and bliss, which go back centuries and millennia—and our lineage is all about expansion, exploration, and the cutting edge. These online classes weave the traditional and the modern together, for a grounded, reliable, kickass take on nourishing your well-being and enlightenment.
Learning with a master meditation teacher about joy is priceless. So is communing in a community to learn about deepening and expanding our joy, collaboratively. We don’t necessarily need to be with others for our joy, but it can be more fun with others—and often, others have thought of ways of having fun that we would never have thought of. You might even learn to stop being embarrassed about something that gives you joy, and lean all the way into it. Engaging in the study and practice of joy together will create the space for something totally new in one’s own life.
It’s an ode to joy!
Course Schedule
April 13 – May 4 2025
Class Times (Mountain Time)
- Sunday April 13 – 9:30-11am
- Sunday April 20 – 9:30-11am
- Sunday April 27 – 9:30-11am
- Saturday & Sunday May 3-4 – 9:30am and 2:30pm (approx 60-90 min)
The formal and participatory teachings for this course will occur on Sundays with a Saturday-Sunday flash retreat on the fourth weekend. Class times are estimates and may change slightly.
We encourage you to connect with sangha outside of class times to discuss and deepen your learning of the material.
Flash Retreat Weekend: May 3-4
To deepen and integrate your experience, the final (fourth) weekend during the course will also be a Flash Retreat (May 3-4). This can be done at home, or with us at Clear Sky Meditation Centre, in Eastern British Columbia. We highly recommend clearing your schedule over the weekend to focus on the retreat. Formal group sessions will be held at these approximate times.
- Flash Retreat morning session: 9:30am MT
- Flash Retreat afternoon session: 2:30pm MT
- Sessions will be 60-90 mins in length.
Meet the Teacher
Catherine Pawasarat Sensei
Catherine Pawasarat Sensei is a contemporary Dharma teacher, attendant, consort, co-teacher via Planet Dharma and co-founder of Clear Sky Retreat Center. In addition to Buddhist philosophy and its applications to daily life, Catherine also draws on generative living and universal spiritual tools including transpersonal astrology and Japanese arts.
She 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.
Course Details
Time and Location
Each of the weekly classes in this online course will be streamed live at 9:30-11am MST. We ask participants to attend live whenever possible. The recording of each class will be available for one week after each class. We encourage you to connect with sangha outside of class times to discuss and deepen your learning of the material.
The course culminates with a Flash Retreat on February 1-2, 2025, with formal group session times held at approx 9:30am and 2:30pm Mountain Time on Saturday and Sunday, with a 60-90 minute duration.
What Does the Course Cost?
This course is offered based on the unique combination of:
1) dāna, and
2) a $80-120 USD administrative fee:
- Register by March 16 2025: $80 USD
- Register by March 30 2025: $100 USD
- Register less than two weeks prior: $120 USD
Click on the tabs below to learn more:
You may have come across this elsewhere in 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.
The dharma has been built on generosity. No one is excluded for lack of funds. However, it is also extremely beneficial to give as much as you are able.
Typically people give in a range of $120-$500 USD for a course.
As we’re committed to ensuring everyone has access to the Dharma, please feel comfortable to give less if you are not financially secure. Another form of giving dāna is to offer service, and if you are interested in providing support in a non-financial way, we invite you to contact us.
If you are financially secure, we invite you to generate merit by providing more financial support to the Triple Gem. Contributions like these make the difference in supporting our teachers, teachings, and center.
We're delighted to share that we created a short online course so that you can learn more about the practice of dāna here.
In a traditional model of in-person teachings, a retreat center or urban meditation center invites teachers to visit. In these cases the centers have infrastructure and organization costs to cover, which might be covered by an admin fee. For the teaching itself, dāna to the teachers is offered in a bowl. This honors both the sustainability of the teachers, and of the supporting center.
We’ve tried to recreate this approach online. The teachers’ time and the teaching themselves are offered on the basis of dāna, separate to the admin fee. With our dāna offering we are making a direct gift of generosity to the teachers to support their teachings and livelihood.
The admin fee* goes to support the infrastructure and organization necessary to support them to teach. As anyone with an online business will know, the costs of setting up good infrastructure to support effective teaching and connection online can be surprising.
Our admin fee changes based on the date of registration.
Register four + weeks prior: $80
Register two to four weeks prior: $100
Register less than two weeks prior: $120
*We also do not wish to exclude anyone from the Teachings, so if you are not currently in a financial position to afford the admin fee, please contact the course Registrar via [email protected] so we can support you to attend.
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Below are a few of the work and benefits that your admin fee payment is supporting:
- High speed internet (to allow interviews and classes on-line)
- Online class systems (Zoom)
- Registration / admin systems (Eventbrite, Basecamp)
- Communication systems to keep everyone informed, share connection details, teachings and other resources (Mailchimp)
- Online storage (for example, Dropbox, to allow us to let students watch recordings, and to store and share selected teachings in other forms such as podcasts and video later, and Amazon cloud)
- Quality sound, video and editing equipment (both for live teachings and to provide good enough quality for later sharing as podcasts and video). We are regularly updating our equipment to improve your user experience.
- Online calendar booking system to allow students to book interviews
- Website hosting and maintenance for sharing upcoming courses, teachings, blogs and other resources.
We welcome any questions. May all our efforts be sustainable, abundant and for the benefit of all beings!
