Making Deeper Contact

What does it mean to be human in a body that gets sick, a mind that creates judgments, and a society that so often divides us into good and bad, clean and unclean, right and wrong?

In this second section, we explore the emotional terrain that lies at the heart of suffering, separation, and self-rejection—and we begin the inner work of transforming it. These four classes will guide you into the messy, embodied reality of being human: our vulnerability to illness, our instinctive recoil from difference, our tendency to create enemies when we feel powerless, and our need to make sense of what goes wrong—often through blame.

But this isn’t a course in pathology. It’s an invitation to awaken compassion. Through Buddhist frameworks, emotional science, and narrative self-awareness, you’ll come to understand that disgust, shame, fear, and blame are not personal failures—they are baked into the human condition. Once you see this clearly, you can begin to loosen their grip. You’ll explore how ideals can become weapons, how unconscious memory can turn others into enemies, and how suffering—whether physical, psychological, or relational—can be transformed through awareness, humility, and care.

Ultimately, this section asks: What if our task isn’t to purify ourselves, but to love what’s human? What if we could meet illness, difference, conflict, and grief not with judgment, but with an open, spacious heart?

This is the work of unlearning blame and rediscovering belonging.