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Machrie Moor Standing Stones: 4,500-year-old ceremonial landscape on Scotland's Isle of Arran oriented to align with the rising sun on the solstice, taken from the Westerly view.
Photo by Jeremy Woodcock
Six Weeks of Courses, Interactive Small Groups, and Much More
Begins September 8, 2026 1PM ET US
How can you remain engaged and hopeful about yourself and your life, no matter what happens?
Most of us believe that confidence comes from success, self-improvement, or empowerment. And yet, we discover that failures, crises, mistakes and conflicts can teach us more about ourselves and our life than anything else. Through these challenges, we find access to our “natural wisdom” because our unique self-awareness changes and develops through limits and constraints.
The secret to getting in touch with natural wisdom is to remain open and accepting when challenged by difficult conditions, disagreements, and defeat. This requires cultivating self-knowledge and self-awareness so that we can discover and create something new in the face of crisis, conflict or loss. This course was designed to guide you through this process.
Being Human is a six-week course for seekers, lovers, and leaders. Through the principles and practices of Real Dialogue, you will learn how to remain curious when you disagree, listen without becoming defensive, speak authentically without attacking others, and learn from the very experiences you would rather avoid.
SEEKERS:
LIVE WISELY
If you are drawn to understanding yourself more deeply, pursuing a spiritual path, or making sense of adversity and trauma, Real Dialogue will help you cultivate the self-awareness and self-knowledge needed for natural wisdom. You will learn how to use your own defeats, failures, and loss to awaken greater insight and meaning.
LOVERS:
LOVE WELL
Whether you are partnered, married, parenting, caring for family members, or navigating important friendships, Real Dialogue offers practical skills for creating healthier connections, deeper trust, and more authentic relationships. You will learn how to listen more carefully, remain curious longer, and speak with authenticity and humility.
LEADERS:
LEAD CONFIDENTLY
Whether you lead a family, a team, a classroom, a business, or a community, leadership begins with confidence in yourself. Real Dialogue will show you how to navigate difficult conversations without polarization and create relationships grounded in trust rather than control, helping others to do the same.
THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF REAL DIALOGUE
1. Know Thyself
Understand your own emotions, assumptions, biases, and limitations before attempting to change yourself or your relationships.
2. Speak and Listen Responsibly
Speak for yourself. Listen mindfully. Remain curious—especially when you disagree.
3. Resist Dehumanization and Polarization
Stop turning people into enemies, heroes, victims, or objects. Recover your shared humanity with everyone you encounter.
4. Learn from Defeat and Failure
Growth comes less from success than from learning from disappointment, misunderstanding, limitation, and loss.
BEING HUMAN INCLUDES
• Six live one-hour sessions with Polly Young-Eisendrath (Recorded for those who cannot attend in person)
• A digital workbook
• Weekly Real Dialogue Practice Pods facilitated by experienced faculty
• Digital resources, exercises and practices between sessions
• A supportive community of fellow seekers, lovers, and leaders
Six Weekly One-Hour Courses with Polly
Week 1: Diving In: Principles and Practice
In the first week, I will introduce you to the overview of Real Dialogue as a perspective on living well with your life, as it is. You will also meet your cohort in the practice pod and receive the first chapter of the workbook, as well as other materials to help you getting oriented.
Week 2: Emotions and Self
In this week, we will look at how human emotions, self-consciousness, and the urge to control others develops for all humans in early family life. We will look at these aspects of being human in terms of the ways they benefit us and make us unique among mammals, as well as how they work against us in our feelings about ourselves, our relationships and our authority. We will begin to get the Big Picture of being human (not animal).
Week 3: Living in a Snow Globe
In week three, we will explore and experience how we each live within our own subjective world and see/hear/feel everything from our own first-person perspective. We will see how this condition can lead to emotional threat, defensiveness, conflict and isolation, on one hand, and mystery and individuation on the other.
Week 4: The Tension of Real Dialogue
In the fourth week, we will talk about and practice the Skill of Real Dialogue, unpacking the experience of Speaking, Listening, and Remaining Curious from a perspective of responsibility and humility.
Week 5: Being Wrong: Defeat and Failure
In this fifth week, we will take on board the facts about how humans are often wrong about what they see/hear/feel and remember. We will talk about how being wrong can become a wondrous playground for being humorous about yourself or a rigid prison of always defending yourself. We will explore Don Hoffman’s theory of “fitness beats truth,” in terms of the ways you defend yourself against what has already happened.
Week 6: Embracing the Gifts of Impermanence
In this final week, we will inquire into loss, impermanence and death as doorways to awakening and love. We will explore awakening, Near-Death-Experience, and the heart break of loss for what we can learn about wisdom.
About The Founder
Dr. Polly Young-Eisendrath
Polly Young-Eisendrath, Ph.D., is a psychologist, writer, speaker, and Jungian analyst who is the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Real Dialogue in Vermont. She has published 19 books including, The Self-Esteem Trap: Raising Confident and Compassionate Kids in an Age of Self-Importance and Love Between Equals: Relationship as a Spiritual Path. She is the co-author, with Jean Pieniadz, Ph.D., of Dialogue Therapy for Couples and Real Dialogue for Opposing Sides: Methods Basedon Psychoanalysis and Mindfulness. She maintains a clinical practice in central Vermont. In 2009, Polly received the Otto Weininger Memorial Award from the Canadian Psychological Association for outstanding lifetime contributions to psychoanalysis. Polly’s books have been translated to more than 18 languages.
Polly’s current podcast, Waking Up is Not Enough: Flourishing in the Human Space, examines the current fads, fictions and potentials of psychedelics, meditation and other kinds of awakening. She previously hosted the popular podcast ENEMIES: From War to Wisdom, which provides a fresh look at human hostilities and what to do about them.
Polly is a lifelong Buddhist practitioner and a Mindfulness teacher.
You do not need to perfect yourself. You need to befriend yourself and embrace the life you have. Then you will discover your own natural human wisdom.
Live recordings with Polly will be recorded and available for participant reuse and for anyone who was unable to join live.
Course Begins Tuesday, September 8 at 1PM ET
Tuesday, September 15 at 1PM ET
Tuesday, September 22 at 1PM ET
Tuesday, September 29 at 1PM ET
Tuesday, October 6 at 1PM ET
Tuesday, October 13 at 1PM ET