Hope and Fear
“Hope is the thing with feathers,” wrote Emily Dickinson. From her hermit’s life in Amherst, Dickinson had strange insight into the nature of hope, the poignant layers and dangerous pockets that comprise our complex relationship with the things we want. These days, everybody invokes “hope” for a myriad of social and cultural place markers. But what is hope? What does it mean to hope? What is our relationship with hope?
The founder of the Shambhala community, Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, offered formal training in closely examining the nature of hope. What we discover in such training is that “hope” is often a barrier to what’s really happening. Hope is often the friendly-faced mask of my desire to manipulate the world around me, to swat those quacking ducks into the row that I know they need to be in. To wish things were different. To fantasize about alternative universes.
The training on hope and her cousin, fear, that Trungpa, Rinpoche offered is available in various formats, but one of the most concentrated and thorough is a program taught by one of his senior students, Frank Berliner. Frank is an associate professor of Contemplative Psychology at Naropa University and a senior teacher in the Shambhala community. This weekend program, while part 3 in a series, does not have pre-requisites and can easily be done as a stand-alone.
Dancing with Hope and Fear (Part 3): Sacred Wisdom with Frank Berliner