Empowering Unconditional Compassion
Through Deep Interfaith Learning
with Rabbi Sheila Weinberg and Lama/Professor John Makransky
An Online Retreat
Sunday, October 10, 2021
9:30 AM – 5:00 PM ET
Developed by Lama/Professor John Makransky with a teaching team, Sustainable Compassion Training (SCT) is adapted from Tibetan Buddhism into a form that is accessible to people of all spiritual backgrounds who wish to access a power of care and compassion that can be more sustaining, inclusive, and unconditional than what they have been experiencing—less subject to bias and emotional depletion. SCT includes three kinds of meditation practice: (1) The receptive mode helps us find new access to hidden qualities of love, compassion, inner peace, and wisdom. (2) The deepening mode helps us settle into the source of those qualities in the depth of our awareness—with deepening relaxation, inner acceptance and spaciousness that is healing and freeing in mind and body. (3) The inclusive mode helps us come from that depth to respond to others in their deep dignity and potential, with more replenishing, unconditional and expansive powers of care, compassion and wisdom for action.
Rabbi Sheila Weinberg has been a rabbi for 34 years and is one of the founders of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. She has taught meditation to many clergy and lay folks over the last three decades. She became a student of John Makransky about six years ago and has found that his teaching and practices can illuminate Jewish prayer practice and an understanding of Torah.
In this day of learning and practice John will share his deep understandings and guide us in these practices. Sheila will offer texts, insights and interpretations from Jewish sources that are illuminated by these practices.
Eligibility
This online retreat is open to everyone – beginners and those with more experience.
If you require financial support to participate, please contact [email protected].
Retreat Faculty
Rabbi Sheila Weinberg served as a congregational rabbi for seventeen years. She is the author of Surprisingly Happy: An Atypical Religious Memoir and God Loves the Stranger. She has released the CD, Preparing the Heart: Meditations for Jewish Spiritual Practice. She has also published widely on such topics as feminism, spiritual direction, parenting, social justice and mindfulness from a Jewish perspective and has contributed commentaries to Kol HaNeshama, the Reconstructionist prayer book. Rabbi Weinberg has taught mindfulness meditation and yoga to rabbis, Jewish professionals and lay people in the context of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. She serves as a spiritual director to a variety of Jewish clergy including faculty at HUC-JIR in New York and students at RRC in Philadelphia. She is the creator of the Jewish Mindfulness Teacher Training Program and taught five cohorts. She is married to Maynard Seider and they have three married children and six grandchildren.
John Makransky, PhD is Associate Professor of Buddhism and Comparative Theology at Boston College, senior advisor for Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche’s Centre of Buddhist Studies in Nepal and co-creator of the Sustainable Compassion Training model for accessing innate human capacities of compassion and awareness. John’s academic writings have focused on connections between practices of wisdom, compassion and devotion in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, on adapting Buddhist practices to meet contemporary minds, and on theoretical issues in interfaith learning. In 2000, John was ordained as a Lama, a meditation teacher of innate compassion and wisdom, within the Nyingma Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. As a meditation teacher, John is known for guiding participants in their discovery of underlying powers of love and wisdom.
