Between a Rock and a Hard Place

What’s Between a Rock and a Hard Place? The world around us is full of beautiful, interweaving and subtle diversity, and yet so easily we fall into patterns of seeing in which there are only polarities: ‘this’ or ‘that’, black or white, all or nothing. The same is true of our inner experience. How often do we find ourselves caught on one side or the other of an internal polarity, with our capacity for choice limited by unconscious patterns of thought and behavior?

During this workshop, we’ll explore how we get caught up in ‘either/or’ mindsets, and how patterns of automatic response live in our bodies as well as our minds. We’ll invite ourselves to slow down and feel into the fullness of experience, and to discover the wisdom that created these deeply ingrained habits, as well as the cost of forgetting that we have choice.

We’ll ask, “who am I when I open myself up to the possibility of choice? What can I learn from my feelings and sensations as they shift and change? How do I create my own practice for staying awake when my habits want me to fall asleep?”

This workshop is part of the Academy’s new Foundational Series. These five one-day workshops expand upon some of the topics of our popular Evenings of Exploration and explore the overarching question: Who Am I? You can take the workshops individually, or you can take the whole series.

Each daylong workshop is designed around an exercise from the first phase of the Academy’s foundational training: Leading by Being, and will introduce you to the Academy’s learning model and some of the methods and theory central to our work. Through experience and interactive dialogue we’ll discover how the intentional practice of learning can lead not merely to the accumulation of knowledge and skill, but also to personal transformation and the expression of our innate gifts and unique qualities.

Join us for this adventure in ‘learning as a practice.’

Supported in part by the 1440 Fund, an advised fund at Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

Read more about the history of our Foundation Studies in a post written by Academy founder Aaron Stern from 2012:
Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Teaching and Learning in a Time of Cynicism

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