Essential Change

04/16/2025

New Online Course: June!

Enhancing Positive Qualities 3 Part Workshop Series
With Craig Mackie, MA, MSW, RSW

Mondays, June 9, 16, 23, 10:00am-12:30pm (Eastern Time, Toronto, Canada), On-line via Zoom, sessions recorded and available for missed classes and deepening practices.

The objective of this course if to embrace the helpful traits we already have and to bring in new traits we wish to embody. What happens if we let go of those parts that keep us separated from our highest potential? What happens when we ask for help from our best parts? What happens when we let go and find creative loving strength from within?

We carry so many stories that prevent us from seeing our greatness or highest potential. Our goodness is constantly obscured by stories we carry or recycling challenging events. These tracks that play in our heads, often having come from somewhere or someone else, become our reality. How we speak and think determines how we see the world and subsequently live. What if we could disrupt this pattern? To do so requires awakening and listening to something else and identifying new or hidden helpful parts of ourselves.

This course draws on the wisdom of the 16 Guidelines and the healing practices of Transformative Mindfulness Methods, both of which align with FDCW - Universal Education (https://compassionandwisdom.org). This course would be appropriate for anyone with a mindfulness practice who is interested in working with a moral transformative framework that is directed towards self-healing.

Session 1 - Role Model - Grounding and Connecting
In this session we will learn to connect with role models who have guided or taught us in some way. Role models leave an imprint that lives inside of us. These teachers can awaken in each of us the greatest potential. In fact, if we witness a good quality in others, it is inherent in ourselves. Connecting with our highest self means getting out of our own way and letting in what is already good.

Session 2 - Past Self Practice - Grounding and Discovering
In this session we will connect with parts that are already good and then integrate them in novel ways or new situations. In this practice we enhance the past self or already-skillful-self so that it can grow and serve us in new ways.

Session 3 - Positive Part - Bringing it Forward
In this practice we learn to accept what is uncomfortable and embrace what is thriving. By paying attention to where we focus we can discover an inner refuge, we cab become “our own lamp on the path.”

Letting go of what separates us: Enhancing, asking for help from our highest self. In this session we ask: what do my good qualities need in order to balance? What does a whole version of my self feel like? When I am grounded, how does my goodness flow?

Participants will learn:
Somatic grounding that helps connect with the body in a kind, safe and gentle way;
Visualization techniques that are calm, creative and open;
The practice of asking for help and letting go so that new energetic and neuropathways can emerge;
Integration and forgiveness steps, with dedication to magnify transformative benefits.

Please familiarize yourself with the 16 Guidelines prior to this course(https://compassionandwisdom.org/product-category/free/).

To register email Craig Mackie: craig@essentialchange.net

Subsidized rate: $0-100
Standard rate: $200
Insured rate: $300 (receipts for psychotherapy/psychological services can be issued, registered MSW/RSW with supervised practice in Ontario, Canada).

essentialchange.net

03/05/2025

http://www.essentialchange.net/2025/02/new-course-shadow-work-with-the-16-guidelines/

NEW COURSE MARCH 2025 - Shadow work with the 16 Guidelines

This will be a three part series that will help you go deeper into transforming the shadow side of good a good quality. We will explore how fear, anger and other hidden motivations can cause suffering that masks seemingly good intentions.

2025, March 17, 24, 31 - Mondays, 10:00am-12:30pm Eastern Standard Time (Toronto, Canada). Via Zoom.

Session 1: Preparing for transformative work: connecting with a healing space, grounding in compassion and wisdom, acceptance of pain and the root causes of suffering.

Session 2: Approaching and transforming our relationship to the shadow: welcoming the negative aspects into a healing space, encountering resistance, introducing wisdom and compassion, asking for help and letting go.

Session 3: integrating and healing the transformed shadow: welcoming and encountering resistance, applying and integrating new insights and feeling, next steps and embodying transformed shadow.

So often in mindfulness practices, for participants and facilitators alike, deep discomfort and distress can arise. Having a toolkit to encounter stress, pain, trauma, childhood wounds or resistance of any kind is essential. This course will introduce participants to a framework and practices that will help them meet blockages to their highest embodied potential through transformative mindfulness.

The 16 Guidelines are an indigenous set of embodied virtues that originate from Tibet. In their modern iteration they comprise a virtue based framework (for example Respect, Kindness, Patience) that can be universally accessed through our own experiences and inner wisdom. Laid out in 4 wisdom themes of how we Think, Act, Related and Create Meaning, each corresponding 4 guidelines (e.g. Humility, Patience, Contentment, Delight for how we Think) can be used to meet challenges and transform suffering.

With each good quality also comes the potential for a shadow to arise - something that resembles the qualities but is not (semblance), a misuse of the quality (unskillful) that is tainted by unclear motivation or malicious intention, and the opposite of the quality (contra). Each of these shadow aspects has the potential to be transformed through introspection and healed by introducing wisdom and compassion.

Transformative Mindfulness Methods provides the perfect framework to dive into transforming a specific shadow that may arise.

In this workshop, participants will be encouraged to pick a specific quality with which they wish to have a deeper relationship. Over three weeks they will participate in transformative work through visualization, group discussion and didactic instruction.

Pay what you can, suggested at $100 (CAD). Receipts available for psychological services/social work available.

Participants should be familiar with either the 16 Guidelines or Transformative Mindfulness Methods.

Contact craig@essentialchange.net for registration.

Session 1: Preparing for transformative work: connecting with a healing space, grounding in compassion and wisdom, acceptance of pain and the root causes of suffering.

05/03/2023

I would like to offer three 2 hour workshops on some practices that have helped me facilitate transformative work through Transformative Mindfulness Methods and 16 Guidelines.

This series will be free, with a suggested donation to FDCW (UK) or Centre for Compassion and Wisdom (Burlington, Ontario).

This will be equal parts didactic and experiential.

The intention is to help anyone doing transformative work in their own lives and for the benefit of others.

Here are the themes I would like to cover:

Grounding
4 part grounding
Motivation in Love
Open curious intention

2. Connecting
To our own highest-self
Each other to their highest self
Each to each in groups

3. Integrating
Letting settle
Giving space to integrate
Dedication

Please RSVP by email to me: craig@essentialchange.net and I will send you the Zoom link.

These session will be recorded with the intention of making the practices available to participants.

Topic: Workshop Mini Series
Time: May 15, 2023 10:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
May 15, 2023 10:00 AM
Jun 5, 2023 10:00 AM
Jun 12, 2023 10:00 AM