Our Students Talk About the Program
May 13th, 2010
Here are a growing collection of comments from our students on their experience in our program on InterSpiritual Wisdom.
Tom Baskett is a psychoanalyst living in Vermont. Here is a recommendation he recently sent to another psychologist who is considering joining us next semester.
“…. First of all, both my wife, who took the course with me, and I found the program unique and extraordinarily rich in its combined focus on the academic and experiential as well as its breadth in covering the five major spiritual traditions. The quality of the teaching and the teachers is exceptional. They all attended each others’ presentations and were open to discussing their experiences drawn from their own tradition. Each was faithful to their tradition yet totally open to hearing and comparing the other traditions. They modeled what they were presenting; walked the walk and talked the talk. Extraordinarily rich, endearing and loving.
What stood out for me in the experience was an overall movement from my head to my heart. The practices in each tradition both during the intensives and the interim electives grew on me over the two-year period. I started out interested and intrigued and ended up in love! Maintaining that without our community of students and teachers is the challenge now. But it is a challenge that I recognize first of all as a gift.
So, I would make a lot of room in my life for this program. It can be a transformative if you are open to that, to surprises. Over the course of the program I felt there was considerable latitude in terms of how much time I needed to devote to it. Although I no longer practice psychotherapy, I found this program extremely rich and provocative in terms of how our psychological and spiritual journeys intertwine and inform each other. This interface has been my interest for the past thirty years and it will continue to the end I suspect! I think you will find the information and experiences of this program will extend and enrich your analytical practice.”
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Catherine Wyler is a film producer, film festival director, and former head of Cultural Broadcasting for PBS
Orion Pitts is a musician and music director of First United Lutheran Church in San Francisco.
Before starting the first intensive, I envisioned that the SPI program would be 5 glass vessels, and from each vessel I would get some exposure, instruction, and practice in a particular tradition—Sufism, Kabbalah, Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism. And that would have been fine—I wanted to learn about each one. What I got, however, and didn’t expect, was something much more. What I got was a Petri dish, with all these traditions, represented by the faculty, and all the fellow students, all mingling together, sometimes bumping up against each other, occasionally backing off, sometimes merging into small units, sometimes coagulating into one big, messy whole, but always remaining together in the dish, swimming together and bonded together by an unknowable and unseeable substance. I love that Petri dish, and I cherish the joy of continuing to swim around in it.
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Judy Whetstine former federal prosecutor, chair city board of ethics, board chair of environmental justice legal group, and ombudsperson for local media company.
How does one describe an experience that created joy, intellectual curiosity and challenge, warmth, connection, surprise, and an insatiable desire for more?
The Institute was to be an opportunity for expanding my views and actions beyond the tunnel vision of my professional legal life and for learning about the purpose of meditation and its practice. What it gave, instead, was a new dimension for understanding and interacting with “reality” using different spiritual traditions of meditation.
Receiving a basic education in the spirituality of these different contemplative or meditative traditions resulted in a reaction of: where has this experience been all my life?
The Institute’s “structure” of incorporating respect and interaction among the diverse teachers and students, unveiled inter-spirituality. Each tradition’s path, examined by the others, provided a rich context for living and meditating in a diverse spiritual world.
The Institute’s gift was guidance. When falling off the wagon into frustration or despair about the world’s condition, revisiting each tradition’s basis for a contemplative life and re-enforcing the need for a meditative practice lifts me back into the driver’s seat.
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Constance McClain is a college teacher and wellness instructor. Her college courses include “Spirituality and Health” and her welness practice includes yoga, and a variety of other holistic mind-boy-spirit modalities.
“Immeasurable, has been my personal experience as a student in the Spiritual Paths Institute over the past two years. I say this with a certainty born from the highly experiential process this school offers and from the rare quality, deep sincerity and unique faculty and student body. We travelled meaningfully with great support into the mystery and boundless wisdom across an expanse of great spiritual traditions. Rare is a program that guides itself from a bridge of greatest humility and spiritual curiosity while including the students in the process, opening into the inner knowing one must ultimately arrive to on ones own.”
Gigi Ross is a spiritual counselor who has worked with the Shalem Institute in Washington, DC.
Arcot Radhakrishnan is an engineer, a native of Hyderabad, India, and a student of Swami Atmarupananda at Trabucco Monastery. He is presently a student in our two-year program.
“I wanted to express my sincere gratitude to you and the Faculty for the weeks that we spent on the Inter Spiritual Wisdom Course and its retreats. I consider it to a rare privilege to be associated with the Inaugral Year Class.
To call this a transformative experience would be a gross understatement. At one level, for me, it provides many moments of reflection and opportunities for mindfulness practices in my daily life.Our teachers are not merely erudite with regard to the Philosophy and Metaphysics of the Great religions. Their desire and capacity to share their personal philosophy with selfless love, transport this Course from becoming a mere intellectual debate to one of profound transformative lkearnings.
Combining deep philosophy, metaphysics and illustrating the importance of ritualistic practices amongst the Great Traditions makes this Course unique in affecting our lives.
In summary, I am indeed grateful to the Faculty and the group who included me. In their Community. My congratulations to the graduates !.
OM NAMAH SHIVAYAH”
Radhakrishnan
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Jay Gold is a medical doctor from Madison, WI, with extensive experience in both contemplative and academic spiritual study.
“There never has been a program like the Spiritual Paths Interspiritual Wisdom program. If, like me, you believe that different traditions provide different perspectives upon spirituality, and if you want access to spirituality that is not hemmed-in by the viewpoint of your own tradition but takes full account of the viewpoints of others’, then you will find no serious alternatives to Spiritual Paths for providing such access. Studying and practicing different traditions with great teachers, comparing and contrasting them, and integrating appropriate elements of each tradition into my own spirituality, has been one of the great experiences of my life.”