As laypeople, we are fully engaged with ordinary life. Our experience of the world is an ever unfolding series of relationships inseparable from the emotional ups and downs associated with those relationships. From personal relationships with family, friends, work, pets, possessions to larger things like our views and ideas about social and political unfoldings and climate change, our minds are filtering everything that appears. We typically react to these experiences with attachment or aversion based on our conditioning and habitual reactivity, which ends up being the source of much of our emotional afflictions.

The Dharma teaches another way to be in the world. To live with ease and compassion and with freedom to respond wisely to whatever arises – to be in the world without being driven by the world. To be fully involved and present and yet not ensnared, stressed or emotionally depleted.

How do we move through life without attachment and at the same time, without rejecting or withdrawing from the world? How do we live with love, compassion and healthy engagement rather than with emotional drama? In this half day workshop, Fred will provide targeted big picture teachings, real world examples, and concrete practices to facilitate participants ability to navigate their worldly life with greater ease and understanding.

Fred Eppsteiner, a Dharma teacher in the lineage of Thich Nhat Hanh, has been a student of Buddhism and a practitioner of meditation for over fifty years and has devoted himself to teaching the Dharma (teachings of the Buddha) since 1996. Although Fred has practiced primarily in the Zen and Tibetan Buddhist lineages, he bases his teachings on the full breadth of Buddhist philosophical, psychological and meditative traditions.