Spacious Mind
Coaching
Coaching
Welcoming Life As-it-is:
Coaching, Conferences and Courses
Contemplative Dialogue based on Non-dual Buddhism and Advaita
Coaching, Conferences and Courses
Contemplative Dialogue based on Non-dual Buddhism and Advaita
Welcome.
Namaste.
Namaste.
The greatest of the great is the spacious mind...
its nature a supreme and uninterrupted evenness.
Longchen Rabjam (Longchempa)
The Precious Treasury of The Way of Abiding
Welcome to Spacious Mind Coaching.
I'm Michael Shandler. My intention in hosting this site is to let people know about the Spacious Mind approach and the events, workshops and coaching services that are available. At the same time, I want the site to offer powerful teachings that express the essence of open spaciousness and presence. I hope readers will find these inspiring and instructive. If you are interested in what is shared here contact me at: michael@spaciousmindcoaching.com
Many of the photographs that appear on the site are courtesy of Josh Gladstone, from his 2006 trip to China and Tibet.
The Spacious Mind Approach
Spacious Mind brings us into the now, and uses this moment as the opportunity for freedom and fulfillment. Peace and inner harmony arise through being genuinely open and present to our moment-to-moment experience.
In learning to genuinely accept our experience - comfort and discomfort, joy and suffering - we enter Spacious Mind, where conflict and problems lose their charge and are held spaciously in stillness.
Deconstructive Contemplation
Spacious Mind Coaching combines the insights of timeless nondual wisdom with mindfulness, dialog and deconstructive contemplation. The process brings awareness into the foreground, creating a detached release of fixations as they arise. The result is a spaciousness that transcends and dissolves the conditioning and stories that hold us hostage.
Spacious Mind Coaching is an innovative and contemporary synthesis of ancient wisdom found in non-dual Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, ancient Hindu non-dualism. Traditional life coaching often focuses on achieving external goals, but here the purpose is to help clients rest in see how their own habits of mind - their interpretations of experience - skew right action and peace of mind.
Coaching Process
The central aspects of Mindfulness – serenity and insight – form the contemplative container for the interchanges between coach and client. These conversations and inquiries lead to the gentle release of fixations, thereby facilitating a natural open awareness unfettered by identification with thoughts and emotions.
From within this spacious awareness, coach and client look at mind structures that cause suffering. For example:
- The moment-to-moment "core fixations" of attraction and aversion, and how we gain release from our preferences and conditioning.
- The construction and attachment to our "stories" - our unconscious biases, beliefs, expectations, fixations, judgments etc.
- Attachment to our own suffering and interpretations of reality.
The result is a deep sense of peace and presence that transcends limiting identities and stories.
Who Benefits from Spacious Mind?
Any person with a sincere desire to take responsibility for their lives will benefit from the Spacious Mind approach. Although some experience in meditation can be helpful, it is not a prerequisite; what is important is a sincere desire to live in freedom and an openness to seeing how we construct suffering. Any life experience or life transition is fertile ground to begin this work. The result is a deeper sense of peace and relaxation, truly what Buddhists call “ultimate medicine.”
To see the results of this work from the client's perspective please go to testimonials.
