The Gradual Path Blog
I'm calling this 'Juice Press'. You haven't heard me say this yet but this is where it fits...
Take an orange in the juice press. You lay it up in the capsule. You lay a theme up on the 'squeezer'. Your theme will be the preciousness of human life.
How many of you are musically inclined? You have ...
Think about the worldly refuges first. The worldly things that we take as our refuge, as our sources of comfort, our sources of guidance.
The iPhone... food... the doctor... Netflix... friends and family... fishing... leisure activities...
How well a source are they for the ultimate or existentia...
One of Tsongkhapa's big critiques is that you cannot arrive at enlightenment without a good start. Don't throw out your conceptual knowledge. Don't throw out your ability to reason your way to enlightenment.
Go back for a second to the image of meditation in our culture. What does it look like? It'...
The four features of trauma are rubrics to help you frame your own personal experience. If you start thinking about them very deeply, they will also lend themselves to antidotes or remedies. If you know these four features you also know what the antidotes are, the remedies. The hallmarks of healing ...
The spiritual seeker sees our oneness with all and interconnectivity but it's only the true student of the mind that understands that if we're all one, we're also one with the ugly bits. Dr. Miles Neale explains in this clip from Return with Elixir.
We said that for each of the preliminary practi...
The Hero needs to a find a mentor but they also need to know when to leave the mentor. In this clip from Return with Elixir, using the example of Jung's departure from Freud, Dr. Miles Neale discuss what that might look like.
This class is on the Departure. This dream I raise because it is a livi...
In this excerpt from Return with Elixir, Dr. Miles Neale introduces Joseph Cambell's monomyth, how it can be applied in our own lives and what to expect from the course.
It became clear that another level was necessary the progression to rise above the personal and enter the transpersonal or the ...
When we add this visualization system to the hero's roadmap that we'll unpack in the course, the two coming together is articulating the roadmap of your own development. You have to remember wherever you are right now, as an ordinary person, you and I, we both feel very stuck. To really get the bene...
What are the main building blocks of Buddhahood? There is both the body and the mind of the Buddha. The mind of the Buddha is the mind that realizes complete and utter interdependence or emptiness and the body of the Buddha is of a compassionate, sensitive, capable, skillful agent of change or altru...
In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the mentor or teacher is seen as being the living embodiment of the Buddha. In this clip from Return with Elixir, Dr. Miles Neale discusses the reason behind this and when finding a guru may or may not be appropriate.
I thought that we should talk about the ment...
The motto of the alchemical tradition, solve et coagula, is the transformation of base metals into gold. It is also the heroic transformation of ordinary life, through trials and adversity. Dr. Miles Neale explains in this clip from Return with Elixir.
Solve et coagula is very encapsulating of th...
For millennia the contemplative traditions of India and Tibet have taught that the ultimate nature of reality is empty of inherent existence, and thus insists on social engagement based on love and compassion. This paradox is known as nonduality and understood correctly avoids the extremes of absolu...
