Samye Institute joyfully announces the launch of Training in Compassion: Making your compassion more stable, vast, and effortless, an online, self-paced course taught by Dr. David Shlim. Dr. Shlim is a senior student of Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche, and Phakchok Rinpoche. As an experienced travel medicine doctor, David has devoted his life to demonstrating how Buddhist teachings on the nature of compassion can improve medical care.
Dr. Shlim is the co-author, with Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche, of Medicine and Compassion, a book that offers advice from a Tibetan Buddhist lama on methods of training in compassion for health care professionals. In this Samye online course, David draws upon that book. He expands the topic beyond the health care field, offering any individual the tools to develop their own compassion.
Training in Compassion contains seven units, each containing a lecture from David and specially selected videos of Phakchok Rinpoche’s teachings in the Medicine and Compassion Project.
By taking this course you will open yourself up to understanding the nature of suffering, and ways to overcome suffering in yourself and others. You will learn how to use meditation to decrease the negative thoughts and emotions that disturb our minds, helping you feel more relaxed and able to think about others. Drawing on the deep tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, you will find that a compassionate mindset is a skill that can be cultivated, trained, and developed through practice.
Studying compassion is a method through which we can gain many positive qualities in our lives. Ultimately, Buddhist practice and compassion practice become the same thing. As one of our greatest lamas, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, said, “In an absolute sense, compassion is the awakened nature of the mind.” Together we can learn to train in ways that will reduce our own suffering and the suffering of all those around us. Samye Institute hopes that David’s class will provide you with essential insights into how training in compassion can alleviate the suffering of oneself and others and how a compassionate mindset is an essential companion throughout one’s journey on any spiritual path.
