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3 month residential intensive program at Clear Sky Mindfulness and beyond: a three-month training program. Learning and serving in conscious community. What is the residential intensive program?

A 3 month residential program consisting of daily karma yoga (or selfless service) activities done with mindfulness, living and communicating with a conscious awakening community and inside a strong spiritual container.

Is this program a good fit for you?

Are you:

• looking to spend three months, or longer, focused on fast-tracking your growth?
• seeking new ways to deepen your spiritual practice?
• wanting to learn to live and relate in conscious community?
• open to reaching new levels of freedom, by looking at patterns and views that limit you?
• willing to consider input and training offered by others?
• ready to go the extra mile to complete tasks with engagement and attention to detail?
• reading carefully all of the words on this page, and not just skimming the bits you want to hear about?

If you can answer yes to all of these, we’d be a happy to receive your application for the karma yoga program.

As part of the management team and as a karma yogini, I’ve learned the wisdom of combining skillful interpersonal communication with organizational ability and compassionate training with a heart of loving-kindness.
- Linda Yamashita, January 2013

What is Karma Yoga?

Essentially, we define Karma Yoga as training in mindfulness through action. Clear Sky is a modern-day working monastery, and if you spend time here, you will be training in Karma Yoga through all the community interactions and activities that it takes to run the center.

It takes time to understand what a precious opportunity it is to engage in Karma Yoga at a place like Clear Sky. In fact, no matter how carefully we explain this in advance, we’ve found that people still arrive thinking that Karma Yoga is a fancy phrase for volunteerism, or simply an exchange of work for food and accommodation.

Instead, we’d like you to understand the potential for transformation and growth this ancient discipline offers. The people who succeed in our program, those who stay past the one month trial period, are the ones who come to understand this magical mix of service, community, mindfulness and study.

Mindfulness - moment to moment awareness

Karma Yoga is about bringing consciousness to everything we do. After all, when we practice formal meditation on the cushion, we’re really training the mind to be more focused during all the hours we’re not on the cushion. We’re training the mind to be calmer, all day. We’re aiming for moment-to-moment awareness.

Doing service, then, we treat every action, task, and interaction as a practice in mindfulness, a meditation in action. We look to see what’s going on in each moment. We look with curiosity at why one task is more interesting to us than another. When something stirs up a reaction in us that we weren’t expecting, we see it, accept it, and begin to see the unconscious patterning, the preferences and habits that have been driving us.

Immersed in a community of people doing the same, you’ll experience a sense of connection and honest communication that you may not have experienced before. This happens because compassion and the wish to free ourselves and others from suffering is our main motivation.

What Karma Yoga isn’t

We’d like to clarify a common misunderstanding that comes from the word "Yoga" itself, because of the mainstream use of the word from the practice of physical postures (Hatha Yoga). The word "yoga" derives from words meaning "unite" or "yolk." Karma Yoga is not a form of Hatha Yoga, and to be clear, we do not teach any form of Hatha Yoga, though we absolutely recognize its value.

The Karma Yoga program, based on daily activities, is also not just a way for us to get our chores done - it really matters to us that people who come to the centre understand the nature of what we’re doing here, and engage with us.

What a dramatic shift in my view of human beings since my service stay program at Clear Sky Centre. Others are not a threat! In fact, learning to live with each others has been the most powerful and transformative experience in my life.

- Maryline Fortier, June 2015

Study curriculum

Woven into the daily activities and life of the community, you will study and practice across three main training areas. These follow the three pillars of the Buddhist Noble Eightfold path. You will receive self study material, as well as guidance through periodic morning education slots and one on one check-ins with your assigned mentor.

Ethics/integrating practices (sīla) -

This ranges from exercises and reflections using Clear Sky’s 5 principles to in depth work on communication and team work. You could say this about is what we DON’T get taught. We never learnt at school about healthy conflict, emotional honesty, money issues, working in teams, integrating heart, speech and body in all our actions.

We use a wide variety of resources such as Fifth Discipline, 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, stretch collaboration, and non-violent communication.

Meditation (samādhi)

We will guide you in developing or strengthening your daily meditation practice morning and evening. The program includes an opportunities for a day of practice and a short retreat. Depending on timing you may also have the opportunity to join and receive Tibetan empowerments.

Wisdom / study (pannā)

The curriculum includes study of traditional and modern Dharma, bot Buddhist and more eclectic approaches. There are generally an abundance of opportunities for live, informal in-the-moment teachings with our root teachers, senior students, and members of the community. Meal times are a particularly rich time for questions and lively dialogue. There are opportunities to join classes where available.

Example curriculum self study material:

How challenging is this residential program?

This may well be the most challenging, and rewarding, experience you could have. At times, you’ll likely come up against your limits, which may send you into intense emotions like anger and fear. Typical responses can be shutting down, wanting to escape, or going to something comforting or familiar. Imagine jumping into cold water - all the same responses may occur, and the result is feeling incredibly alive! Clear Sky exists to be the container for these kinds of moments, which are beautifully rich with potential for insights.

We know that everyone goes through these challenges, including ourselves. If we have the courage to honestly meet discomfort, we can train the mind to welcome these moments and open into joyful discovery and growth - in the end, we learn that everything opens into spaciousness. We also know that guidance from those who have experience can save us a lot of time and struggle. As a Karma Yogi you report to a mentor, who assists you in processing your expectations, hopes, and fears, and guides your work. In addition, our founding teachers are generally available for questions and help with processing issues that may arise from unrealistic expectations.

We highly value the emerged individual but we also honor the collective, and the team spirit. This experience is about being immersed in a conscious working community, where allowance for personal preferences is limited. Most find this very enjoyable and enriching, yet if you’re just looking to chill out at a meditation center for a while and expect lots of time to do your own thing, the Karma Yoga program is not for you.

If you do like a challenge, if you want to develop skills you have and find ones you didn’t know you had, if you want to share in an awake, investigating group of people who also manage to have a lot of fun, then we might just be what you are looking for.

In the past, I’ve struggled with business and had a business not work out the way I’d intended. Now, I’m launching a new business, and the reason that I feel confident in the success of this new business is the learning and growth I’ve experienced in the Karma Yoga program at Clear Sky. The training in systems, the experience of being in a team business where we reflect on our own patterns and support each other to change, these things have been transforming. This experience has dramatically enhanced and expanded the skills I couldn’t quite put together before Clear Sky. I recommend it highly.

- Stephen Gilmour, Feb. 2017

What are the benefits of Karma Yoga?

The discipline of Karma Yoga shows us how much our personal preferences want to run things, especially if we’re tired, uncomfortable, not getting what we want, or getting what we don’t want! It shows how resistance and protection use up our energy, needlessly. If we’re watching closely, we see how all of this comes and goes, just like clouds in the sky. It is an incredible experience to realize that we, and we alone, have the power to decide what state of mind we choose to cultivate.

Karma Yoga:

• helps us integrate our inner meditative work with our daily lives; it actualizes the insights.
• shows and frees us from going-nowhere patterns.
• opens up new paths of exploration and discovery by taking us places we don’t usually go.
• strengthens and grows our capacity for greater generosity, discipline, patience, focus, wisdom and JOY.
• develops skill and compassion in communication and relationships, and allows us to connect more deeply.
• boosts our creativity, clarity, and ability to act wisely, quickly.

I’m appreciating more and more how amazing you all are. I’m very pleased how the dharma I gained at Clear Sky has not been dying out in me as I feared, but feels like a seed that is now germinating in me and promising future fruit. I’m so grateful to you all