Saturdays: April 12 / 19 / 26 & May 3

1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. ET

About the Course

The word “bardo” is a Buddhist term often used for the after-death experience. But it also describes the gap triggered by any unexpected crisis. The shock of illness, death, or any kind of loss can be the most brutal of interruptions. Your life’s timeline no longer makes sense. You feel vulnerable and alone. But we’re not truly alone. We’ve just dropped out of everyday life into a new dimension, a bardo-world that appears as if out of nowhere.

–Susan Chapman

In this course, consisting of four live sessions, you will explore how the Buddhist teachings on the bardo can be a guide to keeping our hearts open when life seems to fall apart.

Susan will draw from her new book, Which Way is Up?, as a guide for meeting the bardos of everyday life by understanding three different kinds of fear:

• Awake Fear: The first kind of fear is disillusionment– waking us up from our illusions like a loving protector. It’s time to face  reality and the truth of impermanence. When we meet this fear with lovingkindness, it resolves into mindfulness and the joy of being alive.

• Frozen Fear: The second kind of fear happens when the fog returns. It’s a dangerous but familiar habitual pattern that lures us back into our illusions. This is a time when we need to trust a loving friend who can help us unmask our toxic certainties and let go into groundlessness.

• Core Fear: The third kind of fear is a background anxiety, the doubt about our basic goodness. We’ve been spinning a defensive cocoon to avoid this fear, without turning around and examining it. The bardo journey gives us a chance to let go of this false identity and come home to our true nature.

Susan will further explore with participants that to work with these three kinds of fear, we can lookat three kinds of love:

• Loving Presence: Being willing to be present with whatever experience we’re going through is the way to support Awake Fear.
• Compassionate Insight: The way to work with denial, or frozen fear, is with compassion, feeling the pain of shutting down, and insight, being curious about where our ideas and opinions come from.
• Mother-Child Reunion: Our core fears go back to the misunderstandings of early childhood when we formed ideas about who we are to stay in relationship with the caring adults in our life. Somewhere along the line we concluded that there was something wrong with who we are, “I’m unworthy, unloveable, unforgivable, unwelcome”. When we discover our basic goodness, it’s as though the loving mother of wisdom brings the lost child home, showing us our true nature.

Susan’s warmth, gentleness, and loving kindness pervade these powerful teachings. Her approach to presenting the bardo teachings is informed by her personal experiences with death which have turned her towards understanding that there is beauty and sacredness in every moment of life. The themes of love and fear, along with the Buddhist teachings on death and dying, have been her central focus over the past few years after beingdiagnosed with an aggressive cancer in 2020. Susan shared: 

The experience of chemotherapy in particular gave me a taste of witnessing my familiar body and mind dissolve into someone new. The thread I was able to hold onto was trust in the heart-instructions, to bring loving presence to fear, to let go into a bigger space of tender vulnerability, and most importantly to have a deeper understanding of what suffering means to countless others.

Join Susan for a tender, personal, and compassionate approach to ancient bardo teachings that will feel relevant for everyone who struggles with the groundless and transitory nature of life.

A bardo is an emotional free-fall. We’ve moved into a strange new neighborhood, or we just lost our job. It’s the morning after a painful fight with our lover. It feels like a sinkhole has opened with our past on one side and our future on the other. We are refugees from the life we thought we had. Like refugees, we need to know where to find support, shelter, and nourishment. The path of awakening through fear is with love. Love is stronger than fear.

-Susan Chapman

About Susan

Susan Chapman has been studying and practicing the Shambhala and Buddhist dharma for over 50 years. During that time she’s worked in prisons, battered women’s shelters and in private practice as a family therapist. She spent nine years in retreat at Gampo Abbey followed by 10 years serving as an acharya. In 2020 she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer and her experience in that living bardo is the basis for her new book and this class.

Publications: The Five Keys To Mindful Communication and Which Way Is Up? (newly released).

What Participants are Saying About Susan

Susan is kind, wise, and crystal clear in her teaching. She achieves both depth and clarity, like still waters.

Susan Chapman always feels very real/unpretentious teaching from her studies, practice and experience. She explains the topic very clearly and she touches my soul when she teaches.

Susan’s presentation and embodiment of the teachings was exceptional. The material presented was profound and rich. So much content and yet it was presented in a way that was very accessible and could be received in different ways by different people with varying dharma study and practice histories. I found it personally very helpful as it brought together different teachings into a framework with key practices attached and instructions and examples of application in everyday life – on and off the cushion.

She is a treasure.

Susan hit right at the “heart” of the bardo experience.