Suffering: A User’s Guide
with Paul Fulton
Residential Program
Dates: Feb 02, 2024 – Feb 04, 2024
Days: Friday – Sunday
Number of Nights: 2 nights
Instructor: Paul R. Fulton
Overcoming suffering, avoiding unpleasant experience, and pursing happiness are common motivations in our conscious and unconscious lives. While we are all familiar with suffering and can often recognize it in ourselves and others, there are countless ways of understanding its causes and solutions. How we understand suffering shapes what we think is to be done about it. In this program, we will explore a range of different accounts of suffering and how our own understanding is shaped by personal history, culture, science, and personality, with particular attention to the underlying assumptions about suffering found in clinical psychology and psychotherapy. We will then explore the Buddha’s formulation of the origin and cessation of suffering. Through presentation, readings, deep conversation, and practice we will explore these various accounts, opening new possibilities for understanding–and responding to–suffering, both our own and the suffering of others. This program is open to all, though it is particularly relevant for mental health practitioners and other caregivers.