The Hidden Gem in Suffering
Meeting the Hidden Patterns That Keep Us Stuck
The Five Poisons: Transforming Reactivity into Wisdom
The world is turning – and it’s turning hard. Confusion, chaos, and uncertainty seem to ripple through every part of our shared experience. So, it’s natural to feel fear, loss of control, and even a threat to who we are and what we value.
How do we respond when our sense of stability is shaken?
How do we meet the feelings of anger, grief, and helplessness that arise?
How can we stay open, awake, and compassionate — even in the midst of turmoil?
In Buddhist teachings, our instinctive reactions to fear and threat are described as The Five Poisons:
Greed, Anger, Ignorance, Jealousy, and Pride.
These energies arise when we feel our being, or our world, are under attack or misunderstood. They divide us, both from others and from our own deeper wisdom.
Yet within each poison lies a hidden gem – a potential for awakening. When we meet these energies with awareness, they can transform from reactive patterns into powerful insight and compassion.
About the Series
This workshop series is an invitation to explore The Five Poisons as living energies within ourselves and the world. Through meditation, reflection, and Bigmind, we’ll discover how these reactive energies relate and are used to protect our vulnerabilities, habitual patterns, and core wounds – and how they can open our hearts instead of closing them.
We will begin with an introduction and deeper exploration into the three basic poisons of greed, anger and ignorance and from there, we’ll continue into the full cycle of all five poisons, learning to recognize, befriend, and transform them.
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Rather than pushing away our reactivity, we’ll learn to recognize it as part of our human experience – and as a path toward greater wisdom, clarity, and compassion.
What to Expect
This topic – The Five Poisons – is profound, filled with endless subtleties and layers of wisdom still to be discovered. This series offers only a brief and gentle introduction. There is no easy way to work with these teachings — they invite honesty, courage, and patience. Yet we find that the teachings on the poisons hold one of the great keys to understanding humanity’s tendency to separate, to harm, and to perpetuate our deeply rooted patterns when we fear for our identity or safety. Instead of reacting from fear, we can learn to respond from wisdom – together, as one human family. Our wish is to keep this exploration simple and alive, inviting you to inquire and deepen with us.
Date & Time
January 2026 – dates to come
Cost
will soon be announced
Location
Zoom On-line
Facilitator
Jigen Sensei & Seien Roshi
What to bring
Loose clothes for meditation
Notes
The classes include foundational teachings on the Five Poisons and their connection to the Buddha’s early insights. Each session offers guided meditation and group Big Mind exploration. We keep our gatherings intimate, with a maximum of twelve participants, so there is space for everyone to be heard, seen, and fully engaged.
What other people have said about the workshops:
The Hidden Gem in Suffering
“This series was rich and meaningful from the very start. The gentle opening-built trust, and the skilled facilitation encouraged genuine participation.
I loved the clarification that ignorance is the fundamental mistake from which the other poisons become magnified. Attraction and aversion become greed and anger from the mistaken sense of me and mine, mine, mine.”
“The workshop was powerful and eye-opening. Exploring ignorance in depth gave me clarity, and hearing others’ experiences made me feel connected. I left with a deeper awareness of how anger and greed operate — both in myself and in the world — and a renewed sense of how to meet them with practice.”
“Facilitation was brilliant. Really appreciated how everyone was not just encouraged but expected to participate. Felt like a transformative conversation, a solitary “big mind” working together. The open mike could have been messy, but due to the size of the group, or the quality of the participants, or just plain magic, it worked really well.”
Reserve your post
Contact Jigen at email cjuul@me.com