You’ll receive a mind-expanding introduction to Spiritual Peacemaking as a map of peace. This will catalyze your development of a spiritually aligned vision along with knowledge, processes and skill that will move you beyond piecemeal conflict resolution efforts into deep personal and social transformation.

In this module, you will:

• Learn how we bring the convergence of separate and diverse disciplines such as law, science, psychology, social theory, conscious evolution and spiritual insight into a breakthrough vision of peace.
• Align with a higher consciousness, upgrading your vision and skills, to create a field where inner and outer are synchronized and synergized with your fullest potential.
• Learn how to articulate a hopeful evolutionary perspective on violent conflict: how we got here and where we are going.
• Learn how to create an integral peace map to use for personal alignment with spiritual work and visionary service.

In this module, you will deepen your understanding of different states of consciousness and how they activate positive or negative emotions and entrain behavioral patterns that uplift self and others. You’ll understand how emotionality triggers reactivity and find out why certain states, though not violent in themselves, end up destroying peace, sabotage relationships and lead to antagonism.

In Module 2, you will learn how to:

• Release suppressed grief to prevent antagonism and violence.
• Channel the energy of raw anger in ways that are morally enlightening rather than damaging to others.
• Cultivate a state of peace that can positively affect thousands of other lives.
• Explore your role in holding states of consciousness that catalyze a tipping point in shifting consciousness.

Discoveries in neuroscience, heart science, human biochemistry and mind-body science offer new approaches to creating a culture of peace and give us specific peace practices to develop and master peacemaking at every level of relationship. During this module, you will learn to understand the frequencies of thought and emotion; speaking and listening; intuition and inner guidance; meditation and action.

In Module 3, you will:

• Learn to apply these frequencies in tense encounters and for advanced peace work.
• Learn to recognize and correct fragmentation and triggers and reach heart/mind coherence.
• Review communication strategies that get to the heart of spiritual peacemaking and guide us to experiencing a state of communion and oneness with others.
• Attain the spiritual high of altruism, visionary service and collaboration.
• Review the science of holarchy and wholeness, which help us understand both limiting blind spots and the wider perspective that leads to compassion.

Karma is the law of cause and effect deriving from sanskaras, which are accumulated impressions or psychic imprints. Spiritually advanced peacemakers learn how impressions are cleared through specific insight and knowledge; this knowledge is gained through understanding both sides of the coin – victim/perpetrator, rich/poor, male/female.

Receive guidance on how to create a map of your personal Karmic profile, which contains all imprints and how they were dealt with – where we have learned and achieved insight and where we are stuck.

In Module 4, you will:

• Explore individual, family and societal karmic profiles to create context for personal and collective healing.
• Forge pathways to higher principles to choose forgiveness over perpetual resentment and partnership over domination, which create good karma.
• Learn why releasing negative karma is not about being good as much as being true.
• Receive the latest scientific research on the continuity of consciousness beyond the brain and after death – including near death experiences and reincarnation – and why this science is key to spiritual peacemaking.

Duality serves us in very functional ways, but when ego takes over opposites get polarized and create chaos, injustice and enmity. Learning to work with opposites as complementary while defusing rigid polarities is the heart of peacemaking – as is understanding nonduality as the basis for unity.

In Module 5, you will:

• Learn how to remove the charge of otherness while celebrating diversity and clarifying values.
• Learn the high art of practicing crucial deep discernment while also practicing non-judgment.
• Recognize how ego operates at the center of polarizing conflict and the psychological states it uses for cover.
• Exercise personal power to embody peace at home, in the office and in your community.

This module moves you towards mastery of dialogue and truth process to reach the highest truth beyond accommodation or compromise. You will also explore energy mastery and how to recognize the structure of wounds and triggers in yourself and others and how to deal with them in a transformational way.

In Module 6, you will:

• Commit to universal servanthood; making your vows as a transformational peacemaker.
• Learn to nurture your own gifts, holy names and creative predisposition.
• Understand how to embody passion without ego – – cultivating equipoise.
• Activate power with humility.
• Expand your capacity for love and self-actualization.

In this final module, you will learn about six elements for manifesting your vision and how you can uniquely organize them in your life to share the gift of peace with others. We will also summarize and integrate the course work, laying the groundwork for practices you can move forward with for years to come.

In Module 7, you will work with six key elements:

• Vision: Embodying the vision that you have acquired in the course.
• Relational Field: Taking the spiritual peacemaking practices into the world and into all of your relationships.
• Intuition: Continuously fine-tuning your intuition and energy-reading capacities so that you are spiritually informed in every conflict.
• Timing: From learning to work on the subtle planes to cultivating master timing in ways that will bring spiritual healing and transformation in your work.
• Great Mystery: Surrendering to the great mystery as a dynamic engagement with the deepest guidance for your peacemaking work.
• Passion: Awakening the passion of the conscious activist and spiritual peacemaker to create a new template for social transformation.

Matthew Fox has a cosmology where the individual and all of nature are expressions of God. When you tap into your oneness with God, you experience deep peace in your soul, which is the foundation for all peace. Many of the current paradigms and systems – church, education, military industry, politics – are based on separation and fear; therefore, they are out of alignment with cosmic law and are not reflective of our highest potential.

In this special session, Matthew explores the challenges and sacrifices of speaking your truth to power, including his experience with the Catholic church. He also talks about the three brains – reptilian, mammalian and neocortex – and how we, as humans, can respond to the global crisis, such as climate change, selfishly, (each person and nation for him/itself) or with compassion for all.

Matthew Fox is the author of 28 books including Original Blessing:The Reinvention of Work; Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet; One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from Global Faiths; A Spirituality Named Compassion; A New Reformation!; andThe A.W.E. Project: Reinventing Education, Reinventing the Human. He was a member of the Dominican Order for 34 years and holds a doctorate (received summa cum laude) in the History and Theology of Spirituality from the Institut Catholique de Paris.

In this provocative dialogue, James and Rabbi Lerner discuss how the creative intelligence of Spirit is guiding the evolution of the entire physical universe. Suffering comes when people act from free will in a way that harms others – they then experience the karmic consequences of their actions. The Jewish tradition has periods of atonement where people come back into alignment with cosmic law. Rabbi Lerner also explores the transmission of pain from generation to generation and the need to overcome the patterns, especially in Israel and Palestine.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is an internationally renowned social theorist, theologian and psychotherapist. He is the founder and publisher of Tikkun, one of the most respected intellectual/cultural magazines in the Jewish world. He is the rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue, which meets in San Francisco and Berkeley. Lerner received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the Wright Institute.

In this bonus dialogue, James and Dena discuss the idea that all religions come from one source. Each religion is a different path to the same goal – union with the Divine. In Dena’s work with the Global Initiative of Women (GPIW) she has seen several trends emerging around the world. One is that religions are moving away from competition – my religion is the only way – to understanding that each religion is a legitimate path. She is seeing more people drawn to “spirituality” and away from religious dogma – people wanting to be taught how to have their own experience with the Divine causing an increase in the practice of meditation and yoga. The growing trend of individual focus on spiritual growth is helping shift societal narratives of conflict and violence. Dena and the GPIW have worked extensively to raise awareness about the role of the Divine Feminine working harmoniously with masculine energies in peacemaking.

Dena Merriam recently received the 31st Niwano Peace Prize, one of the most prestigious global interfaith awards. Dena’s work in the interfaith movement began in the late 1990s. In 2000, she served as vice chair of Millennium World Peace Summit and Spiritual Leaders at the United Nations, and subsequently convened a group of women religious and spiritual leaders at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva to form the Global Peace Initiative of Women (GPIW). The GPIW’s mission is twofold: to empower women to facilitate healing and reconciliation globally and to initiate greater discourse between religions and initiatives in civil society addressing critical global problems. Merriam also serves on the boards of the Interfaith Center of New York, AIM for Seva and Dharma Drum Mountain Buddhist Association. She is a former member of the board of Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions and the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy. And, she is co-chair of the Millennium World Peace Summit, the first summit held at the United Nations General Assembly for more than 1,500 of the world’s religious leaders.