The Gradual Path to Freedom and Happiness: Awakening Your Wise Mind, Warm Heart and Inner Altruist Through Insight Meditation

This third course in the Nalanda Institute Sustainable Happiness Program covers everything you need to know about contemplative living, a step at a time, gradually unpacking the insights of self-healing, social engagement, and heroic altruism together with the practices of mindfulness, compassion and role-modeling imagery that foster them. Taught by contemplative psychotherapist and celebrated author Dr. Pilar Jennings, the course surveys the lifelong journey of contemplative healing and transformation at the heart of the Nalanda tradition preserved in Tibet. This world-class system of learning, reflection, and practice, designed to sustain contemplative life in the busy world, maps our journey from surviving to thriving in ways that empower us to make tangible progress through step-by-step insight and life-change.

This retreat reviews how reflection on the gradual path is put to use in guiding an ongoing shift in outlook, mindset, and lifestyle that supports progressive gains in healing awareness, engagement and purpose.

Join two luminous masters, Pilar Jennings and Mary Reilly Nichols, as they guide you through a day of powerful transformation. Experience reflections on the gradual path, insight meditation practice, and embodied cognition through gentle asana and pranayama.

The focus will be on surveying the step-by-step logic of repeated reflection that empowers students to gradually assimilate the wisdom and healing arts of the three vehicles of transformation we need to complete our journey to sustainable happiness in mind, heart, and life. We’ll review the step-by-step method of using mindfulness, compassion, vision, and breath-work to enrich learning and reflection, build positive motivation, and foster deep contemplation and transformative action in the world. Wisdom and embodied cognition are woven into the themes of this retreat.

This extraordinary day, led by two of NYC’s most dedicated practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism and Tantric Yoga, is a culminating retreat for the 3rd Course of the Sustainable Happiness Program, however all are welcome and encouraged to take part in this amazing retreat!

Meet Dr. Jennings

Pilar Jennings, PhD, is a psychoanalyst focused on the clinical applications of Buddhist meditation who has been working with patients and their families through the Harlem Family Institute since 2004. She was awarded her PhD in Psychiatry and Religion from Union Theological Seminary, a Masters in medical anthropology from Columbia University, and a Bachelors in interdisciplinary writing from Barnard College of Columbia University. Dr. Jennings is the author of Mixing Minds: The Power of Relationship in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism and To Heal a Wounded Heart: The Transformative Power of Buddhism and Psychotherapy in Action. Currently, she is a researcher at the Columbia University Center for Study of Science and Religion and Co-chair of the Columbia Faculty Seminar on the Memory and Savery, where she explores the intergenerational transmission of trauma.

“It is such a joy to teach the Buddha-Dharma! Exploring the sacred texts of the Gradual Path with Nalanda Institute students is an on-going reminder that healing and well-being is always possible. This is a wonderfully optimistic tradition backed by accessible teachings and methods for reflecting on personal, psychological, and spiritual matters. I so look forward to being in conversation with students and practitioners, and together bolstering our capacity for insight, compassion, fortitude, and an ever deepening wisdom. Especially during these tumultuous times, it is a blessing to come together to meditate on the happiness and fulfillment of all beings. It'll be a gift to meet you! —PJ

Meet Mary Reilly Nichols

Mary Reilly Nichols, is the Director of Nalanda Institute’s Yoga, Mind & Spirit program and has been teaching yoga for over 30 years. She specializes in yoga with an emphasis on the development of wisdom and experience through the lens of non-duality offered in the Upanishads, Advaita Vedanta, as well as in the Tantric methods of Kashmiri Shaivism and Kundalini Yoga. She holds a BA in anthropology from Harvard University, is a devoted student of Muktananda, and completed five years of residency in meditation ashrams in both India and the US. Currently, Nichols teaches stress management in psychiatric settings and is involved in ongoing research on the mind/body benefits of yoga and meditation.

About the Nalanda Institute

The Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science is an educational non-profit inspired by the world’s first university, Nalanda University, founded in India in the fifth century to advance the Buddha’s mission to end suffering by offering public education in the health and mind sciences.

We train people from all walks of life in timeless contemplative skills informed by practical neuropsychology to empower themselves and others to cultivate a wise mind, compassionate heart, and altruistic way of being in our interdependent world.

The Institute is home of the Sustainable Happiness Program. The program offers the college-level education everyone needs but never gets in a modern university: four years of intensive training in the contemplative sciences, practices and life skills a person needs to break free of stress and thrive happily in our interdependent world.