Opening Yourself: Integrative Dharma Series with Ken Bradford ~ Affinity Group

Series Section 1: Opening to the Heart of the Human Predicament
Location: In Person Only, Nevada City Insight Center, 710 Zion St, Nevada City, CA 95959
Drop-ins welcome.
Dates: 4 Sundays: February 2, 9, 16 & 23
Time: 4:00 - 5:30 pm

Cost: suggested donation $15 - $30 per class, no one turned away for lack of funds.
All donations for this Affinity Group go directly to Mountain Stream to sustain our continuing programs, as the facilitators freely offer their time as a service to the community. Any level of generosity that is received is deeply appreciated ~ thank you.
Affinity Group Dana

Questions: Please email vivian@mtstream.org or carol@mtstream.org

Opening Yourself: Integrative Dharma Series
Inspired by Ken’s book Opening Yourself: The Psychology and Yoga of Self-Liberation, this series offers a teacher-led affinity group similar to the 2024 “Training the Mind” program. Meeting in 4-week blocks 2–3 times per year over two years (or as it unfolds), the series will include retreats and daylongs.

The program integrates three key streams of Buddhadharma—shamatha-vipassana, tonglen, and dzogchen—through embodied practice. Using a mandala of self-liberation, we’ll quiet the mind, tune into felt sensing, and deepen embodied presence. This approach allows us to befriend all parts of ourselves, including unresolved trauma and habitual patterns.

While deeply reckoning with the self is transformative, the series also emphasizes the “game-changing” insight of seeing through the illusion of self. This recognition—of the mind’s empty-openness—frees us from self-referencing and allows compassion and lucidity to arise naturally.

The series will build progressively, with each section and retreat building on the last. While serious practitioners are encouraged to attend all sections, participation is open to anyone drawn to the teachings. Weekly sessions will unfold spontaneously, responding to the group’s emerging needs.

Description of Section 1: We begin by unpacking the Buddhist psychology of the skandhas, exploring how we fabricate a seemingly solid sense of self “out of thin air.” Could it be that samsaric suffering is not something happening to us, but something we are complicit in creating? If so, we can stop doing it.

Through shamatha, vipassana, and self-inquiry, we’ll investigate how our inner sense of self is always tied to an “outer” world, raising the question: What is reality? Engaging with the Heart Sutra, we’ll explore its radical teachings—there is no fixed self, and reality is not as solid as it seems.

This inquiry challenges the notion of a gradual path toward enlightenment. Instead, we cut through the idea of “going somewhere” better, allowing us to fully embrace both our wounds and our intrinsic brilliance, contentment, and kindness.

Bio- Ken Bradford is a contemplative yogin, author and Dharma teacher integrating a wide arc of Buddhist, Dzogchen and psychological thought and practice. His heart teachers include Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, Joseph Goldstein, Ruth Denison and Tsoknyi Rinpoche, among others. Formerly, he maintained a psychotherapy practice in the San Francisco Bay area and was Adjunct Professor at John F. Kennedy University and CIIS. His publications include Opening Yourself: The Psychology and Yoga of Self-liberation (2021); The I of the Other: Mindfulness-Based Diagnosis & the Question of Sanity (2013); and Listening from the Heart of Silence: Nondual Wisdom and Psychotherapy, Vol. 2 (2007, with John Prendergast); as well as numerous peer-reviewed articles intertwining psychology and spirituality. Website: www.authenticpresence.net

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