Using Illness as a Springboard to Personal Growth
Illness is a path to deep personal growth. Understanding how this growth occurs can offer a direct route to a better, more mature, and more sane experience of being human, even in the midst of tragedy.
This course begins each January
Sign Up NowLearn to harness the tragedy of chronic illness for deep and lasting personal growth and development.
This virtual course begins January 4th, 2022.
When illness strikes it can feel like the rug is pulled out from under you: your identity, career, relationships, plans, and even your sense of who you are all altered, turned over, and shaken up. Being derailed in this way can be excruciating, but with the right tools, support, and awareness, it can also be an opportunity for growth. This growth won’t necessarily change your circumstances, but it can give you more freedom within them.
“A person who is beginning to sense the suffering of life is, at the same time, beginning to awaken to deeper realities, truer realities. For suffering smashes to pieces the complacency of our normal fictions about reality, and forces us to become alive in a special sense—to see carefully, to feel deeply, to touch ourselves and our worlds in ways we have heretofore avoided.” --Ken Wilber, from No Boundary
Using Illness as a Springboard to Personal Growth, our 6-week live, virtual course, we focus on the tools and understandings you need to use illness as a path to deep personal development. Using Ken Wilber’s Integral map (which we will teach you), we study how development occurs and the ways that the experience of illness and caregiving can offer a direct route to a better, more mature, and increasingly sane experience of being human.
This Course Will Help You:
- Understand the process of growth and understand what a fully developed human being looks like
- Determine where you are on the map of development
- Learn practices that can help you develop beyond your current capacities and perspectives
- Mine the chronic illness or caregiving experience to find the gems hidden within the pain
- Learn from others in the course how to navigate this experience with grace and wisdom
This Course Is For:
- People who are interested in personal growth and development
- People who are interested in validating the growth they have experienced in living with chronic illness
- People who are ready to step out of a victim story and into their power
- People who want to live lives that are meaningful and growthful despite illness
Register Now for $197
Or, if you need a discount, contact me at [email protected]. No one will be turned away for financial reasons.
Register now!What you'll receive
— 6 modules packed with helpful ideas, questions, and practices.
— Multiple materials ranging from pdfs. to videos
— Links and referrals to helpful resources
— 6 live Zoom calls which feature both teaching and discussion, recorded and archived on the site
— A supportive group of participants to share with and learn from
Course Overview
Week 1: Overview. The Trajectory of Personal Development
Week 2: The Stages of Development; the Gifts of Infrared Sensation and Magenta Openness
Week 3: The Gifts of Red Power and Amber Conformity
Week 4: The Gifts of Orange Rationality and Green Sensitivity
Week 5: The New Consciousness - Integral Wholeness
Week 6: Integration; Creating Your Personal Growth Map
Using Illness as a Springboard to Personal Growth is part 4 of our 6-part Koan of Illness series.
Each of our live, 6-week, stand-alone courses addresses a part of the illness experience and is designed both for people suffering from chronic illness and caregivers. You can begin with any of the courses, pick and choose, or do them all
More info about the KOI CoursesThe Koan Of Illness series
The Koan of Illness 1: Empowering Yourself
Does the complexity of chronic illness management overwhelm you? Do you struggle to navigate the paperwork, the emotions, the lifestyle changes that illness brings?
Everyone who deals with illness, whether patient, caregiver, provider, or administrator, deals with a complex mixture of personal, technical, institutional, and spiritual issues.
The Koan of Illness Part 2: Healing the Trauma
When you learn that illness is a part of your life and likely to be for some time, it is often a traumatic event. You may begin with denial and move through other stages such as anger or grief. You find that illness touches every aspect of your life – from your physical existence to your spirituality. Often it creates havoc with your relationships , your self-esteem, and your beliefs...
The Koan of Illness Part 3: Healing Your Relationships
Chronic illness brings changes and challenges to every relationship – your partner, children, parents, employer, friends, and even yourself. Your relationships can fracture or deepen depending on how you integrate illness into them.
The Koan of Illness Part 4: Illness as a Springboard for Personal Growth
Chronic illness can seem like a prison sentence, isolating you from life and taking away opportunities you might have had. However, illness is as valid a life path as any other, and, often, people with illness are able to use that difficulty to deepen their personal growth. In this course, we use the integral map to look at the process of individual growth...
The Koan of Illness Part 5: Chronic Illness and Spirituality
How does one find spirit in the midst of pain and loss? How can illness offer opportunities for spiritual growth? In this course, we use the integral map to look at the spiritual aspects of illness and explore how illness offers a path to awakening and an opportunity to develop spiritual intelligence.
The Koan of Illness Part 6: Integration: A New Vision for Healing
How can I create a personal plan for growth in the midst of the complexity that is illness and personal development?
How can I relate to the systems in which I have to operate?
What are my Koans?
Your Instructor
Dr. Lynn Royster Fuentes
Lynn is a college instructor, educational course designer, and a mediator with a BA, MA, JD, and PhD. An experienced classroom and online instructor, she has designed and taught courses in transpersonal psychology, writing, planning, chronic illness, and conflict management at DePaul University, where she also founded and directed the Chronic Illness Initiative, a program to help students with chronic illness obtain a degree.
A devoted student of Ken Wilber and integral philosophy, she has published integrally oriented essays and articles on conflict resolution and illness management and weaves integral ideas into her course design and teaching. She follows an integral life practice of physical, psychological, meditative, and cognitive development.
Lynn has volunteered in many capacities – with battered women, people in the recovery community, and people with chronic illness – and served on the board of the Solve ME/CFS Association of America for many years. Despite her study of many disciplines, Lynn regards her greatest learning as long-term caregiver for severely ill family members.
Scholarships are available
Please contact [email protected]
For the current course in the series please head over here.
