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.

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Learn to harness the tragedy of chronic illness for deep and lasting personal growth and development.

Actionable Information

6 modules packed with helpful ideas, questions, and practices.

Meaningful Interaction

6 live Zoom calls which feature both teaching and discussion, recorded and archived on the site. Be apart of a supportive group of participants to share with and learn from.

Useful Resources

Multiple materials including PDF downloads, links to helpful resources and in depth videos. PLUS access a special bonus course: The Six Skills Of Meditation.

Our virtual course will help you 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.

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

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Pay what you an afford. No one will be turned away for financial reasons.

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

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.

FAQs

Do I have to do all of the courses? Or, do them in order?

What if I can’t attend the live calls?

Who are these courses for?

Testimonials

Wendy

And Lynn – simply wow! Thanks for being such a pioneer and putting such an educational and heart-full class together for our benefit. I will read and re-read your handouts as I continue to live with this chronic illness. Your work is a blessing and a deep comfort to me. It is good to be understood and to have partners on this journey. So thank you for showing up on my computer – I will never forget you!

Liz Taylor

As a person struggling with a chronic condition, I find the world isn’t often interested in hearing about my challenges when they come back again and again. But being able to hear from, respond to and talk live with others who share that experience gave me a sense of being seen and heard in such a healing way. Never have I felt so connected to so many new friends in such a deep and meaningful way.

Heather

Lynn has created a way of seeing our experience of illness that empowers and enlivens. Being part of her course let’s me know I’m part of a greater whole where my challenges are shared. I can feel connected, seen and heard. Even the difficult stuff is allowed.

Brent

I can’t count the blessings and benefits these courses have been for me. When I was first looking for a sponsor in AA, it was suggested that I look for a man “that had something I wanted”. Don’t worry, I have a sponsor – but that’s the feel I get from you.

You have a wonderful presence – kind, wise and humble. I’m not the best book learner/reader – I’m more experiential. This has been a great experience in learning Integral theory and practice.

Thank you! Deep bow of gratitude.

Susan Schuurmans

The course has prodded me out of my comfort zones, humbled me when I see the challenges others face, invited me into a valuable self-assessing of myself, and challenged me to engage once again with the Integral model, this time grittily working on my understanding of myself and where I can grow into further ways to work with great consciousness with this dis-ease. Lynn teaches from a place of being a person still learning after all these years in the territory of illness and caretaking and shares as a companion on this challenging journey how she finds the perspective of Integral is useful when living with illness.

Laria

This course is wonderfully thought provoking and has so many valuable tools I hope to keep revisiting it again and again to further contemplate all that you have given us.