Discover a timeless path for cultivating compassion, courage, patience, and wisdom in daily life.
Many of us feel the stirrings of compassion. We want to live with more kindness, be less reactive, and have the ability to meet suffering — our own and others’ — without shutting down.
Daily life can make this difficult. Anger flares, habits take over, and attention is scattered. The needs of the world can feel overwhelming. Even sincere practice can begin to feel like something we force, rather than something that renews and sustains us.
But the famed Buddhist text, The Way of the Bodhisattva, by Shantideva, offers us a fresh approach, leading us to engage the awakened, boundless heart that is already present within us. Our project, then, is to simply learn to recognize it, trust it, protect it, and let it guide our lives.
In this five-part online course, scholar-practitioner Gaylon Ferguson brings Shantideva’s profound teachings to life as a practical path for our time. Through talks, guided meditations, reflection exercises, and a live mini-retreat, you’ll explore how the bodhisattva path — in which we more often put others before ourselves —offers direct antidotes to isolation, reactivity, burnout, despair, confusion, and rigid thinking.
This is a course about returning to the compassionate intelligence already present within you — and learning how to live from it with greater courage, steadiness, and joy.
Enroll Today
Begin the Course on June 1st.
Help Lion’s Roar sustain our free programs, scholarships, and accessible community learning.
Our reduced standard price to make the course accessible to as many people as possible.
Pay the standard rate in three installments.
What You’ll Experience
In this course, you’ll learn to:
☸ Recognize bodhicitta
The awakened heart — as an innate capacity for compassion, care, and courageous openness.
☸ Understand how patterns can obscure your natural compassion
How mindfulness-awareness helps you see them clearly
☸ Explore the bodhisattva commitment as a living orientation toward benefiting others
Rather than a distant or unattainable spiritual ideal.
☸ Practice patience as strength
A brave, active way of meeting anger, conflict, blame, and difficulty without becoming hardened or reactive.
☸ Cultivate joyful effort
So that helping others becomes not a burden or obligation, but a source of nourishment, energy, and purpose.
☸ Deepen meditation and wisdom
Through teachings on interdependence, openness, and the lossening of fixed views — so compassion can become more flexible, responsive, and free.
Course Structure & Module Highlights
This five-module course offers approximately 5.5 hours of teachings and guided practices, plus a live mini-retreat with Gaylon Ferguson.
You’ll be guided step by step through Shantideva’s essential teachings in a way that is grounded, accessible, and immediately relevant to contemporary life.
MODULE 1 : Awakening the Heart
LESSON 1: The Benefits and Practice of Bodhicitta
Shift from self-centeredness to a revolutionary care for others. Learn to recognize the innate "awakened heart" (bodhicitta) expressed through ordinary kindness, listening, and the wish to relieve suffering.
LESSON 2: Guided Loving-Kindness Meditation
A guided practice to stabilize the heart’s warmth and extend goodwill toward loved ones, strangers, and ultimately all beings.
MODULE 2 : Habitual Patterns
LESSON 1: Recognizing the Clouds Over the Heart
Understand how aggression, grasping, and distraction act as temporary "clouds" obscuring your natural compassion. Use mindfulness to notice these patterns without self-criticism.
LESSON 2: Mindfulness of Breath and Body
Ground yourself in direct experience. Learn to steady the mind and carry awareness into daily activities to maintain presence.
MODULE 3 : Commitment to Compassion
LESSON 1: Sustaining Practice Through Conscientiousness
Explore the "six transcendent actions" (generosity, ethics, patience, effort, meditation, and wisdom) as a framework for living. Learn to use intention as a source of direction and renewal.
LESSON 2: Meditation on Commitment
Transform aspiration into a steady inner direction by dedicating body, speech, and mind to the benefit of all.
MODULE 4 : Patience and Joyful Exertion
LESSON 1: Forbearance and Vigor
Reframe patience as a courageous strength for meeting conflict without reactivity. Cultivate "joyful exertion" to prevent burnout and make compassion a source of energy.
LESSON 2: Sending and Taking
Introduction to a powerful practice for transforming suffering into well-being, specifically useful for resolving anger and conflict.
MODULE 5: Meditation and Wisdom
LESSON 1: Meditative Concentration and Interdependence
See clearly how interdependence loosens fixed views. Learn how wisdom makes compassion more spacious, flexible, and free from concepts of "self" and "other."
LESSON 2: Guided Loving-Kindness Meditation
A final practice integrating steadiness and openness. The course ends with the "dedication of merit," offering the benefits of practice back to the world.
Plus: A Live Mini-Retreat
Sunday June 28 | 1-4pm ET
As part of the course, you’ll be invited to join a live online mini-retreat with Gaylon Ferguson.
This gathering will give you space to deepen and integrate the course teachings through guided practice, reflection, and further exploration of the bodhisattva path. After moving through Shantideva’s teachings on compassion, habitual patterns, commitment, patience, joyful effort, meditation, and wisdom, the mini-retreat offers a chance to reconnect with the heart of the course in a shared practice setting.
Help Lion’s Roar sustain our free programs, scholarships, and accessible community learning.
Our reduced standard price to make the course accessible to as many people as possible.
Pay the standard rate in three installments.
Meet Your Teacher: Gaylon Ferguson
Gaylon Ferguson, PhD, has been leading mindfulness and meditation retreats since 1976. For fifteen years he was core faculty in Religious and Interdisciplinary Studies at Naropa University, one of North America’s foremost centers of contemplative education.
He is the author of Welcoming Beginner’s Mind, Natural Wakefulness, and Natural Bravery. Gaylon brings to his teaching a rare combination of deep scholarly understanding and decades of lived practice — as well as a warmth and accessibility that makes even the most profound teachings feel immediate and personal.
In this course, Gaylon serves as a trusted guide to Shantideva’s Way of the Bodhisattva, helping students encounter this classic text not as a historical artifact, but as a living source of wisdom for our lives now.
Course Features
When you enroll, you’ll receive:
Five in-depth course modules with Gaylon Ferguson, offering approximately 5.5 hours of teachings and guided practices.
Guided meditations to help you cultivate loving-kindness, mindfulness-awareness, steadiness, openness, and dedication.
Practical reflection exercises to help you bring the teachings into daily life, relationships, conflict, and moments of reactivity.
A live mini-retreat with Gaylon Ferguson, offering an opportunity to deepen your practice in real time. Sunday, June 28 from 1-4pm ET.
Lifetime access to all course materials, plus downloads, transcripts, audio and resources.
A clear, accessible introduction to Shantideva’s Way of the Bodhisattva and its relevance for contemporary life.
This Course Is For You If…
✔ You want to expand your scope for compassion, and want practical support for making it a steadier part of your life.
✔ You are looking for Buddhist teachings that speak directly to anger, burnout, isolation, distraction, and confusion.
✔ You want to explore Shantideva’s Way of the Bodhisattva in a way that is accessible, embodied, and relevant to modern life.
✔ You have a meditation or dharma practice and want to deepen your commitment, clarity, and sense of purpose.
✔You struggle with reactivity, discouragement, or rigid thinking, and want tools for responding with more patience and wisdom.
✔ You want to live with a more open heart — as a daily practice of courage, care, and benefit to others.
Enroll Today
Through Shantideva’s timeless teachings and Gaylon Ferguson’s warm, accessible guidance, you’ll learn how to recognize that heart, unlearn the patterns that obscure it, and let it become a source of courage, wisdom, and compassionate action in your life.
Course access begins June 1. Once the course is released, you’ll have lifetime access to all course materials.
Help Lion’s Roar sustain our free programs, scholarships, and accessible community learning.
Our reduced standard price to make the course accessible to as many people as possible.