In this module, you’ll look at the questions: Where do feel the most pain in your life? What is the center of your wound? We’ll begin by creating a safe container and you’ll learn to locate your most vulnerable parts — becoming acquainted with the landscape of your losses, fears and limitations.

You will learn how to:

• Tell the truth about your pain.
• Isolate the source of suffering and its effects on your life.
• Free the voice of emotion.
• Tend to your particular pain.
• Understand the value of limitations.

The wounds are nestled in shadow. Hiding the truth in the darkness, the wound wants exposure to the light. This month, you will illuminate your vulnerable parts, bringing more awareness, understanding and acceptance to them. In turn, this releases fresh energy throughout your life.

You will learn to:

• Overcome shame towards your shadow.
• Reflect on parts of yourself you deny.
• Stop hiding behind your pain.
• Become intimate with your own damage.
• Cull the shadow’s hidden treasures.

You will learn to:

• Use the gift as a tool for self-healing.
• Enter the “fruitful darkness.”
• Turn the gift toward self-realization.
• Grasp the power of paradox.
• Change your wounding story.

As you’ll discover, your greatest gift is guarded by adversaries. As you move forward on your path, fear, anger and doubt rise up alongside awakening. This is the paradoxical truth that this module will help you hold. Knowing it is the source of healing.

In this module, you will learn to:

• Confront your adversaries as difficult friends, not strangers.
• Tap the inverted power of anger.
• Weaken fear through open awareness.
• Stop resisting adversity.
• Practice comfort in moments of discomfort.

Moving out of the last module, your internal (and external) adversaries force you to face your story. This month we look at: What is the nature of your life myth? Your memory is unreliable; as research shows, we “remember” things that never happened. And those that did happen are clothed in fiction.

In this module, you will learn to:

• See where your story diverges from reality.
• Discern in what ways you are blind to yourself.
• Step outside of the fiction you’re telling.
• Reinvent this fiction over time.
• Gain authenticity and well-being.

When you tell the truth, your story changes. As your story changes, pain is transformed — and your life is transformed. This month, we look at the metamorphic, protean nature of personal reality.

You will learn to:

• Become comfortable with life’s messes.
• Connect vulnerability with strength.
• Transform pain from suffering to wisdom.
• Be tender with your wounded parts.
• Accept the trauma of everyday life.

As survivors, we see with new eyes. Having passed through darkness, we’re wide awake. This month we will focus on how our lives are always beginning — that untended wounds freeze us in place, that and awakened wounds enlighten us. That will be our focus this month.

You will learn to:

• Harvest the gifts of survivorship.
• Use limitation as a strength.
• Establish a beginner’s mind practice.
• Savor the ever expanding view of what is possible.
• Dwell in gratitude each day.

The powers of habit are deeply conditioned. In order to balance this new way of seeing, mindfulness is necessary. This month, we investigate mindfulness as a tuning fork that harmonizes with the awakened self.

You will learn to:

• Stabilize emotion using mindfulness.
• Practice mindfulness off the meditation cushion.
• Catch yourself when old patterns appear.
• Use the body as a self-tuning instrument.
• Practice openness to the view.

The awakened self wants to pay its gifts forward. The wounded healer wants to share. Every wound yields its own medicine, its own particular kickback of power. This month, we look at the ways that you can use this power to improve your life and the welfare of others.

You will learn to:

• Use the wound as medicine.
• Put that medicine to the service of love.
• Bless the gift of the wound.
• Use pain as a bridge for connecting to others.
• Know yourself, finally, as unharmed.

In this inspiring and provocative interview, Mark talks with playwright, author and activist, Eve Ensler, about the connection between personal storytelling and soul survival. Until we put our stories on paper, Eve says, we cannot understand our own healing journey; nor can we appreciate the powerful role of the imagination in creating a meaningful life. “Until you imagine it, you can’t live it,” Eve tells Mark. Moving from the victim’s role to that of creator, we come to honor our wounds as sources of wisdom and personal empowerment.

Eve Ensler, Tony Award winning playwright, performer and activist, is the author of The Vagina Monologues, which has been translated into over 48 languages and performed in over 140 countries. Ensler has written numerous articles for The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Washington Post, Utne Reader, International Herald Tribune, Glamour Magazine andMarie Claire as well as a regular column in O Magazine. In November 2009, Ensler was named one of US News & World Report’s ”Best Leaders” in association with the Center for Public Leadership (CPL) at Harvard Kennedy School. In 2010 she was named one of “125 Women Who Changed Our World” by Good Housekeeping Magazine. In 2011 she was named one of Newsweek ’s “150 Women Who Changed the World” and The Guardian ’s “100 Most Influential Women.”

In these 9 interviews, you’ll hear stories of inspiration and transformation from previous students of Mark. In each session, Mark is joined by a special guest who has healed through writing — and they will discuss the work they are doing which you may relate to your own writing and healing journey.

We cannot harvest the gift of the wound without the courage to face the shadow. Mark will talk to the author of Care of the Soul about how to overcome fear of our dark parts and why they’re indispensable to the cultivation of soul.

Thomas Moore is the author of the bestselling book Care of the Soul and fifteen other books on deepening spirituality and cultivating soul in every aspect of life. He has been a monk, a musician, a university professor and a psychotherapist, and today he lectures widely on holistic medicine, spirituality, psychotherapy and the arts. He lectures frequently in Ireland and has a special love of Irish culture. He has a Ph.D. in religion from Syracuse University and has won several awards for his work, including an honorary doctorate from Lesley University and the Humanitarian Award from Einstein Medical School of Yeshiva University. Three of his books have won the prestigious Books for a Better Life awards.

Do survivors of life’s greatest trials possess a secret knowledge? Why do some people blossom through adversity while others fall apart? What mysterious power gets us back on our feet after we’ve been knocked down? The answer: viriditas, the power of drawing passion, beauty and wisdom from the unlikeliest places.

In When You’re Falling, Dive, Mark examines this remarkable phenomenon. Seeking advice from well-known survivors such as Joan Didion, Elie Wiesel and Isabel Allende, as well as philosophical experts like Eckhart Tolle, Jon Kabat-Zinn and Sogyal Rinpoche, he brings 25 years of personal experience to the paradoxical question of how disaster can be used to awaken and transform us.

From a Sudanese boy slave kidnapped at the age of seven, to a Tibetan nun imprisoned by Chinese militia, to the heroic women of Calama, Chile, who continued digging for their “disappeared” relatives following Pinochet’s Caravan of Death, Matousek sifts through extraordinary testimonials — as well as recent breakthroughs in neuroscience — to demonstrate that we are, in fact, hardwired to evolve and adapt when faced with the impossible. It is humbling yet inspiring to be reminded that in our frailty rests the key to our greatest strength.