Prof. Michael Sternfeld
Prof. Michael Sternfeld, MA, is a Vedic scholar, educator, and acclaimed producer-director with 35 years of expertise in Ramayana scholarship, storytelling, theatrical productions, and cultural education.
$300.00
This course is part of the following programs:
Admission to the program of study.
In this course students will be able to:
Just as the Ramayana is a heroic quest, unfolding its inherent wisdom through stages of development, this course will also follows a heroic journey model through four primary stages.
The first stage of our journey explores aligning ourselves with our integrity and core values. Speaking truth. Compassion and forbearance. Insight and action. Power and peace. All these qualities of Rama, Sita, and Hanuman are displayed throughout the Ramayana. By enlivening their stories, we learn to align our core values with these exemplary characters. This grounding is the first stage of bringing Rama and Sita’s presence into our hearts.
The next stage is deepening our mission and sense of service. Rama and Sita’s journey is a cosmic journey interweaving Love and Dharma every step of the way. As we follow Rama’s and Sita’s footsteps, we deepen our own sense of Dharma, while Sita inspires us to bring Love into every step of our dharmic journey so we can better serve the world in our missions. This is the second stage of bringing Rama and Sita’s vision into a living reality.
As we move deeper, we learn to embody our divine presence. Rama and Sita are divine beings (avatars) who incarnated as human beings to purify the world of ignorance. Fashioned from the same stuff, we are also deeply spiritual beings in human form. At this stage of our journey, the Ramayana helps guide us to discover and remember the intrinsic nature of our own divine presence.
Finally, we learn how to deepen ourselves as a “force of nature”. At the subtlest level, Rama and Sita embody the primordial opposites: Purusha and Prakriti, or silence and dynamism. Here, we learn to embody these impulses at our own primordial level of consciousness. The full blossoming of wholeness—our own totality—becomes enlivened and integrated at this most fundamental level of the Ramayana.
At every step of our learning process, we will illustrate these themes with stories, audio, and video clips from the Ramayana that illustrate the guideposts of this journey.
There will be a minimum of 1.5 contact hours with one or more teachers during this course.
Each weekly session will include approximately a 1-hour presentation by Michael Sternfeld, followed by 30 minutes or more of discussion. There will also be opportunities for self-study and reflection each week.
Professor Michael Sternfeld’s teaching style enlivens learning as an experiential, process-oriented journey so that the material becomes more deeply integrated into our lives.
$300.00
On the program page, there are multiple payment plan options to choose from.
