WEEK 1 The New Good Life: Creating High-Joy, Low-Cost Solutions for Your Life (Oct 19th)

How do you define the good life? For many, success is measured not by health and happiness but by financial wealth. But such a worldview overlooks the important things in life: personal contentment, family time, spirituality and the health of the planet and those living on it. A preoccupation with money and possessions is not only unhealthy, it can also drain the true joy from life.

In recent years, millions have watched their financial dreams go up in smoke. The international financial collapse, out-of-control health care costs, massive layoffs, and burgeoning consumer debt have left people in dire financial straits. But there is a potential upside to our collective financial downturn: curtailed consumption could lead us to reassess our lives and values.

The New Good Life provides a philosophical and prescriptive path from conspicuous consumption to conscious consumption. Where the old view of success was measured in cash, stocks and various luxuries, the new view will be guided by financial restraint and a new awareness of what truly matters.

You will learn:

• How to create your own definition of success based on your deepest beliefs and life experience.
• The top three ways you can save significant money and improve your quality of life at the same time.
• How you can live frugally, without deprivation.

WEEK 2 The Food Revolution: Creating a Healthier Future for Yourself, Your Family and Our Planet (Oct 26th)

A few companies dominate U.S. food policy and control an ever-larger share of the nation’s seed and food distribution systems. Meanwhile, the people of the U.S. spend vastly more money on medical care than any people in the history of the world, yet have unprecedented rates of obesity. In addition, tens of millions of kids in the U.S. now struggle to get decent food to eat.

There’s a connection between these realities as millions of people all over the world are realizing that chronic illness is not inevitable, and that a healthy diet and lifestyle can transform our lives and make a profound impact. We can all take steps that make us less dependent on insurance companies and doctors, and more dependent on our own health-giving choices. And we can create healthy habits that help us not just to survive, but to thrive.

In this first week together, you will learn:

• The latest breakthroughs in medical science to support your optimal chances for health and wellness.
• The most common nutritional mistakes that vegetarians make, and how you can be plant-strong and thrive, whether you call yourself a meat-eater, a vegan or an asparagus.
• How farmer’s markets and organics are a pivotal part of the solutions for individuals and for communities.
• How you can extend your life, increase your vibrancy and vitality and create a healthier future for yourself, your children and for our beleaguered planet and all the life it holds.
• What’s on the front lines of the food policy struggle, and how you can get involved and make a real difference.

WEEK 3 Building Thriving Families and Relationships (Nov 2nd)

Loneliness and feelings of disconnection are among the most common realities of the modern human experience. Yet for most of us, love is fundamental to our joy and fulfillment.

Every heart encounters wounding and struggles in the journey of life. Often we armor ourselves to protect from future injury. Yet sometimes, the emotional walls we build come to imprison us over time. In this session we will explore the journey from isolation to connection, and what it takes to build healthy and thriving relationships that last.

You will gain:

• Specific practices and insights to help you create a solid and vibrant foundation in your intimate partnership.
• Tools to help you build more authentic and nourishing connections with those in your life.
• Understanding as to which emotional protections serve you, and which imprison you.
• Inspiration to discover what is possible for you in love and partnership.

WEEK 4 Bringing Healing and Wisdom to Our Elders and Youth (Nov 9th)

As we heal in relation to our parents and elders, our connections across the generations develop transformative power. And as we bring authenticity and vitality to our relationship with those who come after us, we fulfill a sacred task in the cycles of life.

For those of us who are parents and elders, it is our task to guide our children so that they may live with respect for themselves and respect for others. We do this most effectively when we, ourselves, embody respect for them. Our function is never to impose our limited and limiting beliefs upon our children, but rather to help them to develop so they may give the gifts they are here to give, and to receive the gifts that others have for them, as well.

Our children build on all that previous generations have accomplished, and yet they go places we can never imagine - they carry the seeds of the future. Each new generation is here not to fulfill the expectations of elders, nor to follow any agendas that might have been conceived for them. Our children and grandchildren have their own path to follow, their own dreams to fulfill, their own sorrows to learn from, their own joys to be nurtured by, and their own love to share.

You will discover:

• An opportunity to reflect on your own childhood experiences and discover how they shape your experience of the present.
• A deepened sense of community as you hear the struggles, breakdowns and breakthroughs of others.
• Tools to help you step into your wisdom with clarity and respect.
• Practical steps you can take to build healthier relationships with elders and young people in your life.

WEEK 5 The Power of Partnership: Reaching Across the Divide to Build Trust and Restore Harmony (Nov 16th)

Whatever our skin color, whatever economic class we inhabit, whatever the country in which we live, the social and political realities of an increasingly interdependent and resource-depleted world are defining realities of our lives. Commerce, ideas, pollution and perhaps even love flow across borders almost as effortlessly as the air we breathe. Recognizing our part in the web of life is not just a nice idea, but, increasingly, it’s becoming a necessity.

What’s at stake? In a world with nuclear weapons, with a resource consumption overshoot that is placing us on a collision course with systemic environmental collapse and with increasing numbers of people living in states of desperate poverty, the very future cannot be taken for granted. To create solutions to the vast challenges we face, we must do so not in isolation, but in crossing the divides and building healing relationships.

Partnership can be messy; it can be painful; it can challenge us deeply. And it may be one of the most pivotal forces upon which the future of a profoundly divided, yet at the same time increasingly interconnected, world may depend.

You will discover:

• Step-by-step tools to engage in honest and healing conversations that build trust across historic divides.
• Resources to help you build relationships and engage in constructive dialogue with people who are different from you.
• Inspiring stories of courage, resiliency, love and partnership that offer hope for your life and our world.
• Support to look at your own growing edge boundary-crossing hot spots, such as race, class, religion or political perspective - and to take steps to cross the divides.

WEEK 6 Heart-Centered Activism: Discovering Your Role in Healing the World (Nov 30th)

We are witness in our times to wars, destruction, plagues and pestilence on an almost biblical scale. But what we do with calamity is up to us. We can let it shatter our resolve and our sense of possibility. Or we can use the pain to deepen our commitment to all that is good and life-giving in ourselves and in the world.

Albert Einstein famously said that we cannot solve problems with the level of thinking that created them - we need to rise to the next level of consciousness. How, then, might we engage with the real world challenges and devastation that are so prevalent in our lives and in the world today, with a heart that is open to grieve, to love and to empower our responses? What aliveness, fulfillment and joy might we tap as we find ways to meaningfully engage with the vital work of our times? And if there are more than seven billion parts to play in the healing of our world - what is yours?

You will gain:

• A deep inquiry into the nature of your unique gifts and how they interface with the needs and opportunities in the world.
• Insight into where you shut down or become antagonistic in ways that are out of alignment with your values - and how you might experiment with other approaches.
• Inspiring stories of heart-centered social change, and inspiration to help you on your path of manifesting your values in the world.
• Practical resources and organizations to help you constructively engage and create change.

WEEK 7 Loving What Is and Being a Force for Change (Dec 7th)

Buddhism teaches us to accept the world as it is, recognizing that resistance to the truth is a sure recipe for suffering. Inspired activism teaches us to respond to injustice with justice, to meet hatred with love, and to find a strategic and effective response to the violence in our world. Somehow, in the center of being and doing, of reacting and embracing, there is a dance. What can it be like to live in that dance?

In this final week, we will explore our own places of resistance to what is so, our passion for change and the courage it takes to live with a heart that is open both to pain and to possibility.

You will gain:

• Provocative reflections on some of the profound issues of our times.
• Inspiration to make lemonade out of lemons, and to make the best of what you’ve been given.
• Personal insight into the Robbins’ family journey with autism, and how raising special needs twins has deepened their notion of social change.
• A powerful and galvanizing send-off, to take all that you’ve learned in this course and activate it as you live with ever-deepening passion and purpose.

Special Bonus Session with Marianne Williamson:
The Gift of Change - Spiritual Guidance For A Radically New Life

Acclaimed international bestselling author, teacher, activist and visionary Marianne Williamson will join John and Ocean for this special live interview as she shares tools for creating transformation in our lives as a key to changing our world.

Attempting to merely change the external world, Williamson asserts, is akin to trying to change a movie by altering the screen -- when dealing with the projector is what’s needed. Building from the understanding that hidden beliefs are dangerous beliefs, she challenges us to examine personal beliefs and the attitudes they engender. Tracing defensiveness - a form of "passive violence" - to the root of war, Williamson demonstrates how our resistance to love and vulnerability keep us enslaved to the ego.

In this interview, Williamson will build on the ten bridges of transformation that can be crossed when we fix our eyes and hearts on that which is unchanging - an eternal compass of spiritual principles which can guide us on the personal AND global path to wholeness.

• From Forgetting Who We Are to Remembering Who We Are
• From Negative Thinking to Positive Love
• From Anxiety to Atonement
• From Asking God to Change the World to Praying That He Changes Us
• From Living in the Past and Future to Living in the Present
• From Focus on Guilt to Focus on Innocence
• From Separation to Relationship
• From Spiritual Death to Rebirth
• From Your Plan to God’s Plan
• From Who We Were to Who We Are Becoming

Special Bonus Session with Van Jones:
Living Your Purpose and Passion in a New Economy and a New World

As a globally recognized leader in human rights and the clean energy economy and someone Time Magazine named one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2009, Van Jones will join John and Ocean for a lively exploration of how your purpose and passion connect to our current global challenges.

What lies ahead in the green economy and progressive human rights movements? How can we each play a powerful role in a healthy, sustainable future? Drawing on his work with dozens of non-profits and with the Obama White House, Van Jones will explore these questions and more in this rare conversation between these international social change agents.