I've been participating in Three Sundays for awhile now. Your work has shown me how to "hold a different conversation" with life and has helped me move through grief to find my self again. Thank you.
MAY 2024
Breakthrough: Finding the Narrow, Creative Road Between Crazy and Brilliant
Creative breakthroughs are what we seek all our lives, whether they be artistic, entrepreneurial, financial or emotional, but real breakthroughs only arrive when we combine our best gifts with what others might consider a little wildness. Individual brilliance almost never finds a true outlet unless it can break through the strictures of our surroundings by carrying a slight, sharp edge of craziness to cut through our habitual routines and our habitual conforming. Brilliance needs wildness not only to break through the strictures of society but also to loosen the constraints of our own minds. Our relationship with the ever-moving constellations of the wild, natural world around us are often a measure of our intimacy or distance from our own wildness.
Almost every real achievement that has earned a broad audience or the acclamation of society or posterity has been authored by someone who took an approach that was inimitably their own, that was confidently emblematic of the way they were made and the way in turn, that they made a world. In other words they took an approach that others call eccentric. This series looks at our ability to understand and gain confidence in our own wild ways, and then to build disciplines and what only look like ‘routines’ around these abilities. These routines are really a form of daily ritual investigation, involving real time for the self, as a vehicle for maturing and bringing to the world whatever brilliance we might have hidden inside us.
In our attempt at whatever breakthrough we wish to make, our own eccentricities and very particular approaches are to be prized and nurtured, but they can also very easily be suppressed by the glare of others or the pressure of society. The ability to have faith in our very own, often very particularly wild way, not as a selfish indulgent path, but as the way we will give our gifts generously to others, is essential for all creative breakthroughs.
But our real brilliance never lies in our individual powers alone, which by themselves can become isolated and in fact, powerless to move. Our real brilliance is more often in all the ways we learn to ask for help from others: in order to bring our internal conversation to fruition in the outer world. Asking for help, and especially from unexpected quarters and from unexpected people, has a whole wild and radical quality in itself. Asking for help opens us to a proper experience of radical wildness, it asks us to get over ourselves while explaining ourselves at a deeper and more elemental level.
Join David Whyte to look at our long traditions, in poetry, in Zen teaching, in all forms of artistry, and from the experience of his own slightly mad life, that bring together all the crazy, the wild and the eccentric with all the ways his individual gifts have needed and been given crucial help from others.
A tiny bit of crazy multiplied by just a little brilliance often goes a very long way toward creating a more interesting life and a more interesting work. Crazy and brilliant have a large magnifying effect when brought together, far beyond a life where our best gifts never see the closed doors blown open by way of a little, unsettling but necessary wildness.
Live session webinars take place via Zoom and include 60 minutes of David speaking followed by a 10-15 minute Q&A period.
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Each session is recorded and will be made available to all registered attendees for a period of three months after the series ends. Session recordings can be found in “Three Sundays” in your Profile.
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Each session is 60 minutes of David speaking following by a 15-minutes Q&A.
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The sessions are set up as webinars. Only David will be on camera. Attendees are muted and set to video off during the entirety of the session.
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Yes. You can connect via the Zoom app on your mobile device, or call in from a landline or mobile phone. For those interested in listening on a landline or mobile phone, we will send the phone number prior to each session, including international call-in options.
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Yes! English Closed Captions are provided with the video recording. We do not have CC available with the live sessions at this time.
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The Zoom details will be made available 24 hours before each session begins. The call-in number and link to join will be added to your Series Library, as well as emailed to you. Please check your Spam/Junk folder if you cannot find the Zoom details in your inbox.
If you do not receive the Zoom information by email, or cannot log into your library, please contact [email protected] and someone will be happy to assist you.
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The cost to register for three sessions is $65.00 USD. If you cannot afford to pay the full fee, please contact us to receive a discounted rate.
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During each session, we will open the Zoom Q&A column where anyone can submit a comment or question. David will take select questions during the last fifteen minutes of the session.
Due to the limited time, we cannot answer every question live, but David does enjoy reading all the comments after the session is closed, and on occasion is able to answer additional questions there.
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Session recordings are posted in the Series Library and are available for a period of approximately 3 months after the date of the last session.
We round up to the 1st day of the next month, so, for example, if the last session of a series is on March 26th, we will have the recordings available until July 1st.
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In the coming months, we will launch a subscription service called the David Whyte Companion. The Companion Library will contain all of David’s poetry and essays, as well as select videos and an archive containing featured Three Sundays Series from the past four years.
We are very excited to launch the David Whyte Companion and look forward to sharing more details soon.
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