Welcome & Orientation

Welcome! Here you will find basic instructions on how to interact with our course platform and quick links that you may find useful while taking the course. If you need technical support for any aspect of the course, please reach out and we’ll get right back to you.

Navigating through the course

At the bottom of the main course page, and throughout the course in the sidebar, you’ll find a menu that lists the course in sections. (The sidebar can be minimized for “distraction-free learning” – if only it were so easy, right?) Within each section there are several classes, or sub-topics, where you will find the audio content.

If you click the “next class” button at the bottom of each page, it will mark it complete so you can keep track of where you are in the sequence. You may also click around through the navigation and do the classes in any order that feels right for you.

Asking questions

If you have questions about practice at any point in the course, please join us in our Facebook group, In It To End It, where you can ask questions, connect with a warm community of practitioners, and join live gatherings. If you have specific questions about a talk in this course, consider writing it as a comment at the bottom of the page for that talk, and Sean will answer it there. Your question, and the answer, may be helpful for others.

Chants to support your practice

Every week at Satsang, we do a short chanting ceremony called a pūjā, or devotional ritual. We chant a few ancient verses in Pāli, the language of the early Buddhist texts. These verses are excerpts from a longer sequence of chants done daily in Theravāda monasteries, emphasizing the basic lay (non-monastic) practices of going for refuge and the five ethical precepts.

The verses we chant praise the “Triple Gem” of Buddha, Dhamma, and Saṅgha, pay homage to the Buddha, renew our practice of Taking Refuge in the Triple Gem, and renew our commitment to the ethical practices known as the Five Lay Precepts. The pūja ends with a short verse in English known as the Five Recollections. You can read more about the chants here.