Rather than compiling endless amounts of new ideas and obligations to our metaphoric basket, it’s tremendously useful to first set aside – at least for a time – every burden that we carry. Once we have been emotionally as well as conceptually emptied of them, we consciously and purposefully choose which ideas, visions, relationships, commitments and roles we want to bear.

Taught by Jesse Wolf Hardin

Suggested Length: 3 Days to 2 Weeks

Prerequisites: None (You may want to take the introductory “Journey Begins” in preparation for this and any other courses)

The Burden Basket is a metaphor for the load that we carry on our shoulders, including not only unpleasant obligations, restrictive schedules and plans, but also the commitments and responsibilities we are proud or pleased to bear. The worries and fears we’re attached to. The weight of what we think we know. The illusions and preconceptions that limit our understanding. The dogma and certainty, comfort and assurance. The career that we are bound to. The family and other people we’re promised to, and the ways in which we are expected to be with them.

Most of our lives we may choose to just keep adding to our Basket, never taking time to do a comprehensive inventory, to see what has grown or otherwise changed since we first put it in there, to assess what is still real and relevant to us and see which continues to align with our needs and priorities as well as what doesn’t. The result of such endless accumulation is often a feeling of being over-promised and overwhelmed, beholding to old promises and intentions rather than responsive to current needs, principles, mission and purpose.

You are sure to benefit from the Burden Basket process and course:

• If your daily activities seem increasingly unrelated to your needs, desires and aims

• If you are spending an every larger portion of your days worrying about what you “have” to do instead of what calls to you

• If your preoccupation is with the problems of the past or fears of the future rather than the challenges, lessons and rewards of the present

• If you feel that you owe a debt to somebody or something, rather than feeling a desire to give back

• If you think of much of what you have promised as obligations, instead of as commitments

• If some of your commitments were made mostly to meet the expectations or demands of others

• If your main reason for sticking with any unhealthful activities, patterns or relationships is that you’d feel guilty if you didn’t

• If you have come to resent any of the ways that you give to loved ones and the world

• If current relationships are based on who you once were, instead of on who you are now

• If your relationships, behaviors and missions have evolved, without reappraising and reframing them

• If your vocation doesn’t serve your purpose, or weaken your spirit

• If you mainly cling to the place where you live out of habit, convenience, desperation or familial expectation rather than because it somehow serves and nurtures you

• If you feel stressed over things you no longer truly care about

• If you are unclear on the order of your priorities

• If you are unclear what is amendable, as well as what is irrevocable

• If you mistakenly imagine that it is “out of your hands,” that others have control and you have no options

• If you are willing (not necessarily “ready”!) to undertake a fresh and radically honest look at your life and how you live it, and initiate the major shifts that will be called for

Your course includes deep self exploratory questions, along with assignments that include not only every step of the actual Burden Basket emptying but also the instigation and framework for making the crucial changes in our lives. More than a rite of passage, it involves a complete stripping down and reassessing, prompting a thorough remaking of our ways and beings, relationships and promises.

It is only with our baskets scarily empty, that we can see clearly what matters most. It’s then – clear headed, unmanipulated, unmonitored and unburdened – that we can best decide which weighty ways of being, means of income, behavioral habits and systems of perception, long term efforts and worthy pledges to willingly and happily put back into our basket. It’s then that we are best able to make conscious choices as to what to reincorporate and recommit to, which people to bring back into our promissory fold, and in what ways we insist on relating to them or being treated by them from now on.

Done well, there will not be nearly as many items in the Basket as before, with the unreal, illusory, outdated, unhealthy or no longer relevant left out. And even if perchance the total weighs as much, you will then be able to shoulder it again with satisfaction as well as determination on your face.

Through the process of this course, you will no longer do anything out of unconscious habit or unhealthy custom. And you will no longer feel controlled or a victim of past pledges and circumstance. You will for a period or periods step aside from all usual habits and ways – then re-enter the larger world you will help create – bearing responsibility but not obligation, carrying forward in your treasured basket what will then be your most welcome burdens.

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