“In everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the Heaven.”
Ecclesiastes 3:1

“Happiness depends upon ourselves.”
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

“Happy is he who has overcome his ego; happy is he who has attained peace, happy is he who has found the Truth.”
Buddha, Anguttara-Nikaya (664-584 BC)

The Seasons in Our Life seminar series developed by Carlos Durana is a body-centered resource and skill-based approach for growth, for healing and for enhancing our relationships, and for successful living and working in the world. Incorporating an integrated approach combining Eastern and Western methods, these seminars explore our emotions, personality orientation, behavior, mind, life force and spirit.

Our desire for happiness and fulfillment is basic to our actions and goals in life. As unique and special manifestations of life, we come into life with certain predispositions, qualities of being and strengths. But as we develop, our natural strengths and ways of coping are covered over by limiting characteristics, beliefs, emotions and behaviors. These limitations generate a feeling of unhappiness or emptiness—a lack or a flaw that we reproduce through our limiting beliefs and behaviors—thus creating suffering while we seek external solutions to remedy our suffering by trying to change others. To make personal choices that can lead to happiness, well-being healing and healthy relations, both universal principles and methods for self-discovery are essential.

The basic goal of these seminars is to provide knowledge and skills for enhancing our connection to our core self, our True Nature and inner/outer resources, thus claiming our love, worth, strength, inspiration, support and power—discovering who we are, what we truly need and what matters the most. Each season offers a corresponding and opportune time for personal development in life themes.

The energy and movement unique to each season are reflected in our physical and psychological processes. The seasons in their circular movement, in how everything comes around in the cycle, symbolize the processes found in ourselves and in nature: birth, maturation, fruition, harvest (release) and death (regeneration).

Encouraging personal harmony with the movement of the seasons, the Five Phase Model from traditional Chinese medicine and Qigong presents a theory of personality and a description of the evolution of our being as well as a framework for healing, for understanding ourselves and others. This model forms the basis for the seminars presented in this series.

For more information about the Five Phase Model, visit the Elemental Personality Type page. A document describing a Resource Model of Growth used in the seminars is here.