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The Third Treasure: Awakening in Relationship

Live Online Course

With Diane Musho Hamilton

May 24th, 2026 - June 14th, 2026

Bring your practice into the heart of your relationships

The Buddha and the Dharma guide us toward awakening. But it is the Sangha – our relationships – that challenge us to bring awakening to our life.

Again and again, practitioners discover that their greatest challenges do not arise on the cushion, but in conversation, conflict, intimacy, and community. While Buddhist ethics offers profound guidance, we also need practical, embodied skills to navigate the terrain of self and other with wisdom and compassion.

Even with years of practice behind us, we may still find ourselves reactive or defensive in the presence of the people who matter most. This isn’t a failure of practice, but an invitation to go deeper.

This month-long course with award-winning mediator, author, and teacher Diane Musho Hamilton explores Sangha – the Third Treasure – as a living laboratory for awakening.

Drawing on teachings from the Zen tradition, Integral Philosophy, and over 20 years of working with students, Diane guides us in integrating Buddhist insight with communication skills, nervous system awareness, conflict resolution, and adult development.

This course is highly experiential, engaging participants in conversation and practice. The practices are designed to foster self-expression, quality listening, and emotional authenticity, addressing our defensive patterns and power dynamics. Most importantly, this training will awaken the qualities of self-confidence, wisdom, and compassion – not just in meditation, but in the heart of our relationships.

Through dialogue, embodied practices, and relational exercises, you’ll learn how to:

  • Distinguish awakening from emotional and interpersonal maturity
  • Transform emotional reactivity into clarity and connection
  • Regulate the nervous system to remain present under pressure
  • Express yourself with confidence, authenticity, and care

Module 1 - Entering the Third Treasure: Sangha as Practice

We often imagine our practice as a solitary endeavor – on the cushion, in silence, in the careful tending of our own inner life.

But our most revealing and transformative experiences are born from the friction of being with other people.

In our opening session, Diane introduces the course and its central insight: that Sangha – our community of practice – is more than just a support system; Sangha is where the real work of awakening happens. Together we’ll explore why meditation alone isn’t enough, and what it means to bring the qualities of waking up into the full complexity of our relationships.

This week’s experiential practice: Listening and Reflection

Module 2 - Sameness & Difference: Crossing the Ego Boundary

Conflict often arises at the boundary between self and other – the place where my world ends and yours begins.

Much of what we experience as relational difficulty is the ego doing what it was built to do: organize experience around protection and identity, sorting the world into sameness and difference, safety and threat.

In our second module, we explore how that egoic structure shapes our conflicts and our connections. We look at three primary conflict styles, how sameness and difference register in the nervous system, tips for self-regulation, and what becomes possible when we begin to recognize the boundary – and choose to cross it.

This week’s experiential practice: Nervous System Regulation for Relational Stability

Module 3 - Working with Emotions: Energy, Intelligence & Meaning

Emotions are not obstacles to awakening. They are filled with life force and energy, with meaning, with intelligence – if we know how to meet them.

The problem isn’t that we feel too much. It’s that we’ve learned either to suppress what arises, or to be swept away by it.

In our third week together, we explore the intelligence within emotion – sensation, feeling, mood, and the deeper traits that shape how we experience the world. Together, we practice letting in, letting be, and letting go – how emotional energy can be transmuted rather than suppressed, and how to move from reactivity to responsiveness.

This week’s experiential practice: Transmutation of Emotion in Real Time

Module 4 - One Up, One Down: Power, Difference & Freedom

Many relationship struggles have nothing to do with outright conflict.

They arise in the subtler territory of power – differences in confidence, status, or skill that can destabilize even our closest connections, feeding into unconscious “one up/one down” dynamics.

In our final session, we delve into how power differences can trigger defensiveness, how they show up in ways we rarely name, and how we can learn to recognize and work with them rather than be governed by them.

And together, we return to the ongoing practice of letting go: of position, of needing to be right, and of the tight grip on how things should be.

This week’s experiential practice: Working with One Up / One Down Patterns

Praise for Diane's Teaching

“Working with Diane has been one of the most profound experiences of my life… If you have the chance to work with her, it’s something that I would not pass up.”

“She is a fantastic translator/practitioner of Zen in a way that is so tangible and practical, and immediately translatable to my own life.”

“It’s an honor to be able to be part of her teachings and to be in the world growing and maturing in them.”

“I have such a deep appreciation for Diane and her teachings. When I first met her in 2007 I knew that she was the teacher for me.”

Live Online Course Details

Live Interactive Sessions

Diane will lead our weekly Sunday sessions, to include dialogue, embodied practices, and relational exercises designed to cultivate the skills necessary to manifest wisdom and compassion not just in meditation, but in the heart of your sangha relationships. Each class will also include time for students to ask questions and receive support from Diane.

Nolitha Tsengiwe - When Practice Comes Alive: Energy, Calm, and the Joy of Rapture

Practice Partners (OPTIONAL)

Students who feel it would be helpful for them are encouraged to pair up with an practice partner for the duration of this 4-week journey. Diane will offer guidance in class around how to work together with your partner to explore, share, and bring awareness to each week's learnings.

Experiential Practices

Deepen your understanding of the teachings through weekly practice exercises (like nervous system regulation, or transmutation of emotion) guided by Diane, to be completed with your practice partner and/or on your own for 10-15 minutes each day (or as often as your schedule allows).

Lifetime Access

All teachings, meditations and Q&A's will be recorded, published and archived on our interactive course platform. Video recordings will be permanently available for you to come back to as many times as you like in the future.

Schedule

Photo - Alarm Clock - Schedule

Dates & Times

Module 1: Sunday, May 24, 2026 9:00 am PDT / 12:00 pm EDT / 5:00 pm BST / 6:00 pm CEST (90 mins)

Module 2: Sunday, May 31, 2026 9:00 am PDT / 12:00 pm EDT / 5:00 pm BST / 6:00 pm CEST (90 mins)

Module 3: Sunday, June 7, 2026 9:00 am PDT / 12:00 pm EDT / 5:00 pm BST / 6:00 pm CEST (90 mins)

Module 4: Sunday, June 14, 2026 9:00 am PDT / 12:00 pm EDT / 5:00 pm BST / 6:00 pm CEST (90 mins)

Replays will be posted in the days afterwards for those who cannot attend live.

About Diane Musho Hamilton

Diane Musho Hamilton Rōshi is an award-winning mediator and a teacher of Zen meditation. She was most recognized for her work in facilitating difficult conversations about race, gender, and religion as the Director of Dispute Resolution for the Utah Judiciary in the 1990’s – mediating many matters, from simple neighborhood disputes to complex, multi-party negotiations.

She began working with Ken Wilber and the Integral Institute in 2004 and has held transformative containers for people interested in their development for more than twenty years.

Diane is the co-founder of Two Arrows Zen, a Buddhist practice center in Utah, and is the author of four books: Everything Is Workable (2014), The Zen of You & Me (2017), Compassionate Conversations (2020), and, most recently, Waking Up and Growing Up: Spiritual Cross-Training for an Evolving World (2025).

Click here to find out more about Diane Musho Hamilton.