Virtue Lab

Nestled in between all the craziness of our lives is a deep desire for reflection, contemplation, and greater awareness. Before we get too wrapped up in the tedium of daily madness, feeling fatigue and overwhelmed, Young Jains invites you to step back and remember the spirit in us all. This Virtue Lab workshop provides you the time to venture inwards, discover your own strengths, dig deeper, and cultivate awareness.

Virtue Lab is an initiative of self-exploration, daily practice and spiritual living based on ancient wisdom. A unique opportunity for us to explore in an interactive workshop ancient wisdom and apply it to modern life. We will begin to explore the meaning of virtues such as forgiveness, humility, compassion, appreciation, universal friendliness, equanimity, gratitude and the depths to which we can develop them. Practice develops skill, skill leads to mastery.

“Without faith, there is no knowledge; without knowledge there is no virtuous conduct;

Without virtues there is no annihilation of karmas and without annihilation of karmas, there is no liberation.”

– Mahavir Bhagwan (Uttaradhyayana Sutra 29.30)

Spiritually, these virtues will uplift our inner attitudes. They will make us more open to spiritual messages. They will help inner self-transformation. They will help create an inner environment conducive to spirituality, and particularly meditation. Without these virtues, meditation or other actions will not be as effective. So these virtues facilitate peace and harmony in daily life as well as being conducive to spiritual progress.

You’ll get to meet like-minded friends, new and old, and explore these powerful, life-changing concepts in a safe environment using H 3 – Head, Heart and Hands.

Please bring yourself, a friend, a notepad and pen.

In 2016 and 2017 the following Virtue Labs were held:

  • Jain Dharma: deeper exploration of philosophy – “How do the modern ideas of mindfulness and living in the moment connect to our ancient philosophy?”
  • Beyond the Pause – This session showed the link between modern mindfulness and ancient Jain culture. We explored tools to observe mindfulness as well as tools which enrich the experience and practice.
  • Soul in Soho – What do Jains believe? – With no creator God, what do Jains actually believe? Is life fate or pre-destined? Who decides? This VirtueLab workshop explained Jain beliefs in simple contemporary English by Mehool Sanghrajka.
  • Paryushan VirtueLab: Foregiveness – Everyone agrees that forgiveness is a good thing. In most cases, it’s easier said than done and we brush it over so easily with “Don’t worry, I’ll let you off the hook!”. Yet at the same time, we still hang on to the idea that something wrong or bad happened and it takes a long time before we begin to feel forgiveness.
  • Paryushan VirtueLab: Mindfulness – A workshop exploring tools of modern mindfulness that can be used to still our minds and ground us in the present moment. We will learn how Jain Wisdom takes these tools further and gives us a path to profound and infinite peace.
  • A New Year’s Resolution for this lifetime – This Virtue Lab workshop was hosted by Ajitbhai and applied Jain principles to fulfill the promise of this human birth.

Past sessions have included:

  • The HUMANgous Opportunity
  • Mahavir Bhagwan’s Birth and His Spiritual Journey from Hero to Great Hero
  • The Divinity Code
  • Radical Forgiveness
  • How Much is Enough? For Rockefeller, Gekko, Scrooge and You?
  • Is there anything wrong with eggs, milk or leather?

Jainism provides us with 4 incredibly life-changing tools to help us get the most out of our every day life. F.A.C.E represents an acronym to explain these: friendship, appreciation, compassion and equanimity. We will explore these qualities in Virtue Lab.

Friendship (Maitri)

During this workshop, we explored what friendship means, the qualities one expects in a friend and how it could help ...

Appreciation (Pramod)

During some of the Belgium sightseeing we were asked to perform a little task. That was to observe our actions ...

Compassion (Karuna)

The questions discussed in the groups on the subject of compassion were; what forms of suffering are there; how we ...

Equanimity (Madhyastha)

Equanimity can be described in many ways. We discussed the different types of equanimity that one could exhibit and classified ...

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