Radiance Sutras
Meditation Teacher Training
Curriculum
Week 1: Welcome and Overview
Week 2: Initiation Into Instinctive Meditation
There is no one meditation technique that works for everyone, so we lay the foundation on how to discover your unique portal into meditation:
- Strategies on how to access your own unique doorways
- Practices to accept and welcome all parts of yourself
- Cultivating a compassionate and gentle style of meditation
Week 3: The Art and Science of Meditation
Your body loves to meditate. Meditation is a completely natural and instinctive capacity of the human body and everyone can do it. We discuss:
- The research on meditation and benefits of meditation
- Why 20 million Americans are meditating, plus millions more around the world
- Physiological responses that happen inside of our bodies when we meditate
- The most common obstacles in meditation and how to handle them
- 5 Essential Skills of Meditation Teacher
This week you will also receive your first meditation script and start practicing teaching meditation with your peers.
Week 4: The World of the Senses
Human beings have more than a dozen senses, and they are all essential aspects of a healthy approach to meditation. This is the Indriya Mandala.
- Start using all the senses as gateways into meditation
- Discover the power of subtle movement and intrinsic mudras, and embodied energy practices.
- Preparing for your classes as a teacher
We also start creating a toolkit of skills and practices to learn how to handle everything that comes up in meditation - thoughts, emotions, sensations, etc...
Week 5: Rhythm, Spontaneity, and Flow
A skilled meditation teacher learns how to cooperate with the student’s inner nature, not suppress it. You learn how to:
- Structure a meditation practice so that it feels spontaneous and natural
- How ultradian, circadian, lunar, and seasonal rhythms affect your energy
- Opening to flow in meditation
- How to do a movement meditation
- Ecology of sleep: how meditation and sleep are connected
- How to open a meditation class
Week 6: Integration #1
Week 7: The Path of Intimacy
The world of meditation is undergoing a radical renovation as it expands to include women and men of the 21st century. In this lesson, we explore:
- Living in the Body of Love: intimacy, connection, sensuousness
- The difference between the Path of Renunciation (for monks) and the Path of Intimacy (for householders)
- How to bust old repressive ideals and tap into your innate, essential freedom and joy
- Why choosing life-affirming language is critical for meditation teachers
Week 8: Instinctive Wisdom
Learn how to recognize and honor your instincts – the innate impulses of life that guide us to what we need to be healthy and thrive in our lives.
- Why honoring instincts leads to vitality and peace
- Connecting to your Animal Body
- Strategies to protect your energy levels (aura strengthening exercises, conversation on borders and boundaries)
- Meditations for low levels of energies (for exhaustion, fatigue, burnout, etc)
- How to guide meditation using scripts
Week 9: Energies of Emotion
Facing emotions in meditation is one of the biggest challenges meditators face. For mental, physical and spiritual health, it is essential to learn how to engage with the wild and peaceful emotions.
- 6 major emotions and how to dance with all of them
- Practices on how to center yourself
- Elemental energies in meditation (The 5 Tattvas: Fire, Earth, Air, Water, and Space)
Week 10: Integration #2
Week 11: Embracing Desire
The senses, instincts, and elements play through our bodies in impulses we call Desires. Skill in meditation includes accepting the gift and revelation of desire and emotion, and the ability to ride the motion into essence.
- Introduction to the 4 Purusharthas (Kama, Artha, Dharma, Moksha)
- Embracing and transcending desires
- Meditation and sex
- How to adapt and customize techniques for your clients
Week 12: Primordial Power, Shakti, and Chakras
This week we talk about how to open to deeper connection with the field, your inner source, and the larger body of Nature.
- Tune in to the song of the chakras
- Access sovereignty and authentic empowerment
- Claim your inner authority and freedom
- Inhabit your full energy space
- How to help your students transition from medititation
Week 13: Inner Theater of the Soul
Behind the persona, the face we show to the world, live many other selves. When we get in touch with those other aspects, we feel more whole and life gets a lot more interesting.
- Discovering Inner Parts and learning about Archetypes
- Eight Acceptances principle
- Moving Theater of the Soul
- How to answer questions from students
Week 14: Integration #3
Week 15: Depths of Soul
We often think of spirituality as the movement upward into the heavens – transcendence. Its complement is often neglected, the movement downward into the depths of soul. There are times in one’s life when the call downward is a transformative journey.
- Meditations for difficult moments: the Dark Night of the Soul
- Meditation and depression
- The enlightenment vs the endarkenment
Week 16: Recovery and Healing
In meditation, we are setting our own healing powers free to work on us. Human beings often need physical healing, as well as mental and emotional healing. Many of us may also know the process of recovering from trauma such as from loss, abuse or accidents.
- Practices for physical and emotional healing
- Meditations on letting go and forgiving
- Gateways into recovery
Week 17: Syzygy - Inner Union
A syzygy is a continual mating dance between apparent opposites. For balance and wholeness, we need to embrace both sides:
- Yin/Yang polarity
- A conversation on Soul and Spirit
- Earthy and cosmic, human and eternal
- Practice the high art of riding your energies into creativity and freedom
Week 18: Integration #4
Week 19: Bringing Meditation to the World
This week we pour our attention into how you bring your unique way of sharing Instinctive Meditation into the world while reviewing - the Skills of Instinctive Meditation Teacher:
- Trust the intelligence of life
- Understand through experience
- Communicate core principles
- Learn from your students
- Adapt the teachings
Week 20: Completion and Going Forward
Practical Skills That You Will Learn
- All you need to know to teach a group meditation class: outline of the class, introducing core principles of Instinctive Meditation, guiding meditations and holding sacred space, how to answer questions, transitions, etc
- Meditation scripts which open a variety of doorways for your students: Breath of Compassion, Giving and Receiving, Heart-Centered Meditation, Your Natural Doorways and more…
- How to offer meditations for rest, healing, love, self-exploration, recovery, grounding, etc.
- How to listen deeply to your students and be able to modify your class for your students
- The ethics of teaching meditation
- Teaching meditation to diverse audiences, and much more!
