North American Radiant Mind Course - FULL

July 22, 2011 to April 15, 2012 in Portland, OR.

Awaken your heart and infuse your wisdom mind with joy, spaciousness and clarity. Discover the richness and joyful play of unconditioned existence.

The Radiant Mindcourse offers you a simple and profoundly refreshing way of living life and relating to others. It offers a timeless set of skills and sensitivities for achieving sustainable experiences of well-being.

Click here to view or download the Course Brochure. To apply, fill out the online application form on radiantmind.net.

Workshop Dates

Workshop 1: July 22-24, 2011
Workshop 2: November 18-20, 2011
Workshop 3: April 13-15, 2012

Structure of the 9 Month Course:

This course is designed to maximize the benefits of your time and energy. It is based on a very comprehensive set of transformational tools. They are carefully design to work synergistically and accommodate the preferred learning style of all participants.

• Opening workshop
• Mid-course workshop
• Completing workshop
• Working with the Sounds True Radiant Mind course material (book and set of 7 CDs)
• 50 specially designed experiential explorations
• Designing (or enhancing) a contemplative practice
• Koan practice
• Guided contemplations
• Twelve (30 minute) individual coaching sessions with a mentor
• A teleconference call every two or three weeks in groups of 10 - 12 other course participants, facilitated by Peter Fenner or a Radiant Mind coach.

Workshops

There are three 3-day workshops; an opening workshop, mid-course workshop and completing workshop.

In the opening workshop you will:

• Create a sense of community with other participants and develop a common focus.
• Be introduced to the structure of the course and the work you’ll do over the next 9 months.
• Be introduced to the experience of unconditioned awareness.
• Gain a direct experience of the flavor of this work.

In the mid-course and completing workshops you will…

• Deepen your understanding of nondual presence.
• Continue to gain skills in resting in unconditioned awareness and sharing this with others.
• Learn how to dissolve subtle intellectual constructions about the nondual state.
• Learn how to create an accepting, non-judgmental space around strong emotions.

In the completing workshop you will…

• Refine your skills in using speech and silence to bring this experience to others.
• Be given opportunities to facilitate this work.
• Fully enjoy the paradoxical dimensions of Radiant Mind.

Readings and audio resources

You will be working with the Sounds True Radiant Mind course material. These consist of a book and set of 7 CDs. This material will be complemented with some additional practices. You will work with a particular theme each two to three weeks. The study materials are transformational in their own right. They directly open up new possibilities for living fully in the moment and give you new ways for accessing unconditioned awareness. They also give you a set of reference materials through which you can refresh your experience of unconditioned awareness.

Guided meditations

The audio CDs also include 6 guided meditations. These meditations let you sit back and be transported into profound states of nondual awareness.

Explorations

Every two or three weeks you will also receive a set of experiential contemplations and inquiries. Altogether there are 50 explorations. The exercises are varied. Some are designed to deepen your understanding of your conditioning; your desires, needs, preferences, and so on. Other exercises recondition you conditioned mind, in order to make it more pliable and less fixated. Another set directly lead you into the unconditioned mind by dissolving your fixations. Some exercises are completed by yourself, and others with course participants, partners, colleagues and friends.

Contemplative practice

This course attracts people with varying degrees of experience in meditation or contemplation, from beginners through to teachers of meditation. If you are new to contemplation, this dimension of the course will we help you design a contemplative practice—one that suits your lifestyle and commitments. If you’re an experienced meditator we will help you to refine, enhance or reinvigorate your practice, so that it leads more directly to the experience of the unconditioned mind. If you wish we can also support you in exploring how you can share your meditative experience with others. The practice we introduce is very simple and doesn’t conflict with other practices.

In this practice you also explore the experience of shared meditation with a partner on the phone. This can be a very powerful experience. We also introduce some adaptations to the basic practice that help you to deconstruct each other’s identification with the thinking process. The practice of contemplation continues throughout the course.

Nondual inquiry

A major focus in the course will be the use of nondual inquiry and deconstructive dialogue. These are forms of inquiry that lead us from structured to an unstructured state of consciousness. We can ask questions like “What is this?”, “Where am I?”, “Am I moving forwards or backwards?”, “Am I moving at all?”, “Is there something special I should be doing?”, “Who am I?” These questions are like koans. You will gain skills in using these and many other keys that unlock the conceptual mind, and take you into unconditioned awareness.

Individual sessions

Every two or three weeks you will have a private 30 minute session with your Radiant Mind mentor. In these sessions you receive personal coaching in the life issues you are dealing with, and in the practices of the course. The individual sessions give you opportunities to work with concerns of a more personal nature. In some of these calls we also do some role playing in order for you to gain skills in sharing or facilitating this work with others.

Conference calls

Every two or three weeks you will also participate in a conference call with other members of your learning group. These calls are facilitated by Peter Fenner or a senior Radiant Mind coach.

In these calls you:

• Continue the work we opened up in the workshops.
• Clarify questions and queries that arise in the experiential exercises.
• Create a shared and nourishing contemplative environment.
• Experience the unconditioned mind in a globally dispersed setting.
• Give you opportunities to explore nondual deconstruction.

Skype and small group meetings

In some courses participants come together in person or by Skype connection every three weeks or so. These meetings are very fruitful and are up to the initiative of the people involved. In these meeting people share their experiences and work together in creating the nondual field of awareness. We can provide guideline for how to conduct these meetings.

The power of engagement

All of these opportunities and resources are offered to each participant. It is up to each person to discover what supports and inspires them, and how they can engage wholeheartedly in a practice that works for them. Participants who find ways to really engage with each other and with the material in the course receive benefits which keep deepening and expanding throughout the 9 months. The themes explored in the course include:

• The nature of unconditioned awareness—and how to recognize the purity, depth and duration of this state.
• How the development of radiant mind is integrated with the commitments in our daily life.
• Recognizing and dissolving the obstacles to experiencing radiant presence.
• Identifying and transcending our conscious and unconscious sources of suffering.
• The practices of noninterference and natural release-doorways to the state of effortless contemplation.
• Achieving deep relaxation and serenity by learning how to reduce the quantity of our thoughts.
• Learning how to be complete with the past and maintain a state of completion, no matter what we are doing.
• Discovering desirelessness as an effortless state and guide for living in the world.
• Seeing how unconditioned awareness lets us engage the world fearlessly, beyond defensiveness or aggression.
• Nondual communication as a path to openness - discovering pure listening and pure speaking.
• Working with a range of methods for deconstructing fixations.
• Broadening the river of life: learning how to work with very intense emotions.
• Guided meditations for integrating the transcendent state into every aspect of our life.
• Discovering the healing power of unconditional bliss.
• Achieving competence in deconstructive dialogue— the conversations which see through the reality of our beliefs and interpretation into the pristine state of awareness itself.
• Using “checking questions” to purify the final conceptual residues that can block complete access to unconditioned awareness.
• Learning how to dance and enjoy the paradoxes of the nondual state.

Application & Registration

Fill out and submit the online application form, found here on the Radiant Mind website. Check your email for a response to ensure your form was properly submitted.  If we have any questions about your application, we will arrange a telephone interview. You will receive an answer within two weeks.

Once your application form has been approved you will be sent logistical details and an invoice for the course deposit. Your place in the Course will be secured upon receipt of a deposit of $500. If you cancel your registration one month prior to participation in the Course your deposit will be refunded less a $100 processing fee. Deposits are nonrefundable for registrations canceled less than one month prior to the commencement of the course. Payment details will be included on your invoice.

New Price

$2100* if tuition payment is received on or before June 17, 2011
$2300* if tuition payment is received after June 17, 2011.

*200 USD will be deducted from tuition if you participate in the weekend introduction with Peter Fenner.

Payments in excess of the full fee will be gratuitously received and placed in a scholarship fund to support participants who are unable to afford the full fee for the Course.

Partial scholarships may be available to qualified participants who are unable to afford the full fee.  The level of support will be determined on a needs basis and the size of the scholarship fund.

If money is an obstacle to participation, you can contact Marie: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Please include your phone number and convenient times to call you.

Venue

TBA

Contact Us

Local contact: Ron Stewart, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), +1(503)665-8733

For registration information please email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) with a phone number and a good time to call you. You may also call +1(877)723-6463.

North American Natural Awakening: Advanced Nondual Training

October 27, 2011 to August 26, 2012 in Berkeley, CA.

The Natural Awakening: Advanced Nondual Training is designed for people who wish to expand and refine their capacity to offer nondual awareness as a component of their teaching, coaching or psychotherapy with individuals or groups.

Click here to view or download the brochure. To apply, fill out the online application form on nondualtraining.com.

The Natural Awakening: Advanced Nondual Training is based on the synthesis of Asian nondual approaches that has been developed by Peter Fenner.  Peter’s approach has been refined and tested over 40 years by thousands of people in workshops, courses and retreats. His synthesis draws on the most powerful aspects of traditions such Madhyamika, Dzogchen, Mahamudra, Zen and Advaita.  These are woven into a form of space creation and facilitation that is refined, minimalist, smooth, and very efficient in the delivery of the pure nondual contentless transmission in an interactive group setting.

A dynamic learning environment

The Training is unique in bringing together people from diverse nondual traditions and lineages.  Together we create a synergistic dynamic that radically enhances everyone’s capacity to embody and share nondual awareness within their clients, communities and beyond.  The framework for the Training is based on the form of nondual transmission that has been developed by Peter.  This framework provides a model and set of distinctions for discerning the subtleties of nondual transmission.  The framework is elaborated in a 320 page book prepared for the Training.

The Training is not limited to this framework.  You will share and demonstrate your own experiments and learning with others in the Training.  You will refine your capacity for nondual transmission through fieldwork in which you share nondual awareness through dialogs and contemplation with people outside of the Training.  You will learn through your own active engagement and focused feedback from Peter and other participants.  The Training is thoroughly experiential.  Together we create a depth of immersion in nondual transmission that is unparalleled.

This training is for:

  * Therapists and mental health professionals who want to explore the contribution of nonduality in individual therapy and group work.
  * People who have a solid grounding in a nondual spiritual approach such as Dzogchen, Zen or Advaita and
  * are ready to share their wisdom with others.
  * Meditation teachers who wish to introduce a nondual dimension into their practical guidance and dharma discussions.
  * People who give satsang who wish to enhance their capacity to share nondual awareness and expand the reach of their transmission.
  * Graduates of the 9 month Radiant Mind course who wish to facilitate practice groups based on Radiant Mind resources. 

The themes of the training include:

  * Presencing nondual awareness within oneself as the basis for all nondual transmission.
  * Discovering your own style and process for nondual transmission.
  * Learning to distinguish and reveal the a temporal, impersonal, unconditioned dimension through dialogue and silence.
  * Deconstructing yourself: working with your own conditioned identities that can arise in nondual facilitation.
  * Not getting lost in personal experience: your own and others.
  * Resting in, and responding from, nondual awareness in high intensity situations.
  * Recognizing and learning how to work at the result level; from the place where there is no time lag between communication and realization.
  * Conversations for bringing awareness into the here and now: the present moment where nothing can be missing and everything is taking care of itself.
  * Working with questions and concerns around choice, ignorance, love, motivation, and integrating the nondual into daily life.
  * Functioning beyond comfort and discomfort.
  * The creative function of ambiguity and the conversion of confusion into objectless awareness.
  * Removing concepts: tracking and managing the gradient of the non-conceptual transmission.
  * Reducing slippage: not getting caught in theories, explanations, advice, recommendations or techniques.
  * Learning how to talk from within the state of unconditioned awareness, and how to use this ability as a tool for inducing this state in others.
  * Listening to, and silently engaging with, the dynamic field of nonverbal conversations that invariably arise in nondual group work.
  * Discerning different qualities of silence: sensing if people are in deep meditation or protecting their beliefs.
  * Creating the conditions for natural contemplation: the effortless unfolding of deep meditation in nondual awareness.
  * Allowing silence to emerge in an uncontrived manner.
  * Not conditioning the space: being in the place where everything is possible in the next moment.
  * Pure listening and speaking: beyond interest and disinterest, beyond validation or invalidation.
  * Correcting the oscillation between polarized beliefs: gently moving people into positionlessness.
  * Nothing to defend or avoid:  working with the misconception that nondual awareness bypasses the relative.
  * Letting things be: noninterference and the auto-liberation of thoughts and feelings.
  * Giving people nothing to think about:  creating a foundation of alert serenity.
  * Observing the tendency for people to experientialize the state of nondual awareness.
  * Nothing is wrong (or right): not making problems out of problems.
  * Inclusion and differentiation: subtleties in the use of “I”, “you” and “we.”
  * The nondual use of “I” and “you”:  being no one having an identity.
  * Learning how to identify if someone is: talking from within nondual awareness; talking from a past recognition; or talking from concepts.
  * Nondual dialogue: creating bridges to the unconditioned.
  * Dance steps—easy methods for moving out of the mind into nondual awareness.
  * Recognizing the soft spot in a construction.
  * Nuanced inductions:  gaining spontaneous access to a rich palette of interactions for deconstructing points of reference.
  * Talking about nothing: learning how to produce coherent conversations that have no subject matter.
  * Easing people into contentlessness by listening for the four main ways through which the nondual is expressed.
  * Playing in the paradoxes and absurdities of nondual awareness.
  * Using checking questions to determine the purity of the nondual state and emptying the space of conceptual residues.

Structure of the training

The training is built on:

  * Three four day retreats, one at the beginning, one in the middle, and another at the completion of the course.
  * A comprehensive 320 page workshop manual.
  * Eight teleconferences with Peter and other participants.
  * Four individual coaching sessions with Peter.
  * A vital and supportive training community.
  * Working with the training materials in your own practice or community.
  * Optional coaching is offered to participants who need support in establishing practice groups.

Requirements

Acceptance into the course is through an online application form, found on the Natural Awakening: Advanced Nondual Training website.  If we have any questions about an application, we will arrange a telephone interview.  In the Training with a group of your own.  This can be an informal group of friends you bring together on a regular basis to engage in nondual work. It could be a select group of clients who are ready for nondual transmission.  It could be a group of professional colleagues who work together to explore the parameters of nonduality in therapy. It may be a sangha or community you are already guiding in meditation, dharma or satsang.  If you don’t already have an existing group we will help you establish this.

Our invitation

If many of the themes outline above make sense to you, you may be well prepared for this Training. If you feel that this Training is the next step in your own evolution, the next step is to complete the online Application Form.

You are also welcome to contact us to answer any questions and give you more precise details.  Places in the Training are limited to 25 so we recommend that you apply without delay.

Registration

Once your application has been approved by Peter Fenner you will be sent an invoice by email.  Your place in the Training will be secured upon receipt of a deposit of $750.  If you cancel your registration one month prior to participation in the Training you deposit will be refunded less a $100.  Deposits are nonrefundable for registrations canceled less than one month prior to the commencement of the Training.  Payment details will be included on your invoice.

Fees

$3,100 - if payment is received in full on or before September 2, 2011
$3,500 - if payment is received in full after September 2, 2011
Payments in excess of the full fee will be gratuitously received and placed in a scholarship fund to support participants who are unable to afford the full fee for the Training.

Partial scholarships may be available to qualified participants who are unable to afford the full fee.  The level of support will be determined on a needs basis and the size of the scholarship fund.

Dates

Beginning Workshop: Oct 27-30, 2011
Middle Workshop: April 5-8, 2012
Completing Workshop: August 23-26, 2012

Location

The 2011 North American Training will be held at Rudramandir, in West Berkeley, California. Rudramandir is located in the center of a very active and progressive area of Berkeley, with many great restaurants and shops nearby. It is easily accessible, just 6 blocks off of I-80, and only 20 minutes from San Francisco and Marin County. There is plenty of open and free parking around the building, and buses stop just a block away. There are several restaurants within a few blocks, and the “4th Street” shopping area is a 10 minute walk from the center. Berkeley Aquatic Park is just four blocks away and features paths along a waterway. Berkeley Marina is a 5 minute drive or a brisk 30 minute walk. There are hiking and riding trails there, along with hotels and restaurants.

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