About Nondual Teacher Training

This 9 month Nondual Teacher Training is designed for people who wish to expand and refine their capacity to offer nondual awareness as the central dimension of their teaching, or as a component of their work with individuals and groups.

The 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 35 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, collaborative learning environment

The Training is unique in bringing together people from diverse nondual traditions and lineages. Together we will create a synergistic dynamic that radically enhances everyone’s capacity to embody and share nondual awareness within their own communities and beyond. The framework for the Training will be based on the form of nondual transmission that he been developed by Peter. This framework will provide a model and set of distinctions for discerning the subtleties of nondual transmission. But the Training is not limited to this framework.

Participants will share, demonstrate and enrich each other’s learning by contributing their own forms of nondual work. The Training will create dynamic opportunities for participants to refine their capacities for nondual transmission through demonstrations of different styles, skills and movements of nondual work. Participants will learn through their own active engagement and focused feedback from Peter and other participants. The Training is thoroughly experiential. Together we will create a quality of collaborative discernment that is unparalleled.

Beginning workshop

February 26 – March 1, 2009
Middle workshop: June 11 – 14, 2009
Completing workshop: November 12 – 15, 2009

This training is designed for

* People who have a solid grounding in a nondual spiritual approach such as Dzogchen, Zen or Advaita and feel they are ready to share their wisdom with others.
* Therapists and mental health professionals who want to explore the contribution of nonduality in individual therapy and group work.
* 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 atemporal, 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
nonconceptual 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.

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