Natural Awakening Training

Led by Peter Fenner, Ph.D. and Marie Barincou

The 10 month Natural Awakening Training is designed as a teacher training for people who want to expand and refine their capacity to offer nondual awareness as a component of their teaching, coaching or psychotherapy with individuals or groups.  With the publication of Natural Awakening: An Advance Guide for Sharing Nondual Awareness we are putting our energy into offering a Video conference based Course in Natural Awakening.  

Future dates for the Training will be announced. At this time we direct your attention to the Video Course which is designed to make our work more widely accessible.
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Nondual transmission to groups and individuals by Peter Fenner

The Natural Awakening 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.

Future dates and places TBA.  At this time we direct your attention to the Video conference based Course in Natural Awakening.

A dynamic learning environment

This 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 Fenner.  This framework provides a model and set of distinctions for discerning the subtleties of nondual transmission.  The framework is elaborated in Natural Awakening: An Advance Guide for Sharing Nondual Awareness.

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.

Structure of the Natural Awakening: Advanced Nondual Training

This Training is designed to maximize the benefits of your time and energy. It is based on a comprehensive set of transformational tools. They are carefully designed to work synergetically and accommodate the preferred learning style of each participant.
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The Natural Awakening: Advanced Nondual Training is built on:

Opening workshop
Middle workshop
Completing workshop
10 Conference Calls with Peter Fenner
4 Individual Calls with Peter Fenner
Nondual Coaching Lab Calls in a peer group
Regular peer Support Team telephone Meetings
Conference Calls with Guest Presenters
Dedicated Online Community
3 optional Coaching Sessions to establish your Fieldwork
Readings from the Training Manual
9 focused Explorations completed with other Participants
10 MONTHS
nonduality workshops

Workshops

There are three 4-day workshops.

Psychologists, therapists, coaches, and nonduality transmission during the natural awakening training by Peter Fenner

In the opening workshop you …

  • Create a community with other participants and develop a common focus.
  • Unfold the vision for how you will share nonduality with a group outside of the Training.
  • Build a strong and intimate support team for the duration of the Training, and beyond.
  • Gain experience in nondual coaching in a peer group.
  • Be introduced to the core distinctions and movements in nondual transmission.

In the middle workshop you …

  • Continue to deepen your presencing of nondual awareness.
  • Identify areas in your nondual sharing for growth and expansion and broaden your capacity to reach people in different psychological spaces.
  • Engage in a group process that produces maximally relevant, highly nuanced observations about your own and other participants’ nondual transmission.
  • Share with, witness and help other participants deepen and broaden their repertoire of skills.
  • Continue to invigorate, energize and expand the scope of your fieldwork.
  • Learn how to silently deconstruct fixations in a group and engage in powerful nondual inquiries.

In the final workshop you …

  • Continue to refine and deepen your capacity for nondual transmission.
  • Fill in the gaps in your ability to move swiftly and skillfully between deep silence and penetrating dialogue.
  • Create a new vision for your future contribution as a nondual facilitator.
  • Create structures from within the Training community for ongoing collaboration.
  • Explore how to innovate from within the space of nondual awareness itself in response to the enhanced global receptivity to nonduality.

Fieldwork

All participants in the Training will engage in some form of fieldwork. This is where you test and refine your skills in nondual transmission. Fieldwork takes many forms. Some participants create informal groups that come together on a regular basis to explore nonduality, effortless being and natural meditation. Therapists and coaches may choose to invite a select group of clients who are ready for nondual work to come together as a group, either in situ or by phone. If you are a meditation teacher your fieldwork may consist of introducing nondual dialogue into your work. Experienced spiritual teachers and facilitators may choose to make a new offering that explicitly includes the nondual. If you don’t already have an existing group we will help you establish this.

Conference Calls with Peter Fenner

These calls give you opportunities to share your experiences in integrating nonduality and especially in offering effortless being and spacious awareness to others. You will bring your questions, doubts, obstacles and new openings to these calls, and benefit from Peter’s many years in offering nondual work in different contexts.

Individual Calls with Peter Fenner

In these calls Peter will support you in discovering your own unique way for sharing nondual wisdom. He will stimulate the creation of new horizons for sharing with others and lead you beyond self-imposed limitations.

Nondual Coaching Lab sessions with Marie Barincou

The Training offers regular practice in one-on-one nondual coaching witnessed within a peer group setting. The sessions are highly focused and elicit high-quality perceptions that support a deep integration and broad expression of nondual awareness.

Support Team meetings

In the first workshop you will join a Support Team with 4 other participants. Your team will be a source of close personal support and an incubator for innovation and discovery.

Guest Presenters

We are delighted to include teleconference presentations by expert nondual teachers during the Training. These sessions will show you how the nondual is revealed by different teachers. They will also give you an opportunity to ask specific questions about different styles and methods of nondual transmission.

Online community

The Explorations and other resources will be delivered through Groupsite, a web-based communication tool. This tool will let you access recordings of the teleconference calls in the Training, create discussions, send emails to participants, upload fliers and recording of your events and workshops for others to see and comment on.

Optional Coaching sessions

During the first 3 months of the Training Marie Barincou offers up to 3 individual sessions to support you and bring the vision of you fieldwork into reality.

Readings from Natural Awakening

Focused Experiential Projects

Throughout the Training you will receive Explorations to work on with other participants. Here you will explore themes such as different teaching identities, discovering the atmosphere and structure of your public events, nondual coaching, unfindability inquiry, releasing glitches in the flow, and dancing in paradoxes.

 

  • Visioning your fieldwork
  • Teaching and facilitating identities
  • The atmosphere and structure of your events
  • Guidelines for group meetings
  • Nondual coaching
  • Nondual inquiry and unfindability
  • Listening for core constructions
  • Working with themes and movements of nondual transmission
  • Deconstruction
  • What you don’t need to do!
  • Different types of silence
  • Working with difficult questions
  • Using the four ranges
  • Contentless conversations
  • Finding the soft spot
  • Levels of competence in living and sharing the nondual

    nonduality themes to be explored

Themes studied during the Advanced Nondual Training

The program offers training in a broad set of skills, strengths and sensitivities that support effective and powerful nondual transmission in different contexts, including meditation groups, satsangs, psychotherapy, coaching and counseling. The themes 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.