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Courses
If, and only if you are interested in our certification program, you will be required to take all 10 day US retreats or both of the Thailand retreats. If you are interested in Yoga Alliance certification, you will need to also take the optional courses. In addition to the course curriculum, each participant will have monthly readings, writings, and be offered a mentor that they can be in contact with each month to track their development. Throughout the years, each participant will be responsible for staying in contact with their mentor through email and phone privates which will involve direct payment to the mentor. Graduates of the full program will be invited to become mentors to the incoming students. See the descriptions of each instructor’s course below.
Kapala Training and teachings on Prajna Parmamita This course offers an in-depth exploration into the practice lineage of the 11th century Tibetan yogini, Machig Labdrön, and the related nature of mind teachings of Prajna Paramita, the Great Mother. Inspired by the ancient practice of Chöd, “Feeding Your Demons” is a five-step process created by Lama Tsultrim Allione that allows one to offer compassion and understanding to their own inner demons rather than engaging in battle and struggle with them. This develops the potential for deep healing and allows the psyche to move from polarization toward integration. This process is of great benefit when working with a wide variety of both personal and collective demons, including addictions, physical and mental illnesses, fear, anger, relationship challenges, and other dilemmas of modern life. During this intensive, numerous modalities will be used to facilitate the creative exploration of this process such as dyad and group sharing, drawing, clay work, and hands-on practice. This training is the first step for licensed healing professionals who want to become certified to use this process with others. Kapala Training Level II offers this official certification which can be taken at Tara Mandala at a later date.
Thanissara and Kittisaro Theravadin Buddhism The Four Foundations of Mindfulness In the Satipatthana Sutta (the foundation text on mindfulness), mindfulness is called ‘ekayana magga’, traditionally translated as ‘the direct path’, but also translated as ‘the path to unification or oneness’. Mindfulness is popular as a secular discipline in the context of health, therapeutic process and even business. While mindfulness enables reduction of stress and increased functionality in daily life, it is also a central practice for the realization of nibbana. (Nibbana is the Pali translation of Sanskrit Nirvana, a term for ‘the deathless’ which has the taste of freedom and peace.) So what is mindfulness? How can it enhance well being and increased skill in negotiating daily life as well as insight into the most subtle aspect of the Buddha’s teaching? 1. Exploring the body / both inner experience of body and outer perceptions around body. 2. Exploring feeling / the connection between feeling and emotion & working with emotion 3. Exploring the mind / what is mind and how do we experience it? 4. Exploring the reality of experience / factors of awakening, hindrance, form and emptiness The Four Noble Truths As mindfulness increases we become more aware of suffering. The Buddha used the presence of suffering/dis-ease/dukkha as the starting point and central feature of his teaching. He was known as “The Doctor of the World” (Bhesaja-guru) since he focused upon the practicalities of healing this fundamental spiritual/psychological disease. In doing so he cast the explanation of his primary insight into this universal human problem in the form of a classical (ayurvedic) medical diagnosis: We will explore the 4 foundations and the 4 truths and how they weave together throughout the course. Our exploration will include explanations, guided meditations, practice sessions, use of chanting to support gathering of body, mind and heart energies and discussion. This course will begin by reflecting on the Triple Jewel, the three sources of inspiration that the Buddha offered as trustworthy refuges for those interested in awakening. Without cultivating confidence or trust in these essential qualities, we have trouble finding the energy to persevere with the difficulties encountered on the Path. Have we explored where we place our trust? In terms of the Four Noble Truths: we will develop and explore the balance of samadhi (concentration supported by the 5 jhana factors) and vipassana (investigation and insight). In particular we look at how meditation practice enables a letting go of self-centered grasping and the realization of Nibbana, that which is truly peaceful. In terms of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness: we will develop the role of insight meditation, particularly as it applies to mindfulness of the body and the investigation of the power of emotions in shaping our world. For example, when our letting go is really disguised aversion, we need to meet that tendency with a patient willingness to be in contact with our experience. Form and emptiness are not found in different places. Wisdom and compassion manifest in this one mind. This non dual perspective will inform practices that help us to maintain emotional balance in the midst of life’s ever changing appearances. In this program we contemplate the integration of these teachings into everyday life, and also reflect how they relate to other spiritual disciplines, such as hatha yoga in particular.
Scott Blossom with Chandra Easton The Alchemical Body: Yoga, Ayurveda, and Traditional Chinese Medicine are practical sciences devoted to the same purpose: cultivating multi-dimensional health and spiritual insight. Central to each of these approaches is the understanding of the life force, known as prana or chi, that interconnects and sustains our lives. Physician sages and mystics articulated how the life-force circulates in the energy pathways of the body and how those energies influence the mind. They have given us exquisite tools for inquiring into the subtle and often hidden aspects of our being. They have also presented imagery and theories that, at face value, can seem incongruous. Joining IYI for a practical and philosophical exploration of the profound similarities these traditions share is Scott Blossom who is a licensed practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine and a nationally recognized expert on Yoga and Ayurveda. Chandra Easton, a longtime Buddhist practitioner, translator, and yoga teacher will guide the yoga classes, exploring how our life force (prana) is enhanced and refined through our physical sensitivity, rhythmic breath, and focused mind. Visit www.shunyatayoga.com to learn more about Scott and Chandra.
Paul and Suzee Grilley Yoga Anatomy Training Yoga Anatomy: the Joints To analyze why a yoga student can or cannot do a posture we must learn to look past the surface of the body to see it as a moving skeleton. Learning to identify which joints are involved in a Yoga posture and determining their ranges of motion is essential if we are to understand why every person practices poses differently. The human body can be analyzed as fourteen different moving segments. All yoga poses are simple combinations of these fourteen segments. This course offers hours of guided practice identifying these segments in ourselves and our classmates. These anatomical principles apply to all Yoga postures – no matter the style. The Fourteen Segments are: Key Concepts: Axis and Extremity Proportion and Orientation Yoga Anatomy: The Muscles Key Concepts: Six Segments of the Torso Muscles only contract Joint Space Closure Muscles and Tendons Shortening, lengthening and stable contractions
Gregory Kramer Insight Dialogue: A direct experience of the Relational Dharma At this retreat we will meditate with each other. Not side by side and separate, but fully engaged and truly meditating. We will cultivate mindfulness, calm concentration, inquiry, energy, and other meditative qualities, interweaving Insight Dialogue, silent meditation, and lovingkindness. This is a chance to engage firsthand with the relational foundation of our humanity, where selflessness and relationship are, finally, not in conflict.
Sarah Powers
Sarah’s classes are intended to deepen one’s understanding of the experiential, philosophical and practical application of yoga and buddhist meditation. The physical discipline of Hatha yoga centers on the harmonious embodiment of postures. How we practice these postures (our state of mind) is as important as which asana we choose and how we orchestrate them. Sarah will explore and refine your understanding of how to bring these passive and active yogic shapes alive within you. Her classes will focus on the combination of inner (breath, energy channels and mind training) and outer (cohesion within the bones and muscles) alignment, as well as the focus on bringing one’s full attention to the Hara, or earth center in the belly during postures. Her classes will combine both Yin yoga postures, practiced safely and effectively to enhance organ health, with strong yang postures. She will also include teachings on the subtle body anatomy according to Yogic and Chinese philosophy,
Jennifer Welwood Psycho-spiritual Inquiry The great 14th century yogi Longchenpa, in his songs of realization, declared: Awakened mind is self-knowing awareness equal to space. Longchenpa’s words reflect the Buddhist teaching that we all have an enlightened nature that is intrinsic and indestructible, and that the only difference between enlightened beings and ourselves is that in us, this nature has become covered over by obscurations. The essence of the spiritual journey is thus twofold: on the one hand, it involves learning to recognize, access, and abide in our intrinsic nature; and on the other hand, it involves learning to meet, penetrate, and unwind the obscurations that keep us from directly knowing and experiencing that nature. Learning to recognize our intrinsic nature is the process of realization, and learning to unwind what keeps us from experiencing it at each moment of life is the process of transformation. While it is relatively easy to glimpse our intrinsic nature during practice sessions, retreats, or moments of transcendence, our greatest challenge is to embody it in our daily living–to live from the truth of who we are rather than occasionally experiencing it. This is evolutionary work that requires particular understandings and methods. In this part of the training we will integrate deep spiritual and psychological work in the service of engaging this twofold journey, which begins with our human predicament and unfolds toward our human possibility. We will explore the ways that we have become caught in habitual patterns that separate us from our nature as innate open wakefulness, and we will work with the mechanisms of identification and avoidance that lock us into those patterns. We will learn how to open to and become present with the underlying feelings and vulnerabilities that our patterns exist to avoid, and we will discover in that meeting the doorway to both our psychological wholeness and our spiritual evolution. What ushers us through this doorway is cultivating our capacity for presence– for meeting our experience just as it is, with open wakefulness, and without judgment, aversion, agenda, manipulation, or conceptual elaboration. When we bring presence to bear on what is most real in us–our own essential nature–then that presence is like sunlight suffusing a closed bud, allowing our experience of our essential nature to begin to open. And when we bring presence to bear on what is most conditioned in us–our habitual patterns and tendencies–then that presence is like sunlight dissolving mist in the sky, allowing our patterns to begin to disperse. By integrating psychological and spiritual work in the service of returning presence to wherever it has been lost, we utilize the potential synergy of this union. Working with our unresolved psychological material becomes a vehicle for unfolding our deeper being, and unfolding our deeper being comes down to earth, and can truly manifest in our lives. Our format will include teaching and discussion, psychological inquiry and process work, spiritual practice, and the profound and sacred work of cultivating the subtle body, which is the bridge that allows our essential nature to manifest in time and space, in this body and in this life. As the subtle body awakens, we develop the energetic basis for becoming an essential person. Then, rather than living our life as the conditioned person who has temporary experiences of our essential nature, we begin to live our life as a personal embodiment and expression of our essential nature. This is the only basis for true happiness, fulfillment, and meaning in a human life, and the only basis for being of true service to others.
We will work with our psychodynamic patterning from the perspective of nondual wisdom and learn to access our larger awareness in the midst of all feelings and states.
John Welwood Psycho-spiritual Inquiry The Body as a Field of Presence: The lived body is like a plant reaching toward the sun: It naturally wants to move in the direction of greater freedom, openness, and expansiveness. Because the body always abides in the here and now, it is our most accessible gateway to presence. In this retreat you will learn to enter into this “wisdom body” through the medium of sensation, feeling, and awareness. Grounding in the belly and heart, you will learn to open up to feeling and emotion, track the flow of where and how you are, and unpack conditioned patterns that block access to the body as a field of presence. This retreat is largely devoted to experiential work: embodiment exercises, psychospiritual inquiry, and meditation practices that cultivate embodied presence and awareness. There will also be talks and discussions. THE HEALING POWER OF UNCONDITIONAL PRESENCE The most important capacity for this kind of work is unconditional presence – the ability to remain open and freely inquire into our bodily felt experience, just as it is, without bias, agenda, or manipulation of any kind. This quality of presence allows a precise tracking of the experiential process, enabling it to unfold naturally in the direction of freedom, truth, and deeper being. As we learn to inhabit the flow of our felt experience, we begin to settle more deeply into the body and heal the inner divisions at the root of all psychological problems. Then the “feeling body” begins to open out into the “wisdom body.”
This retreat will give special emphasis to exploring the body as a gateway to presence. The format includes talks, psychospiritual work, body awareness practice, and some meditation.
B. Alan Wallace Shamatha and Vipashyana in the Dzogchen Tradition In his mind treasure, The Sharp Vajra of Wisdom Tantra, the 19th-century Dzogchen master Dudjom Lingpa clearly explains four quintessential practices that are each indispensable on the Great Perfection path to enlightenment. They are meditative quiescence (shamatha), contemplative insight (vipashyana), the breakthrough (tekchö), and the direct crossing-over (tögal). In this retreat Alan Wallace will give a detailed commentary on the opening section of this text, together with guided meditations, focusing on the shamatha and vipashyana practices of “taking the mind as the path.” This is a widely emphasized combination of practices in the Dzogchen tradition as a whole, and it provides a profound and insightful means to explore the mind and eventually dissolve it into its relative ground-state, the substrate consciousness. This is a necessary foundation for the practice of the breakthrough and direct crossing-over in the Dzogchen tradition.
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The Insight Yoga training program has 