• Meditation Teacher Training

  • MEDITATION TEACHER TRAINING

    Meditation teacher training with us is comprehensive

    Meditation teacher training is often aimed at a single modality and from a single perspective. Meditation or Mindfulness? Health or Spirituality? Goals or empty mind? Still-mind or visualisation? Therapeutic or personal? Religious or Secular? Traditional or scientific? How remarkable would it be to have a training that encompassed the whole perspective, where you find out clearly what the differences are – and the similarities – and teach the way you want, with a clear understanding of your position? That is what this training course aims to provide.

     

  • Training 2021

    Some things to note:

    Class times are on Saturdays and via Zoom.  Any weekend time is a pain, but what you get at the end makes the pain worthwhile

    • The course is approved by Meditation Australia, which is a clear endorsement of the usefulness of the course to those interested in teaching the modern approach to meditation and know the differences of history, practice and outcomes between the modern and the traditional approaches
    • Practical teaching methodology helps you plan your classes so that  you are confident to front your future students
    • The program starts on March 1 and finishes on 25th October, a compact timetable completed in a convenient calendar time.
    • Full fee for this comprehensive teacher training course is $3750 and will be held at our Main Street Blackburn location

  • Content of the Teacher Training course

    The content of this meditation teacher training course is thorough – from the history and purpose(s) of meditation from its distant origins to the modern day – and where mindfulness fits in, both anciently and recently. You learn how to teach from both perspectives and to be clear about what you are offering. There is also significant time spent on the researched aspects of meditation and the effect of meditation on the brain

    Methodology of Teaching

    The methods that you will use to teach – for example, mantra, still-mind, visualisation, mindfulness or others – are one thing, the methodology of teaching is another. Learning how to refine the specifics of your class plan, and how to know whether you have achieved what you intended, will be an eye-opener for most. And you will find the teaching methodology component exceedingly valuable.

  • Practical Teaching

    Meditation and Contra-indications

    Is meditation good for everyone? There are clinical and critical issues to be discovered here, before you actually invite clients into your room. What is the difference between a psychotic state and a transcendent state – or is there a difference at all? When would you refer someone on to a mental health specialist instead of teaching them yourself? We have to understand what “duty of care” entails.

    Practicum

    Under supervision, you will design and teach your own beginner's course - learning in real life the issues of really being a meditation teacher. This will form a major part of your assessment.

  • About Mataji, Principal teacher

    She likes a cup of tea!

    (And she loves teaching meditation)

  • Mataji is someone of unique background and experience, and is rare in her capacity to teach and explain meditation in all its varieties.

    Her personal practice is 35 years of traditional, still-mind meditation, Her first and preferred method is Still-mind meditation which leads to a non-dualist understanding and appreciation of every day life.

    Immersed in the practice, she has been also immersed in the teachings of. the no-mind, no-self philosophy of non-dualism that is common both to Yoga and Zen.

    At the same time, she has been trained as a teacher of the health-enhancing practices of guided visualisation and stress-reducing meditation, at the Gawler foundation, with Ian himself as her mentor. And as the founding Secretary of the Gawler Foundation, she observed at first hand the effects of the modern methods on helping people optimise their physical and emotional well-being.

  • From her time at the Gawler Foundaton, she learnt of the experience of Dr Herbert Benson whose ground-breaking research into meditation in the 1970s virtually brought meditation into the Western world as a stress-relieving health adjunct, and gave it legitimacy in an otherwise skeptical medical fraternity. From Gawler, she also understood the the practice and influence of Thich Nhat Hanh's MIracle of Mindfulness, which is now seen as the founding teaching of Mindfulness that is so commonly practised today as a variant of meditation.

    On beginning to teach Meditation, she returned to university to get an undergraduate qualification in Psychology followed by a Postgraduate Diploma of Health Psychology, the latter from La Trobe university, There she learned research-based academic perspectives on the links between stress, illness, meditation and mindfulness. Thus she understands well the health perspective of stress and learning to release stress. She sometimes teaches a Resilience course on those aspects alone.

  • and furthermore

    While the above is solid learning and practice, as it happens she also understands people from less formal and certainly less academic group practices - eg ashrams, spiritual groups and even spiritualism - her experience of meditation and meditators is very broad-based.

    Mataji is a member of Meditation Australia and a life member of Yoga Australia.

    You might enjoy reading Physical Body, Spiritual Body and Meditation - Being Comfortable with Reality