Advanced Mutuality Skills

This course is designed to assist you in deepening your understanding and experience of mutuality, as well as to train you in mentoring and teaching students in our process or working with people in other life contexts. Even if you have no desire to mentor or teach others, the experience of participating in this course and learning these skills will support the process of integration and evolution in your own second life.

We’ll consider some of the following themes together, according to each group’s particular needs and interests:

Mutuality

  • Examples of what mutuality is, and isn’t
  • Mutuality as a realization beyond the second birth
  • Acknowledging the places we don’t get and don’t trust each other
  • Steps in the process of awakening mutuality in friendships and intimate relationships
  • The roles of compassion, honesty, dignity, and security in growing mutual trust
  • Your impact on others, and “other realization”
  • Revisiting mutuality and hierarchy: issues with teachers and our organization
  • The unique challenges of mutuality with peers, elders, juniors, and others in the world
  • Finding the balance between honoring your truth and the truth of others
  • Honoring resistance to feedback: why it’s natural, and how we work with it
  • Navigating mutuality in the broken zones

Mentoring

  • How mentoring helps mentors as much or even more than students
  • What are mentors expected to do?
  • Principles of mentoring and the differences between mentoring and teaching
  • The importance of maintaining mystery and perfection in your view of others
  • The challenges of dual relationships (mentor/student and friend/friend)
  • Working with shame, blame, and defensive reactions in yourself and students
  • Working with core issues; discriminating your own and others’ divine manifestations from their brokenness
  • When and why to suggest other forms of help for aspirants
  • Keeping in touch with peers, elders, and juniors
  • The extreme importance of coconut yoga
  • Reparenting issues: us as a family, you as big brother or sister, mothering and fathering
  • Yin/yang, masculine/feminine styles of support
  • The importance of understanding the power differential between you and aspirants
  • Sex, tantra, and sexual ethics in the context of our work
  • Maintaining a balance of waking, down, and mutuality in mentoring
  • When to focus on dharmic understanding vs. direct experience
  • Holding tension and projections with aspirants
  • Confidence: trusting in yourself and your own intuition, standing in your own authority

Morning large group meetings will focus on topics mentioned above (along with others that are important to you); afternoon small groups are designed to assist you in your most cutting-edge personal exploration.

This event takes place over the course of eight days.