For Teachers

Introduction

An important part of making dharma relevant to modern lives is that practitioners need to connect with their whole being through a complementary ecosystem of practices and modalities. They also need to understand how these practices work together.

This is a difficult thing to do. In a traditional model, someone can join a lineage, receive training, and adopt the dogma and social structures that go with that lineage. Navigating a more fluid and modern way of practicing takes a lot of wisdom and knowledge from both teachers and students.

Ideally, both teachers and students need to be able to understand:

• the wider practice ecosystem
• where a style of teaching fits into this ecosystem
• how to hold that in a skilful way

I am creating an awakening course and writing a book to create an understanding of the awakening landscape.

I have also created some resources, below, to support people to move into this more fluid, open, and less rigid way of holding practice.

Another aspect of modern dharma and spiritual practice is cultivating the wisdom to hold emergent experiences that arise through practice – for example, energetic phenomena or shamanic experiences – in a mature and skilful way. This is one of the subjects I am most passionate about, and I have created Shared Imaginal Practice as a reliably safe way for people to experience some of these more shamanic or imaginal aspects of experience.

It’s also important to recognise that it’s possible for shamanic and spiritual experiences to go off the rails. I have written a guide to spiritual psychosis, which describes how to support people who have gotten into territory where they are having adverse experiences.