See Upcoming Retreats
Following the success of the retreat described in this post, we’re planning several retreats in 2020 in Bali, California and Australia.
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Coacharya’s Create Your Future Program
This experiential program helps you to design your future with purpose and learn a process that would help you realise it. Admittedly a tall order, and yet one that has been successfully learnt by thousands.
Many people today have achieved material success earlier in life than they ever expected, yet they are often dissatisfied with what they have achieved, what they do, and most importantly, who and what they are. This is often due to having adopted others’ values regarding measures of a successful life.
While most people, at least to some extent, know what does not satisfy them, they are not aware of what would fulfill them. While paying lip service to self-discovery, society for the most part does not genuinely orient people towards deep and genuine self-understanding or self-actualization. It is our observation that over-reliance on external, quantifiable, and tangible measures of success fails to address people’s true psychospiritual and psychoemotional needs, leaving them feeling unsatisfied no matter what they accumulate or achieve.
(The current generations of people from 30-55 excels at setting and reaching short-term goals in a few metrics such as wealth and power, yet many people find it difficult to see beyond this into a longer-term holistic vision that creates a life of meaning and purpose.)
We’ve created an experiential learning program combining study and practice of Eastern and Western-based approaches to self-knowledge which can be of significant help to participants in uncovering and realizing their deeper potential.
We aim to not only orient participants towards specific goal formulation but to give you the tools to continue in your discovery of inner and outer success.
Truths & Myths of New Age Spirituality
Dr. David Hawkins, the scientist and philosopher, called the 1970s the beginning of the “age of consciousness,” when, for the first time in human history, collective awareness went to a self reinforcing positive mode. Around this time, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s TM movement demystified meditation and helped create one of the greatest cultural shifts in history, with the Beatles being his ambassadors for a while. In the US, Esalen and other centers emerged as the sources of empowering psychological processes such as Gestalt, which in turn powered the development of NLP and others.
None of the original offerings of New Age Spirituality was easy. They required understanding and practice.
As time passed, many other teachers climbed on the bandwagon for financial gains, offering instant solutions with no effort. This diluted the power of inner consciousness work, as it took the inner work out of the process, replacing it with superficial promises of instant enlightenment. Yoga – in the form of physical exercise – became one such industry, reducing a powerful holistic spiritual process into a body-building exercise. Ill-informed and unexperienced hippies wrote on how to energize the chakras, which was highly dangerous, with yours truly amongst many victims. Best sellers like The Secret reduced intense creative visualization to superficial positive affirmation exercises promising blue mustangs just by thinking of them.
More recently, meditation has been reduced to a sensory exercise through the mindfulness approach. What is touted as a teaching of Buddha has little foundation in Buddhism. While mindfulness practice is by nature beneficial, the current trainings offered in MBSR do not address true depths of self-understanding. It may be awareness, but a low level awareness.
Congruence of Eastern Wisdom with Western Knowledge
Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung created the foundations for what followed as the flowering of conscious awareness in the West by rendering the unconscious conscious. Jung expanded on the powerful potential of the unconscious through his collective approach, which Eastern scriptures detailed at least 5000 years before him.
Scriptures such as the Upanishads describe a Fourth Level of Awareness, a level beyond the three that Western psychological models are focused on, and also explained how to reach this state. This wisdom is openly available to those who earnestly seek. Fortunately, it is not available as an instant recipe. This same transcendent wisdom is found across different writings of Upanishadic, Yogic, Tantric and even Zen traditions in coded formulae called ‘sutras’, requiring deep meditative reflection and facilitation to unfold their mystic truths.
Coacharya on Mindlessness
I am nowhere near having a full understanding of all of this wisdom. However, what little I have learned and practiced has created miraculous transformations in my life, and also in the lives of those with whom I’ve shared it.
The key distinction between my approach and others is the understanding and practice of what I call mindlessness, that which the Upanishads term as Turiya, or the Fourth Level of Awareness. Zen terms this No Mind, following the Buddha’s teaching of the concept of sunya or void. All I have done is to bring multiple sources of wisdom together. The process leading to this awareness is not a secret and was never meant to be. It was meant for those who truly seek this level of self-knowledge and self-transcendence. It requires some effort and dedicated practice, what in Sanskrit is known as sadhana.
The rewards to those who have practiced even fractional parts of the process have been transformational. This process can be learnt not taught.
Our Process
Using techniques from Eastern traditions, we provide processes to help cleanse past conditioning, to create a tabula rasa, and to imprint a holistic and fulfilling future vision, integrating self-enquiry into values & beliefs, and Self- discovery along with emergence of life purpose. Anchoring this deep into our inner awareness helps us manifest this as a lived reality.
Coacharya calls this a mindless process. As one journeys through this process one transcends the individual mind-body identity into a disengaged, detached space of pure witnessing energy. Using a blend of Eastern practices of Yoga and Tantra meditation with Western science of Psychology and Neuroscience we help you navigate the levels of cognitive, emotional and somatic awareness to journey beyond them into a the highest state of mindless awareness where illumined vision directly corresponds to our experience of external reality.
Creating Your Future program runs for 3 nights and 4 days at Thiruannamalai in the South of India February 22-25 2019. For more information and to register, click here.
