ideas for a meditation class, and am i qualified enough?

[Anthony Ayahuasca]

Hi everyone, I am looking or wanting to open a meditation class in my local town - it is severaly lacking with any new age meditation

my question to you guys is, what would you expect or like to see from a meditation class

and.... am I qualified to take such a class. I have been meditating for 5 years, I have a lot of time, compassion and love for people with a strong determination to help as many people as possible in my life - I am not, however, an expert in anything like reiki, yoga or anything of the sort.... I am just a regular guy who wants to help people

will this make me fall short in being able to deliver the full package??

Much love and thanks for your time, Anthony x

Sincerely don't want to rain on your parade but

if you are asking here whether you are qualified, the answer is probably no. Individuals will need a certain amount of individual attention and if you got it wrong you could do more harm than good, in that the "meditatee" may be taking steps backward or getting locked into frustration. Unfortunately there are plenty of unqualified "teachers" out there and sometimes the results turn up on this forum.

...

[Anthony Ayahuasca]

Originally Posted by Lorelyen

Sincerely don't want to rain on your parade but

if you are asking here whether you are qualified, the answer is probably no. Individuals will need a certain amount of individual attention and if you got it wrong you could do more harm than good, in that the "meditatee" may be taking steps backward or getting locked into frustration. Unfortunately there are plenty of unqualified "teachers" out there and sometimes the results turn up on this forum.

...

I personally feel like I am more than capable of helping out even advanced meditators, but I do see your point and it makes a lot of sense :)

I also feel like I have made a lot of progress in a very short amount of time due to certain experiences with mediumship, ayahuasca and deep meditation. I genuinely believe I 'downloaded' a large amount of information form the akashic records and it has helped leapfrog me in my spiritual evolution.
I was meaning more from an opinion point of view, as in, would people be willing to trust me without the background.

Thanks for your input, I will bare it in mind :) Much love!

[wstein]

Originally Posted by Anthony Ayahuasca

my question to you guys is, what would you expect or like to see from a meditation class

and.... am I qualified to take such a class. I have been meditating for 5 years, I have a lot of time, compassion and love for people with a strong determination to help as many people as possible in my life - I am not, however, an expert in anything like reiki, yoga or anything of the sort.... I am just a regular guy who wants to help people

will this make me fall short in being able to deliver the full package??

First you are talking about meditation, so experience in "reiki, yoga or anything of the sort" is not relevant.

I would expect that the 'teacher' would have practiced what they teach. That means teaching what you know. That means what one has done, not what one has only read about.

Also I would expect a teacher to be able to communicate to others how to do the activity. The most common failings here are to assume others learn the same they do and that others will have the same difficulties they did. While obviously there will be some similarities, there are also going to be differences.

Five years is not a 'lot' of experience in the meditation game. My feeling is that does not qualify you to teach advanced meditation as you probably are not that advanced yourself. Not to despair, you are probably more than advanced enough to teach a beginner's class. Most meditation 'students' are beginners anyway so that should not be too much of a limitation. Get started now, unless your students are inherently way more talented in the mediation abilities, you will keep ahead of them by continuing your own meditation. If they are, get them to be an assistant teacher :) You are going to continue your own practice? If not, don't bother with this. That level of insincerity will show through and kill your en devour.

To quote someone unknown "You don’t have to be an expert. You just have to know more than the students you are teaching."

[Egadanadage]

Originally Posted by Anthony Ayahuasca

Hi everyone, I am looking or wanting to open a meditation class in my local town - it is severaly lacking with any new age meditation

my question to you guys is, what would you expect or like to see from a meditation class

and.... am I qualified to take such a class. I have been meditating for 5 years, I have a lot of time, compassion and love for people with a strong determination to help as many people as possible in my life - I am not, however, an expert in anything like reiki, yoga or anything of the sort.... I am just a regular guy who wants to help people

will this make me fall short in being able to deliver the full package??

Much love and thanks for your time, Anthony x

If I were just beginning down the road of meditation I would feel perfectly comfortable taking classes from someone who had five years of experience, and I agree that if you can keep ahead of your students with your own meditation you should be able to continue on in that fashion. I've been meditating myself for over twenty years now, and I utilize two different forms of meditation daily. For advanced meditators I think you'd be out of your league, respectfully. There are so many small nuisances that come over time that really only make sense with quite a bit of time and experience. That being said? Beginners need more time than you would in those sorts of things. Then there are those people who progress very quickly to think about, because you would need to be able to handle knowing about what they're going through and guide them in the right direction. I feel that if you think you're ready to teach there is really only one way to find out. If your motives are to help others along? Then go do it. Perhaps you should offer some free classes as a community service and get your feet wet? If I had an interest in teaching meditation I think that's where I might start. And as an FYI? Long time meditator, and I know very little about reiki and yoga either. I've utilized reiki, and I think I could probably sit crossed legged if I tried, but that's about the extent of my knowledge there. Don't let the things you don't know keep you from teaching the things you do.

[sunsoul]

I have taught meditation classes before, so please feel free to pm me on the practicalities of it, the logistics, setting it up, and some approaches...

Generally, I would say that you could teach beginner classes, and I would recommend keeping it simple (i.e. mindfulness classes and simple breathing exercises). For many people, just being able to still the mind for a short period of time is quite an achievement..

I would also recommend going to a group yourself, and receiving instruction from experienced practitioners. This will help you a lot, and just keep things more on track, as we are all learning ourselves.

Ideally, it would be good to form a group with people you know and who want to meditate... Then people can join as you go along. Trying to start a new group up (especially of beginners) will not be so easy. People will get busy, or lack the motivation to come regularly, and then your group can easily fall apart.

You could, of course, run beginner courses for six weeks. This kind of set-up can work well.....

[Anthony Ayahuasca]

Thankyou so much for the advice!

And yes, it would be a beginners class, and I would only be teaching what I know through meditation, not what I have read and then pretend to 'know' as my own wisdom

I have received some amazing ad vice here, so thankyou again :)

Thankyou sunsoul, i may just drop you a message closer to the time :) much love x

[sea-dove]

I used to run an advanced meditation/spiritual/healing class for a while as I got approached by someone who had the one who ran their class leave, they needed someone to take it. It was a very interesting expereince for me and I had various interesting experiences from doing this.

If you are good guiding a meditation, you could do well with this as that is all someone really needs or you can use meditation tapes for the class if you have a collection of them (maybe some of the others will have ones they would like to bring and share).

What we used to do (remember thou this is an advanced class so you wouldnt be doing this all this)... is we'd go around the circle and share anything interesting which had happened in the week anyone wanted to share eg psychic experiences, dreams, synchronisity experiences etc.. then I'd guide a meditation, unless a member of the class wanted to (being an advanced group at times one of others wanted to, it was cool as I then got to meditate myself in the group).

After the meditation, I focus on a topic for us .. to either discuss or try to do eg one of the class members one time wanted telepathy so we did that (to my amazement I could actually get all three names of the guys childrens right even a weird name.. I was pushed into that one by the class as telepathy wasnt a topic I was familar with), another time we discussed the book "conversations of God", each asked to be given a relevent messge and opened the book randomly to get our messages (all kinds of topics). Anyway we had a group experimental thing or discussion.

We covered all kinds of things, I took the group throu some of the exercises in a book called "mind games"... merging and becoming the other etc etc.

We'd then do some healing (something I was experienced in) either as a group with pooling energy or individually on each other and then we'd have coffee and biscuits and just chat. (ours used to go for 2-3 hrs but that's probably quite long for a class..but we did like the socialising too).

[sea-dove]

Originally Posted by wstein

To quote someone unknown "You don’t have to be an expert. You just have to know more than the students you are teaching."

Good quote. I do think someone who has 5 yrs regular experience in this could teach beginners "certain kinds" of meditation (some kinds wouldnt be safe for someone with 5 years experience to teach).

It's also worth considering that one's real learning experiences begin when starting to teach.