Natural Awakening

I remember a few years ago someone saying to me, “You can’t ‘teach’ people how to transmit nondual awareness. It’s beyond the mind. The nondual is beyond any form of teaching or instruction. You can’t show people how to do ‘This.’” Of course, from one angle this is true. There is nothing to teach because the nondual isn’t an object of knowledge. It is not a “thing” like objects of awareness. Nor is it a “non-thing” like a vacuum or dark space. It’s “This” that we can’t point to. And, in fact, this—what we are doing right now, shows us how we do this. We are doing it right now! “Doing what?” you might say. We can’t say, because “This” is not a thing, it’s not a specific action, it’s not a feeling or an insight. And this is how we do it! This is one way we point to this moment as the ineffable source-field of everything that is.

This training supports people’s capacity to be no one—to be grounded in centerless awareness—when they are in public, for example in a workshop, fully open to people’s positive and negative judgments and projections. It’s possible to show people how our experience is shaped by our concepts and judgments: how we continually construct the personal “I.” And we can also show people how, when we look for the “thinker,” for that which experiences all of this, we can’t find anything. There is nothing new in this. Therapists learn how to “come from awareness.” They learn how to create bridges that take clients from states of struggle and preoccupation, through to the freedom of boundless awareness. The Nondual Training brings the light of nondual wisdom to psychotherapy and counseling.

In the Natural Awakening Training, we are keeping alive a lineage of transmission that’s been active and vital for thousands of years, especially in Asia. We are also bringing together perspectives drawn from different traditions such as Zen, Madhymika and Advaita, since these are all now available and accessible to us. We have fused selected methods from these traditions into a very minimalist, precise and adaptable form of nondual transmission that can be used in groups, coaching and psychotherapy.

The Training is designed for psychotherapists, coaches, and people who work with groups in a psycho-spiritual or meditative context. In previous Trainings, the community gathered philanthropists, psychotherapists, psychologists, Zen teachers, Tibetan Buddhist teachers, Buddhist nuns and monks, Sufi teachers, integral coaches, executive coaches, life coaches, nurses, medical doctors, psychiatrists, meditation instructors, yoga teachers, qi gong teachers, artists, and social workers. The Natural Awakening Training also gathered people who were on the verge of becoming nondual facilitators, and have been inspired and empowered by working in a supportive community with finely-honed methods and distinctions.

Looking back over 40 years, the changes in terms of the Western integration of Asian nondualism are nearly unimaginable. It seems we can look forward to a flowing of awareness that will continue for at least a few decades. I am extremely grateful that I have been caught up and involved in these changing times.

John Prendergast writes, “Natural Awakening offers an illuminating look under the hood into Peter Fenner’s nondual teacher training program that guides us into not knowing and having authentic, spontaneous, and deeply transformative conversations about nothing. This masterful work—lucid, keenly insightful, and beautifully written—will be of interest to beginning students and experienced teachers alike. A real gem and resource.” I hope you are encouraged to obtain a copy of the book.

In order to support people who are reading Natural Awakening and would like to dig more deeply into the skills and wisdom in the book, I offer video conference-based Natural Awakening courses from time to time. These courses give you a wonderful opportunity to discover the deepest reaches of my teaching. I hope that we will meet soon in a course to explore the experiential heart of the book.

Natural Awakening

“When crystallized identities enter a nondual field of awareness and begin to interact with a being embodying that state, suffering can’t be sustained. It dissolves into a space where there is neither suffering nor its absence. Nondual awareness creates a transformational field or vortex that gently or abruptly, but irrevocably, moves people into radiant awareness. This is the paradoxical state that bodhisattvas play in for eternity.”

This Guide goes behind the curtains of Dr. Peter Fenner’s highly distinctive nondual teachings. It reveals in great detail and clarity the subtle and sometimes mysterious skillful methods he uses in his workshops, training, public presentations and coaching to swiftly awaken people to the liberating freedom of nondual, panoramic awareness.

Peter has a unique ability to reflect on the deep processes involved in his nondual transmission, especially the nuances of language, deep feelings and silence. He is well known for the rigor, precision and organic flow of his unfindability dialogues.

The skills he reveals in this Guide are many of the very same methods used by Dzogchen masters, Zen roshis and Advaita sages in “pointing out events” and “mind-to-mind transmission.” Peter’s teaching has been described by others as “free-form, continuous pointing to awareness.”

In Buddhism, nondual awareness is often called the “ultimate medicine” because no higher evolutionary accomplishment is possible for any conscious being, living anywhere, at any time. When we see everything as the seamlessly changing fabric of immutable, unfindable awareness, it’s impossible to be negatively touched by any environmental circumstance or inner perturbance. We move into the realm of embodied transcendence beyond disturbances and conditioned forms of peace.

In this Guide, Peter often shares at the “result, or fruition level.” He shows us how comprehensive awakening is our natural state, which infuses and embraces the totality of existence whenever we let go of personal striving, ambition, fantasies, hopes, fears and self-judgment. At this level, our familiar preoccupations transform into a blissful and exquisite mandala that’s completely free of the narrow concerns of a self-absorbed life. The neurotic energies and paranoiac projections that shape samsaric existence self-liberate into a panoramic clearing that supports evolutionary transformation throughout the universe.

In this Guide, Peter outlines everything he has discovered in 42 years of teaching. The Guide is especially useful for facilitators, therapists and coaches as it powerfully accelerates the integration on the nondual in a form that lends itself to the public sharing of pure awareness.

Part One is a virtual manual for spiritual teachers, therapists and coaches in how to introduce groups and clients to the ultimate state of healing and being—pure, pristine, timeless awareness.

Part Two traces Peter’s contemporary expression of nonduality, and more especially his well-known Radiant Mind course, through to its Asian origins.