eLearning

PLEASE NOTE:
Due to COVID-19, our workshops at Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health are suspended. Please check Kripalu's website for updates.

We offer three retreat-style workshops at Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts. These trainings are designed to help leaders develop and hone their skills in mind-body teaching and may be taken in any order. They are:

Designing & Leading Transformational Workshops: The Craft of Mind-Body Teaching
Facilitating Transformational Workshops: Group Dynamics and the Power of Presence
Creating Transformational Workshops: Mind-Body Teaching and Your Work in the World

These are each described in more detail below.

Designing & Leading Transformational Workshops

T H E C R A F T O F M I N D - B O D Y T E A C H I N G

This Designing & Leading Transformational Workshops is designed to answer the following questions:

What are the steps or phases in designing a transformational workshop?
What are the keys to designing mind-body experiences?
How can you help people to overcome fear and place their trust in the group?
What’s the secret to being in the moment as a leader? (How will you stand in your own fire—the inner workshop—while facilitating the group process in the outer workshop?)

To find and follow your calling is a great quest. You’ll get clear about your path as a leader with a vision and mission statement. You’ll discover what holds you back from fulfilling your calling, and learn how to guide yourself in making goals and objectives for your workshop. And you’ll begin to write your tentative title, description, and “take-aways” for your workshop, crafting your message to appeal to four distinct personality types.

We’ll walk through all four phases of the workshop design process: Vision, Design, Delivery, and Follow-Up. And we’ll explore how to create the conditions for transformation using the Experiential Learning Cycle, which consists of three elements: Safety, Experience, and Integration (S-E-I, for short). The S-E-I Cycle will help you to design short or long workshops, and it will guide you any time you lead people in mind-body experiences.

You’ll learn how to turn your core teachings into mind-body experiences from an insider’s point of view. You’ll get clues to making your workshops more dynamic and holistic. And our Ways of Inviting Full Participation will help you to breathe life and interactivity into your workshops.

You’ll also learn how to use tools for the design and creation of your workshop, such as:

Mind Mapping: Used to explore your imagination and the limits of possibility for your workshop and to come up with concrete goals, descriptions, and marketing taglines.
Four Phases of Workshop Creation: When you’re ready to draw up your design, the Four Phases will help you through vision, design, delivery, and follow up.
Experiential Learning Cycle Worksheet: Used to construct an experiential learning cycle that incorporates safety, experience, and integration.
Workshop Session Plan: Used to collect and organize your workshop into a sequence of learning experiences and support materials that will guide you and keep you on track during your workshop.

Designing & Leading culminates in the presentation of two mini-workshops (one 20 minutes and the other 30 minutes) by each workshop participant to a small group of peers. The workshop is designed to scaffold your learning so that you’ll feel confident in your design and leadership abilities. And the mini-workshop sessions are designed to gather feedback from your peers so that you’ll have a clear idea of your areas of strength and one or two areas of improvement.

This is a 5-day workshop offered every April at Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health.

Facilitating Transformational Workshops

G R O U P D Y N A M I C S A N D T H E P O W E R O F P R E S E N C E

Facilitating Transformational Workshops is designed to answer questions about facilitating workshops that have the power to transform the group and the individuals that make up the group:

What does it mean to meet, join and belong to a transformational group?
What are awareness and presence, and why are they fundamental to being an embodied leader?
How can you help the group to grow from birth to maturity?
Why are you—the leader—the most challenging participant in your own group?
What are the skills and tools of facilitation that “make easy” the group process?
How can you manage difficult behaviors and challenging dynamics in your group?

Facilitating Transformational Workshops gives you insights into what people think about groups, why they may fear groups, and how groups can become gateways to deeper insight and creativity. We explore how, as a leader, you can successfully navigate each of the seasons of group dynamics. We also examine your relationship to power, authority and control—and how that will influence your personal style as a leader.

Three Challenges.
More specifically, in this workshop we’ll examine the three primary challenges a workshop facilitator faces:

Holding a caring container for transformation
Inviting full participation
Clearing obstacles, upsets, and confusion.

Seven Facilitation Skills.
Throughout the workshop, we’ll reference and practice facilitation skills and techniques to help you address the three challenges by maintaining motivation and trust inside the group, inviting full engagement and participation in the group processes, and sensitively and effectively working with difficult behaviors and challenging dynamics. The seven facilitation skills you will learn about and practice are:

The skill of Presencing
The skill of Listening
The skill of Reflecting
The skill of Appreciating
The skill of Questioning
The skill of Intervening
The skill of Clearing

Group dynamics undergirds the entire workshop process, and we’ll examine how a group evolves over time and how that impacts both the goals of the group and the dynamics operating within the group.

Throughout the workshop you will be invited to deepen your practice of self awareness, which forms the basis for any kind of transformation, and is at the heart of being an embodied facilitator. As a workshop facilitator, self awareness is your most fundamental tool in helping guide the group productively through learning, self discovery, conflict, and, finally, completion.

This is a 4-day workshop offered every October at Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health.

Creating Transformational Workshops

M I N D - B O D Y T E A C H I N G A N D Y O U R W O R K I N T H E W O R L D

When you’re clear about your calling and you’ve got the right tools, you’re in a powerful position to help others. Creating Transformational Workshops is designed to explore your purpose and path as a leader and answer questions about how you can bring your work to the world in the form of transformational workshops:

How do workshops fit into your work in the world?
What is a transformational workshop?
How do you create a transformational workshop?
What are your next steps?

Find out how to enjoy bringing what you’re passionate about into a group setting—in a way that makes your heart sing and lights up the participants. Experience how truly original thinking and breakthrough solutions emerge from group synergy. Set the stage for creative leaps and deep learning (and fun), drawing on the latest mind-body science. Foster your confidence and skills in using interactive techniques to energize, connect, and empower people. Our own group input and feedback will reveal your strengths, sharpen your vision, unfold your ideas, and help you develop an action plan.

You will take home:

A written guide to leading mind-body group creativity experiences
An understanding of the four phases of creating powerful experiential learning
Keys to generating collective wisdom and ways to spark group creativity
Tips for messaging your workshop

This is a 2-day workshop offered every July at Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health.