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andrew cohen
May 2009 
Teacher Training Day Three
Jeff
The first three days of the Evolutionary Enlightenment Teacher Training have gone outrageously well. I and the 22 teachers in training are working together about 10 hours a day and not a minute feels superfluous. We spent the first half of the day one reviewing some basic teaching skills as I have adapted them for use in teaching something as powerful and subtle as a teaching about Evolutionary Enlightenment. We then went through all of the five two hour classes together (including watching film of me teaching the classes). The trainees will start practice teaching the classes to each other today (also filmed).
It all sounds very straightforward, but if you have been reading my blog as I have taught the class, you might have an appreciation for the challenge involved in teaching a class like this – it ain’t history class! But everyone here is rising to the challenge of teaching something so dear to their own heart and so utterly fundamental to how they view the substratum of reality. As I wrote about it my last post, I am anticipating opening this opportunity up to other selected students of Andrew Cohen in the future and getting more excited about the idea by the hour.
Access: Public
My office is about 20 feet from the Evolutionary Enlightenment Teacher's Training class and I can tell you they are deep in. From the first session a vortex started being created, where focus, challenge, creativity and depth started swirling and generating a force field of focus and engagement. Today is the first day of practice teaching after several days of immersion in the content of the classes, excitement, enthusiasm, a little nervousness, and I have no doubt by the end of the day they will all have travelled far.
I took the Intro EEcourse with Jeff at Foxhollow and it was like being on retreat, yet it was different because we kept meeting for 5 weeks. What Jeff gave so passionately to the class was met in interest and we began to develop together. Week to week, a stronger field grew between us and an intimacy was more and more present. Not personal, but in a desire to explore our real experience. It was undeniable. Everyone felt it and knew it, and on some level was changed. What made this class sooo different from any class I've taken was Jeff's complete vulnerability and willingness to talk so deeply about his experiences as a student of Andrew's. It made us want to look as deep as we could into our own, and there was such a huge context layed to be able to do this. It' s giving me goose bumps into my very core just imagining this group of future EEcourse teachers training for this, day and night, everyone diving into their deepest experience of who they are, who we are, because it needs to be shared. It's definitely clear that it's not a history class. Given so many awesome tools to teach the class, it's the ultimate call for authenticity to make it blossom. Andrew's teaching is so alive. There is no doubt that the effects of this will be exponential.
We just finished the first session of the practice teaching today and I was one of the people in that first group-so I have a bit of space to write..As any of you know that took the course, Jeff is a fantastic teacher and very gracious (we watched videos of his classes and he let us critique one of his most challenging moments!) and you really can appreciate the work that he has put into developing the course.
The training is pushing us all to express ourselves in the most authentic way and also challenging how well we can articulate the teachings. As Jeff mentioned, it is a unique challenge to teach something that is so close to our hearts and souls. But it is so valuable to actually just put your mind to it- to try and understand how to best get something across, to be clear about what we know and what we need to dig deeper into and to start to bring our years of experience into the foreground. And because this is all in a developmental context, the evolutionary tension is a constant!
And as Diane said, there is an overarching sense of the explosive potential that this kind of course represents in terms of introducing evolutionary enlightenment all over the world. One very unique aspect of this training is that there is an intersubjective field that we are working within. We are absolutely on our own, and yet we are all together- critiquing, hashing out subtle points, questioning, contemplating. I don't think that teachers have ever had this kind of field to work within and as Jeff said at the beginning, you can feel that the experience of these 23 people teaching all over the world, will exponentially increase the knowledge of the whole in ways that you can't even imagine, but can start to intuit.
It's great being on the EE Course with Jeff, so much has already happened in four days of learning, it's interesting that in these last four days barriers of conditioning seem to be crumbling, although we came here to be trained as instructors, what is actually happening is also life transforming.
As Gail said there is an intersubjective field within which it's so much more natural to work together in ways that allow for creative critiquing and learning, this is definitely a new teacher/student relationship, i can't wait for the next class….