An Invitation to Vedic Meditation Initiator Training

An Invitation to Vedic Meditation Initiator Training

[00:45] A Sacred Setting

I want to make an appeal to as many meditators who might contemplate this as possible, to let your minds gravitate in the direction of Initiator Training. An Initiator is someone who can initiate someone into the practice of Vedic Meditation, and I have ended up, without even intending to, being the world expert on Initiator Training.

I started training people to be Initiators under Maharishi’s guidance in the 1970s, and the training programs have continued on for all of these decades.

These days we hold one Initiator Training program each year, and the place in which it will be held is high up in the Himalayas, near the tiny sacred town of Rudraprayag on the Mandakini River.

The Mandakini River is a beautiful river that flows straight down out of the Himalayas. It comes down to near about our place of training, some 4, 000 feet in elevation, it makes its way down and Mandakini runs right past our training facility.

[02:11] Program Structure

The training itself is 12 weeks that commences in late January 2025, and in that 12 weeks of training I will conduct the first two weeks in person with you, working with you every day for six to seven to eight hours of lecturing, answering your questions, and preparing you for your training, and then I’ll go away for eight weeks and leave you in the care of my expert colleagues, former proteges of mine, who have become experts in the process of Initiator Training. Other Initiators, who are what we call field Initiators, people who work in the field teaching people, will be helping with that training for about eight weeks.

During the eight weeks, in addition to learning everything there is about the source, the course and the goal of all of Vedic knowledge and learning how to understand each of the masters of our tradition and the legendary of all of the masters leading up to the present day.

[03:25] High Rounding

In addition to all of that, you’ll be increasing the number of rounds that you do. Those of you who don’t know what a round is, it means doing a very simple set of bending and stretching, what we refer to as asanas, which in the West is referred to as yoga, although that’s a misnomer. Yoga is a consciousness state that you attain to as a result of doing asanas. And then pranayama, which is neuro-respiratory integration, followed by a meditation session, followed by lying down for a few minutes.

All of this taken together takes up about one hour, and this is referred to as one round. Asanas, pranayama, meditation, lying down.

As you increase the number of rounds that you do each day, this will end up putting you in a position where, for nearly a month, you’re practicing 14 rounds in a day, and this will go on for quite some time as a means to accelerate the industrial-strength purification and normalization and expansion of your consciousness, allowing you to really be, in every way, psychophysiologically, an example of what a great teacher should be.

[04:54] Representing the Shankaracharya Tradition

In the last two weeks of the twelve weeks program, I’ll return to India to complete your training, to put you through your final exams, and then ultimately to graduate you, and then to take you with me to the Mahamandaleshwar, the Shankaracharya designate, His Holiness Swami Kailashanand Giri, the supreme authority on the Vedic worldview, the preeminent master of all the masters of India.

And there you’ll receive your final examination from him and be granted authority to teach in the name of the Shankaracharya Tradition, the highest tradition of knowledge of India.

[05:48] Independent Initiators

This is what, in a nutshell, Initiator Training is. Once you’ve become an Initiator, you will be financially independent. You’ll be authorized to go anywhere in the world, and everywhere in the world, and you can travel and teach, or you can stay put and teach, or a combination of the two, and add to the ranks of the family of Initiators who are conducting a campaign.

It’s a campaign that’s just driven by individual, the individual endeavors and individual commitment of existing teachers, which you’ll join, as a sort of a small army of enlightenment, to do our best to bring enough pure consciousness into the community of the world, to steer the world away from the race to the bottom and into progressive evolutionary thinking by making large numbers of meditators appear everywhere.

All of you have had at some point of your practice of Vedic Meditation the thought, well instead of recommending my friends to go and learn with one of the esteemed teachers, I wonder what it would be like to actually just say, “See you at three o’clock tomorrow,” and you start your four-day course of instruction, 90 minutes each day, yourself personally, starting from three o’clock tomorrow, or whatever time you agree upon.

[07:28] A Life-Altering Endeavor

In other words, the ability to train and teach someone in this wonderful technique that radically revolutionizes someone’s life, puts you in a completely different category of the capability of a human. It means that, not to put too fine a point on it, anyone who is in contact with you for four days of instruction, anyone, will have their life altered for the good, for the rest of their life, by virtue of that contact with you.

There are very few careers, occupations, or indeed hobbies, that ever could lay claim to that radical, revolutionary change, and any person who comes into contact with you, provided they have a little bit of curiosity and the willingness to follow a few simple instructions, you can change their life. And this is just a wonderful experience to be able to accept into your life.

And it’s readily available to you. Now, I’m evidently these days an ancient old man and I feel very young, but I can count and so can you. Being now in the middle of my eighth decade, I think it’s important for us to realize that opportunities to learn from me personally are gradually, gradually going to no longer be there.

[09:04] Apply to Create the Fondest Memories of Your Life

And so, I’d like to have an opportunity to get to know you and to develop that personal alliance with you and make you a colleague of mine as a teacher of Vedic Meditation. And so I’d like you to give serious consideration to looking on my website and finding the link to Vedic Meditation Initiator Training for 2025 and to put in your application.

When you put in your application to become an Initiator, it doesn’t commit you to taking the course. What it does is, it triggers a process in which you are mentored by four or five of my colleagues, interviewed and mentored, to find out how long it will take for you to carry out the prerequisites for becoming a teacher, and whether, in fact, Initiator Training 2025 is the best plan for you.

And so you arrive at these conclusions by virtue of applying. You can’t arrive at those conclusions first and then apply. Application is necessary in order to start that mentoring process.

And then, if it turns out that you are selected to commit to that teacher training program, then I’ll be seeing you in the northern winter of 2025 in Rudraprayag in the Himalayas in India, and start you off on a journey that will really define your fondest memory for the rest of your life.

Jai Guru Deva.