Start Here Now (Group Study Version)
The Path and Practice of Meditation
Taught by Susan Piver
This group study version contains everything you need to share the course with your community, including guides for both facilitators and participants. Purchase price includes full access to the course materials for the facilitator and the rights to use the course materials in an in-person group setting with participants.
Meditation practice is transformative. It has been proven to lead to everything from a good night’s sleep to higher productivity and reduced stress, to clarity of mind and even complete enlightenment. Recently, these benefits have become more widely recognized, but beginning and sustaining a practice amid the distractions and busyness of modern life can seem overwhelming. Over many years, meditation expert and New York Times best-selling author Susan Piver has taught thousands of people how to do just that.
Any questions about this group course package? E-mail [email protected].
Buy now for $249!
In this course, Susan distills all of her best advice and tried-and-true techniques into a four-week program that will:
- Guide participants through the basics of starting a meditation practice
- Teach them how to work with their body, breath, and mind for an effective practice
- Present practical tips for creating a sustainable routine
- Explain how to navigate the inevitable roadblocks
- Teach the key principles of meditation and clarify common misconceptions
- Show participants how to maintain a potent connection to their own unique path
What You Will Receive
This group study version of the course contains everything you need to share these teachings with your community, including:
• Guides for both facilitators and participants to support you in offering this course in an in-person group setting
• Four 20–30 minute lessons and two guided meditations from Susan, available in both video and audio format, with transcripts
• Exercises to help students integrate the practice into their everyday lives
• A 50% discount on Start Here Now by Susan Piver
• Guided reading assignments with PDFs from Start Here Now
• Unlimited access to all course materials for facilitators
Any questions about this group course package? E-mail [email protected].
Course Curriculum
What You Will Learn in Each Lesson
Lesson 1
Getting Started: An Introduction and Overview of Sitting Practice
Meditation is perhaps one of the simplest activities we can do—it is basically just taking our seat on this earth and paying attention to our breath. And yet, there are many misconceptions about the practice that can get in our way when we’re first starting out. In this lesson, we’ll review what meditation is—and what it is not. Susan will also give you practical advice for how to set up your home practice.
Lesson 2
Confidence Leads to Discipline: A Strong Foundation
Culturally, we tend to think of discipline as rigid and sometimes even cruel. But in the context of meditation practice, creating a container of discipline is life-affirming and even joyful. In order to bring discipline to our practice in a healthy way, we need confidence. In this lesson, we’ll learn five steps for creating outer confidence and one step for creating inner confidence. We’ll also learn the three most common obstacles to meditation practice and their essential antidotes.
Lesson 3
Deepening in Wisdom: Relaxing Self-Aggression
Many of us encounter a deep well of self-aggression as we deepen in our practice. At that point, it would be easy to mistake our meditation as a means of self-improvement. Self-help, however, undermines the underlying principle of meditation practice, which is that we already have everything we need to be wakeful and kind. In this lesson, we’ll receive practical wisdom to avoid turning our meditation into a weapon we use against ourselves—instead, we’ll learn how to maintain our connection to the sacredness of the practice.
Lesson 4
Living with a Fully Open Heart: Loving-kindness for Ourselves and Our World
The meditation master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche said, “The only true elegance is vulnerability.” This may sound hard to believe, considering how uncomfortable it sometimes is to live with an open heart. In this lesson, we’ll discuss the relationship between tenderness, meditation, and spiritual warriorship. We’ll learn how to stabilize our minds and hearts in a state of openness to create a truly sustainable practice that will serve not only us, but our whole world.
About the Instructor
Susan Piver is a New York Times bestselling author and meditation instructor whose books include How Not to Be Afraid of Your Own Life, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart, The Hard Questions, and Start Here Now. She has appeared on Oprah, The Today Show, the CBS Early Show, The Tyra Banks Show, and other national television programs in connection with her books. She is the founder of the Open Heart Project and leads workshops and retreats around the country on living an awakened life.
