Training 2008

5 Tibetan Yogas Facilitator Training

Facilitated by Dekyi-Lee Oldershaw

A two-day intensive weekend training based on ZaChoeje Rinpoche's presentation of these amazingly effective yogas which includes foundation education that prepares facilitators to guide students through six months of gentle but progressive development.

Includes:
1.Physical: Postures with adaptations, grounding with variations, pulsing, detoxification
2.Theory behind the practice: practical Buddhist philosophy, spiritual expansion, support of individual student’s experiences
3.Meditation: Buddhist graduated meditations, motivation, purification, dedication (Over 80 short meditations provided on CD)
4.Logistics and administration required to start teaching classes.(forms provided on CD)
5.Support of peers and experienced certified facilitators

Prerequisites:
Must have attended classes with Dekyi-Lee Oldershaw or a facilitator of the 5 Tibetan Yogas certified by Lamp on the Path PLUS completed daily practice at home for at least 3 months. Application also needs to be approved by Dekyi-Lee.

Cost: $430.

If you are interested, please e-mail events@lamponthepath.org or call 905 634 8412.

Feedback from first training:

"The experience far surpassed my expectations! Paul, Canada

"This is the most indepth, comprehensive training material I have ever received, and I have been a trainer for many years. Thank you." Malcolm, UK

"I have been doing the practice for awhile so I wasn't really concerned about that. Getting a "package" of info to support the practice was the key." Eeva, USA

"Excellent information and presentation. Ample time to experience and discuss techniques and issues. I feel secure in sharing all of this information"Lesia

"I was taken by the depth of the meditations from Dekyi-Lee, her explicit way of describing every detail."Brigitte

Transformative Mindfulness
2008 Facilitator Training - Certificate Program

Facilitated by Dekyi-Lee Oldershaw

This training is specifically designed for those presently or hoping to work differently in education, family support, health care, therapy, counselling, complementary therapies, social services, addiction, child care, hospice, the arts, prisons, human resources and any place where people are searching for self-empowered change. You will aquire the tools to help:
1. Yourself– self-help to cope with and change intense work and personal situations
2. Clients of all ages and their families with mental or physical suffering and also educating them to continue with mindfulness exercises, meditations and self-healing
3. Other professionals who work with people’s physical and mental health, education and well-being

The training is specially geared for easy adaptation into any traditional or secular culture. For example, First Nations trained facilitators will be able to adapt the methods to embrace aboriginal practices and traditions. Artists can help others to use their medium to transform and deepen and bring it to schools, seniors, detention centres, etc.Once youth are trained to facilitate, they can adapt it into their music, language and culture in ways that draw the kindness and wisdom from youth. The options are endless.

This training replaces the training in “Transformative Self-Healing and includes:
• 9 days of intensive experiential training including theory, discussion, practice, debriefing, supervision and support
• Supported self-practice at home, with peers during training days and with practice subjects
• Review and feedback of practice sessions as well as personal completion interview with Dekyi-Lee
• Support by experienced certified facilitators who will join throughout the training – new friends and peers

Location: Hearthstone by the Lake - a beautiful venue by the lake,
100 Burloak Drive, Burlington, Ontario Canada L7L 6P6

Meals: Potluck lunches. Full kitchen available. Tea breaks provided.

Course Fee:
$1450

For more information, please e-mail or call Dekyi-Lee Oldershaw at 905 634 8412.

Training Content

The training is specially geared for easy adaptation into any traditional or secular culture. Add the methods to your present toolbox, modality or curriculum. For example, once First Nations’ individuals are trained as facilitators, they will be able to adapt the methods to embrace aboriginal practices and traditions. Once youth are trained to facilitate, they can adapt it into their music, language and culture in ways that draw the kindness and wisdom from youth. Artists can help others to use their medium to transform and deepen and bring it to schools, seniors, detention centres, etc. The options are endless.

Practice:

•
Familiarisation with Transformative Mindfulness methods and additional mindfulness and reflective meditations including:
The power of self-healing
• Intuitive Body
• Transforming Problems
• Enhancing Positive Qualities – Expanding your Potential
• Integrating Inner Conflict and Polarities - Finding Peace
• Compassion– The Great Healer and Tong Len – The profound method of giving and taking
• Clarifying Life Purpose and Joyful Livelihood

Theory:

• The power of self-healing
• Foundation theory of transformative processes related to physical and mental pain
• Most current mind/science research
• The power of the mind and metaphors in healing and wellbeing
• Perspective and projection
• Receptive versus directive visualization and outcomes
• Physiology underlying these methods and outcomes
• Differences in natural healing-based facilitation and psychotherapy,
• Addressing variations, theories of interdependence
• Interdependence - fundamental causes in the mind that create the conditions for pain
• Support for lifestyle changes that accompany healing insight
• Intervention and interpretation
• Spiritual emergence and emergency

Practical Skills:

• Facilitation skills and problem-solving
• Stages of session planning
• Adapting for children, hospice, youth and other specific group needs
• Adaptations using movement, clay and writing
• Assessment documentation and strategy

Supervision and support:

• Feedback, assessment & evaluation by practice subjects and facilitator
• Practical inner assessment charts or journaling
• Documentation for research measurement.
• Individual telephone support and supervision interview with Dekyi-Lee upon completion of training

Practice Sessions

To really understand and get full value from this training, you will have the opportunity to practice during the months of the training, offer suggestions, questions and get useful feedback.

We will all be doing this in 4 ways:

1. During the training days. Practice in pairs.
The first weekend Dekyi-Lee will be guiding you through most of the exercises so there will be no practice. This is your weekend for healing, so you get a sense of what it is like to participate before stepping into the role of facilitator.
The next 6 training days, you will receive theory, background, and explanation of an exercise, then practice on another facilitator while in class. The final day will not have practice included.

2. Between training days: Practice on yourself.
Once each week, you will be practicing one exercise on yourself. You will not practice the first week because you will be integrating the changes of the first weekend. This is to familiarize with that week’s exercise and understand how it works for you personally. This training is about self-healing so you need to become familiar with using these yourself, so that you can help others become self-sufficient using them at home.

3. Between training days: Case study practice session
You will schedule practice sessions with the same person. This is so that you begin to get a familiarity with how these visualisations and exercises work progressively. Note: Let these people know that they are practice subjects. We will have a liability waiver for them to sign.

4. Between training days: Practice session- different people
You will schedule practice sessions with a different person each time. This way you can experiment with different ages, genders and problems. Please try to vary this as much as possible so the whole group learns from each other’s insights and challenges. By sharing what we have all learned, we have some understanding about lots more situations that you can use these methods with.

Criteria for practice subjects:
You want as clear feedback as possible. Your practice subjects should not be a relative or someone close enough to you that you will have a personal investment in their outcome. We tend to have a preconceived idea of what we would like the outcome to be. This makes feedback less clear and it is harder to get a clear perspective on the results of the sessions. Try to find someone who you haven’t created lots of history with, someone who will offer you the experience that will help you to gain confidence and insight. Please don’t pick subject that are too challenging or mentally unstable. Leave that for a later date when you have familiarized more with these methods.

Note: Dekyi-Lee personally supervises all your practice sessions with written feedback, based on your documentation of the sessions, debriefing during training days and a final phone interview.

What are Transformative Mindfulness methods?

Transformative Mindfulness consists of an effective series of simple mindfulness methods, exercises and meditations that draw upon the power of the mind to increase our positive mental states and health and overcome the inner suffering of physical, emotional, mental & spiritual challenges. They also clarify and set new direction, habits and life options. They deepen our inner ability to cultivate universal compassion and understanding.

Transformative Mindfulness has been tried and tested for 20 years in Australia, UK and Canada. Based on simple principles of awareness and transformation from ancient wisdom traditions and current MindScience research, they are effective universally for those of all traditions, religions and philosophical views - all ages and cultures.

There are different kinds of suffering. An individual’s physical pain can often be helped with medication and medical intervention. However, anguish, mental pain and suffering can compound their suffering and symptoms. Other modalities of treatment and prevention besides use of pharmaceuticals can often reduce and eliminate this mental pain, and as a result, the perception of pain and related symptoms.

Transformative Mindfulness methods address the underlying causes of suffering through simple and effective receptive, rather than directed, meditations and visualizations, with the option of documenting with drawing, writing and/or dialogue.

These methods begin with the power of mindfulness, in which the person focuses on their sensations of pain, discomfort or tension or expansiveness, health and positive sensation, while their mind observes these as separate from itself. Research supports the use of mindfulness-based practices to modify the body’s physiological stress response to pain and stressors.

Who benefits?

Dekyi-Lee Oldershaw developed some of these simple methods in 1998 and has been us them since with clients and professionals in hospices, cardiac rehab, mental health outpatient programs, First Nations family and children’s services, HIV and abuse support services as well as with children and youth. This program will provide you with the skills, practice and support that will compliment your present methodologies or set you us with an effective toolbox to begin a new career in empowering others. Certified facilitators are presently using these methods individually and with groups in palliative care, children’s programs, cancer support, weight loss, senior’s programs, writer’s workshops, abuse groups, wellness programs, mindfulness mental health programs, schools and career counseling. For facilitator’s comments, see below.

Process

We expand on the existing mindfulness-based methods that have been researched. The following steps explain how the Transforming Problems exercise makes a difference. This can also applied to increase positive qualities and strengthen health. We include 6 main exercises in the training as well as additional meditations.
1. Firstly the person relaxes, focuses on the uncomfortable sensations in the body, whether physical pain or the physical effect of mental pain. This helps to access and accept it.

2. These uncomfortable sensations are represented by images, metaphors or words. The person allows the pain to present itself in a dissociation as sound, texture, shape, image, metaphor, or storyboard depending on the way the individual perceives his/her pain. By doing so, the underlying psychological and subconscious roots that support the cognitive awareness of the problem or pain are accessed. This facilitates the changes required at deeper levels of the mind to alter the individual’s perception of pain and suffering.
Note: the person is not consciously deciding but “allowing” the information to emerge. This representation often points to subconscious and preceding causes.

3. This metaphor or image leads to understanding of an underlying cause of his/her pain or mental suffering, though not necessarily how to overcome it yet. In some cases, a person learns what his/her investment in the cause of the pain may be, and how it has created conditions that he/she may not want to change. This process enables the person to take responsibility for reducing the condition that increases his/her pain. The power to change comes from the person, not the facilitator and the person eventually becomes confident in pain self-management.

4. With this new understanding, the person can now choose whether to accept or change the situation.

5. Next, if they are willing to alter the situation, he/she can draw on a different aspect of his/her mind to help with this, somewhere different from the mind that is focused on the problem itself. This aspect can be represented for the person as a perceived source of goodness and wisdom, divine source, a mentor or internal strength. Einstein said “We can never solve a problem with the same part of the mind that created it.”

6. Finally, the person closely observes any change in imagery or sensation that takes place. The facilitator encourages him/her to observe and not direct the change. They notice any changes in body sensations, internal imagery or metaphors, words or sounds.

7. In most cases, there is a change in the metaphor. This leads to a change in their experience of the physical sensation and symptoms. The body naturally detoxifies the chemical and toxic build-up related to the stress and tension.

Besides using this method on specific areas of pain, the facilitator can help the person to transform the emotional and mental reactions to his/her pain such as fear, helplessness and frustration. These techniques compliment conventional treatment modalities offering effective tools for people to take responsibility to manage their own reaction to symptoms and pain.

In many cases, drawing or writing about the imagery and information gained is included in a session. This makes these methods very effective and also fun for any age. Utilizing drawing, children and youth have shown remarkable outcomes using this process and can use them repeatedly to help themselves.

Because the Transformative Mindfulness processes are quite simple, after facilitation for several sessions, adults and young people find they can continue to use them easily to manage pain or other problems and symptoms as they occur and often help others with them. One of the methods used to help people to integrate change includes reassessment of life purpose and livelihood, supporting them in practical next steps.

Dekyi-Lee Oldershaw

Dekyi-Lee Oldershaw developed some of these methods in 1988 and has been testing them since then. She has studied and researched the practical application of Buddhist healing and meditation practices for 14 years, spending seven years as a Tibetan Buddhist nun with FPMT (Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition) with the Dalai Lama as one of her teachers. She has extensive experience applying these methods internationally in a diversity of social services, health and education areas. Her background includes:

• Co-author of 16 Guidelines for a Happy Life – Up Close
• Contributing author to Medical Marriage, the Marriage of Orthodox and Complementary Medicine, 1996.
• Profiled on TV Ontario's Person 2 Person program with Paula Todd.
• Interviewed on CTV and CBC Radio, and featured in The Toronto Star, Globe and Mail,
• Media Spokesperson for the Dalai Lama's Toronto visit and the Maitreya Project Holy Relic Tour in Canada.
• Presenter for the 2008 conference in London Happiness and its Causes
• Organized and presented at a conference Intuitive Leadership - Inner Listening for Outer Action for corporate and government leaders from around the world.
• She is a student of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and was an assistant teacher to highly realized masters in Australia and New Zealand.
• 2007 nominee of Athena Award for excellence in leadership, Oakville
Her extensive experience with health and social services includes:

• Work with cancer and palliative patients at various stages of the disease trajectory.
• Running a private practice for 20 years including clients with cancer, HIV, fibromyalgia, migraines, arthritis, cardiac and abuse related problems – presently service patients internationally
• Trained professionals worldwide medical and health service professionals, hospice volunteers, palliative care teams, oncology professionals, social workers, carers and families supporting patients.
• Prototyped in 1994, the “Heal Your Own Heart” 10-week cardiac rehab program for triple bypass patients at St Andrews War Memorial Hospital in Brisbane Australia
• Requested in 1997 by Karuna Hospice in Windsor, Queensland, Australia to run their healing meditation program for hospice volunteers, professional staff and clients.
• Supervised program facilitators for drug and alcohol rehab program in Brisbane
• Invitation in 2006 by Palliative Care Team, McMaster University Medical Centre, one of Canada’s leading training and research hospitals, to conduct enquiry sessions for one year to deepen compassion and wisdom in palliative care.
• Led workshops and talks in various other medical and health organisations include Brisbane AIDS Council, Kasih Hospice Service in Kuala Lumpar, St. Joseph’s Mental Health in Brisbane Australia, CCAC Hamilton/Niagara region

Testimonials from facilitators of Transformative Mindfulness methods

Note: This program was former called Transformative Self-Healing

In 2003, Dekyi Lee Oldershaw brought these mindfulness methods to the Oakville community. We raised over $5,000 in just two workshops on Transforming Anger with over 300 women and men attending. She donated her time to the Women’s Centre in Oakville running workshops and Women’s Circles with women dealing with difficult life issues. Many of the women that come to the Centre were going through separation and divorce, abuse and experiencing depression and anger.

I am sure the women in any community would greatly benefit from training in these methods.

Melvina Walter
Executive Director,The Women’s Centre, Oakville Ontario
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I have had many occasions to these methods both personally and professionally in my work as a community mental health RN. This work takes me mainly into open custody facilities for young offenders, male and female, aged twelve to eighteen and into shelters for abused women and their children where I do one-on-one and group work. While it has not been possible for me to keep accurate statistics to date, anecdotally it has been reported by the majority of clients to be successful in alleviating or mitigating their perceptions of distress and discomfort, at least in the short-term. Most of these clients are on numerous medications for psychiatric/ psychological and concurrent disorders and see the transformative techniques as a valuable addition to their current treatments. It is my hope that further research will be done in this area.

Mary Duncan RN
People in Crisis Program, Acclaim Health, Ontario Canada
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I am a social worker in a hospital setting working with palliative patients and patients with Multiple Sclerosis, and their respective families.

I would recommend learning these techniques for anyone in the helping professions but also to individuals who are interested in personal growth and ways to allow change in a very profound and deep way.

Valerie Spironello MSW, RSW, Ontario Canada
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I am an advanced practice nurse working on a palliative care consultation team in a tertiary care hospital in Southern Ontario. The techniques I’ve learned from Dekyi Lee which include transformational self healing and mindfulness based practice have been extremely helpful when I talk to patients who are nearing the end of their lives. I’ve learned that “wisdom is within” the patients I meet and that “holding a sacred space” around patients allows them to explore their feelings in a safe environment. I am very grateful to Dekyi Lee for her wisdom and for her generous sharing of her experiences and I know I’m a more effective practitioner because of her.

Frances Worobec RN, Ontario Canada
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I have used the Life Transformations mindfulness methods with patients in my medical office, and have had very positive results.

Martha H Howard MD, Chicago, IL USA
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I have taken these exercises into workshops with Von Services, The Canadian Mental Association, Ontario Federation of Elementary Teachers, Fitness Clubs (Curves) Hospital Wellness Days with Cancer Patients and Teen Groups. They have always been very well received with measurable results.

Dekyi Lee makes her courses easy to learn. The information, manuals, handouts and the transformation one goes through during her workshops in itself is a life changing experience.

Una West
One Truth Transformational Holistic Services and Workshops
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One of the most valuable experiences that came out of my training with Dekyi Lee Oldershaw was creating a mindfulness-based program for youth called Mind Blast. One of the aims of the program is to facilitate the gain of insight and solutions to challenges from a new perspective. Once they learned these skills for themselves they could use them over and over as an effective life-long tool, for decision-making, understanding emotions and various physical conditions. With practice, they became more self-confident as they gained a better understanding of the causes of their life situation.
The ultimate goal was to self-empower participants with the skillful means to make positive shifts towards more peaceful and understanding relationships with themselves and with those around them. Even after one session of Mind Blast the participants reported a heighten sense of awareness that they could change their world in a positive way. The following testimonials were very emotional expressions of direct personal experience of something greater within themselves to affect that change.
Claire (17): I learned that I have so much more control over my body and mind and life.
Ala (15): The most important thing I learned was dealing with life in a good and peaceful way. It gave me a feeling that I had never felt before towards myself. I would love to continue doing this.
Asia (16): What I learned about myself is the amount of strength I possess to control happiness.
Brendan (17): I realized that it is not out of reach to be happy and enjoy life.
Tani (15): I learned how to be more focused, being present in the moment.
This same process is continually being utilized to develop myself. These techniques produce permanent long-term changes in the mind that result in a more peaceful and balanced state of being. As the depth of understanding of the cause of challenging situations is deepened within me, in turn, I can be increasingly helpful to others in a wider variety of challenges with much more compassion.

Shelley Urlando
Personal Development Practitioner, Child and Parent Education
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I am a teacher who volunteers at Wellspring, a centre providing support to individuals and families living with cancer. I help cancer patients shift from discomfort to a better sense of wellness through the use of the Transformative Mindfulness methods including guided imagery, meditations for pain relief, body movement and breath awareness.

Lesia Tymochenko
Retired teacher and yoga teacher
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Almost 2 years ago I became engaged and began the training program in Transformative Mindfulness methods. The engagement was a major shift for me. I had to leave my job, sell my house, move out of my village, move away from family and friends and colleagues to a large city 5 hours away from my home. After being single and living alone for a large part of my life, I was going to move in with my fiancé and his two teenage sons. I knew I would need help with the transition and hoped that the program could help.

After the program, I continued to use the techniques to deal with problems and situations as they arose. The effect of the program and techniques went beyond helping me cope day to day. The techniques helped me transform at a deep level. The process helped me to clear away old baggage, start fresh and create a good foundation for my new life and relationship.

Kathryn Zettle
Organisational Change Consultant and Adult Educator
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