B1 – Biography Starter Pack

These two courses set you on your journey of biographical exploration and self-reflection. Together with the your personalised Biography Log-book, Take Charge helps you to create a life overview. Creative activities like the River of Life help you see your life from the bird’s eye perspective, and allow glimpses of the future to emerge.
With Typologies, you explore biographical themes and patterns, and use guides to assess Temperament and Soul Type, which helps to better understand yourself and others.
If you wish to go deeper with biography work, you can join our Holistic Biography Training Program for one or more years. These two modules will be recognised as part of the training.
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B2 – Destiny and Karma Bundle

These two courses take a practical approach to Destiny and Karma and Rudolf Steiner’s two main Karma Exercises: The 3-Level Karma Exercise and the 4-Day Karma Exercise. Practical Karma Exercises was a topic Rudolf Steiner wanted to talk about from the start of his lecturing career on esoteric topics in Berlin from 1901 onward. The theme Reincarnation and Karma comes up several times over the years, until he rounds off with a firework of lectures published as Karmic Relationships – Esoteric Studies in 1924. The 2 main Karma Lectures are published in Volume II, Lectures 6 and 7.
In both modules, we explore this topic by using incidents from our own biography, thereby following Coenraad van Houten’s insight: Karma is the reality we live in.

B3 – Deep Listening

Following this guiding image: You have two ears and one mouth, use them proportionally, we focus on fine-tuning our listening skills.
In Communication Skills, we introduce and practice different levels of listening, and introduce the Four-Ear Model developed by the Hamburg School of Communication.
The Helping Conversation was originally developed by the NPI (Netherlands Pedagogic Institute).
We use the Lotus Flower guiding image, exploring a personal issue on the Thinking, Feeling and Will/Intention Levels, and trying to find a helpful or even healing intuition.
These courses have proven helpful for professionals engaged in client work.

B4 – Life as a Spiritual Journey

Amidst all the beauty and challenges of life which we usually record in memoirs, there is a more hidden life story of the growth and development of our Individuality. From the spiritual perspective, the outer challenges can be interpreted as a path of Initiation through Life. In Mission and Meaning – Life as a Spiritual Journey, we unravel these less visible aspects of our biography and see how the activity of our “I” has the ability to create meaning out of challenging circumstances.
In ancient traditions, meeting challenges was part of an initiation path. Since the 20th century, the spiritual atmosphere and ecology has changed and initiating incidents appear in everyday life. In the Course, Trials and Thresholds – Awakening to initiation through life, we use the archetypes of Fire, Water and Air Trials to trace such incidents in our life. We also explore how super-sensible experiences relate to the inner and outer Threshold, the inward and outward directed senses, and the Mystic (inner) and Shamanistic or Ecstatic (outer) developmental paths.

B5 – Mental Health and Illness – A Holistic Perspective

Reflecting on early Biography Training Programs in the 1990s and our work in teaching or consultancy professions ever since, we felt the need to make Mental Health an integral part of our training for two reasons:

Firstly

to teach students how to recognise common mental health issues, and strategies to manage mild to moderate symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress. Anybody working with clients will meet people almost on a daily basis, presenting with such tendencies.
The course Mental Health Challenges offers information and tools to recognise common mental health issues.

Secondly

to help avoid the misinterpretation of the phenomena of a Spiritual or Developmental Crisis as being symptoms of serious mental illness. Rudolf Steiner addressed such possible misinterpretations in his course to Medical Doctors and Priests, originally published as Pastoral Medicine, and re-translated and published as Broken Vessels.
We explore how to differentiate what Caroline Myss calls: “healthy” spiritual madness from psychotic episodes.

Finally, we explore how the apparent division between Religion and Psychology is overcome with a modern understanding of Spirituality.

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Please note that there is a year between Mental Health Challenges and Mental Health Crisis. For the time in between you can digest Mental Health Challenges, then work through the lectures (10) and slides (ca 300) of An Anthroposophical Perspective on Mental Health by Dr Martha Koelman, and prepare for Mental Health Crisis. Our learning materials include suggestions for related movies and documentaries.