Course Activities

This course consists of three type of activities delivered in a variety of ways to enrich and enhance your learning experience:

1. Explanation: knowledge and spiritual teachings delivered through short (animated) videos, handouts, textbooks, analogies, examples and stories in text format. Knowledge and understanding play a crucial role in this meditation of Raja Yoga. We are learning to use our mind in the best possible way and so, we need to understand the workings of the mind, the influences on the mind and how to be able to see the quality of thinking and channel our energy in the right direction. As our understanding of the self deepens, we see that which is beautiful within the self, the original qualities.
2. Exploration: allowing participants to deeply reflect, contemplate and make sense of spiritual knowledge through a variety of exercises, assignments and journaling. You learn by repeating and relaying the knowledge in your own words and by writing down and sharing your understanding with others through the discussion forums and receiving constructive feedback.
3. Experience: through experiments, meditation commentaries and meditation exercises you accumulate moments of insight and experience that facilitate self-realisation and actualisation. Experience is the greatest source of power.

The building blocks

Each module starts with short knowledge videos containing spiritual “jewels of knowledge” and longer videos also have in-video-quizzes. From experience, we know that there are many things that distract us. So, to encourage you to stay with us during the short videos, we have included in-video-quizzes during the video and knowledge tests after the videos so that you can check whether you have captured some of the key points and or to encourage you to start exploring the points of knowledge in a deep and significant way to enhance your understanding and make the whole experience more meaningful and enriching.

TIP: If a video stops midway, check if you have to answer a question. You might need to scroll down the page to find the submit and continue buttons.

The Meditation Practice units, delivered through animated videos, are aimed at guiding you to discover and develop your own unique meditation style. The content of these animated videos are very subtle and they have been developed in a way to inspire you to explore and develop a spiritual perspective. Rather than drawing you into the animation, we hope you discover the amazingly creative energy of your own mind.

 The Meditation Commentaries show you how other people guide their minds, with specific thoughts, to create an experience.
TIP: When you listen to these, and all the other units, look out for that one word, image etc that fascinates your mind. Something that just captivates the attention of your mind. When you hold and play with that particular thought, image or word in the multidimensional field of subtle energy of your mind and bring it to life, it shifts the energy and vibration within that highly creative energy field to a completely different level. It is not that the mind becomes empty; the energy of the mind is simple fully focused and lost in the experience of a very sustaining experience.

 The discussion forums and Journaling exercises are designed to encourage you to deeply reflect on specific topics and by noting them down, to formulate and structure the ideas even more in your own mind to make more sense of them. And by sharing these, you and others learn from the different insights, meaning and understanding that you and others have given to the topics shared.

You will be asked to reflect on different topics and we will pose questions for you to reflect on. It is not necessarily about giving the right answer or giving answers that you expect others wish to hear. It is about your journey of self-discovery in a deep and profound way. Don't think too much but let the answers emerge and unfold. From experience, we know, however, that students learn a lot from each other by using the discussion forums effectively.

The journaling exercises do require you to share your views and to give feedback on other people's views. We have opted for peer assessment of the journaling exercises because research has shown that peer grading and self-grading are just as effective as grading by teaching staff and so we want to encourage you to trust yourself and your fellow students. Be kind and constructive in your feedback and seek to gain as much as possible for each others’ learning.

 There is a progress page and it is based on a very simple grading structure. If you like it, great. If you don’t, please do not pay too much attention to it. At the moment, we use it to see how you and other learners are moving through the course and it gives us some indication where we may need to make improvements.