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Meeting of Founders and Members of the Association for Spiritual Integrity

Forty-five spiritual teachers, members of “The Association for Spiritual Integrity”, met for four hours prior to the start of the 2019 Science and Nonduality Conference. For the first couple of hours, we engaged in a deep, honest discussion about the challenges teachers face, seeking to learn how we might better support one another. We then broke into six groups, each focusing on a particular topic. Then we reassembled and recorded the remainder of the meeting.

This video includes:

Introduction by Rick

Summary of discussions in each of the six breakout groups.

(1) Bringing forth women and feminine empowerment.
- Distinguishing between women and yin-style teachings in a way to not exclude men from the conversation.
- Action items:
  - to have each day of SAND have a 3-hour session led by women.
  - to have more yin-style teachings on the SAND website
(2) Ongoing growth for teachers and continuing education, trauma, attachment, and shadow work.
- Teacher survey: what is working for you?
- Online teacher assessment through which teachers can assess themselves.
- Regular peer-group meetings, including teachers with younger teachers
- Workshop around developmental trauma that shows up in the teacher role.
(3) Creating community and peer support
- Among spiritual teachers
- How to include more people of color and young people in the spiritual community, which tends to be white and middle class.
- Monthly online and annual in-person peer group meetings for spiritual teachers
- A system whereby teachers can refer students to other teachers, if appropriate.
(4) Healthy power dynamics and dual relationships
- People will naturally come and go from spiritual training groups.
- There should be a balance between teacher and student accountability.
(5) The Ethics of the Spiritual Community
- Have something like the Better Business Bureau which would keep the data on teacher abuse.
(6) The importance of awareness of teacher misbehavior and discerning between real misbehavior and false accusations.