Graduate Certificate in Consciousness, Psychology and Transformation

3.0 Quarter Units

This course focuses on emotional intelligence—the capacity to recognize, understand, regulate, and creatively channel the wisdom and energy of emotional experience, as well as to empathize and relate to others’ emotions. Students learn what emotions are and how they arise physiologically, experientially, and behaviorally. A phenomenological approach enables students to connect with and describe emotions in order to enter more directly into the multi- layered, visceral experience of their emotional lives. The practice of mindfulness allows students to observe, track, and comprehend their experience with openness, curiosity, and acuity. Mindfulness also enables students to identify and work with habitual cognitive schemas and emotional reactions.

2.0 Quarter Units

Students examine recent scientific research in sleep and dreams and explore different phenomena of the dreaming mind. The course incorporates a variety of understandings and techniques for working with dreams, including Freudian, Jungian, and Gestalt psychological approaches, contemporary dream interviewing, content analysis, lucid dreams, “psi” dream phenomena and indigenous approaches to dreams. Students also explore their own dreams, using different experiential and creative explorations.

3.0 Quarter Units

Prerequisite: CNS 5012

This course applies emotional intelligence, along with intuition, social knowledge, and cultural competence, to interpersonal contexts. Students practice techniques of effective listening and understand how emotional triggers can block interpersonal connection. The course also focuses on effective communication, the capacity to attune to another’s experience while remaining connected to one’s own. Students explore how emotional triggers through relationship and provide an opportunity for the expansion of self-awareness and integration. Topics include the principles of nonviolent communication, conflict resolution, and the process of coming into conscious relationship.

2.0 Quarter Units

This experiential course gives students the opportunity to explore their authentic body experiences from a variety of somatic modalities, and in so doing to contact their own lived body wisdom. Students develop greater body consciousness through exercises addressing parts of the body, body systems, and their body in relationship to self, other and the natural world. A variety of movement practices promote creativity and self- expression, supporting the development of emotional intelligence and interpersonal communication. Students integrate a repertoire of body-centered skills to apply to personal challenges, spiritual growth and life enrichment.

3.0 Quarter Units

A paradigm is a model of reality, or aspects of reality, held by a community, and affirmed and enacted through communal behavior. Society today is shaped by past paradigms of consciousness as well as those which are newly emerging. This course explores the nature of paradigms, how they emerge, how they are sustained and how they are changed. We give particular attention to the evolution of various paradigms of consciousness and reality – from indigenous to modern, postmodern, holistic, and integral – and examine the potential of each to contribute to personal, social, and global transformation.

2.0 Quarter Units

This course imparts a meta- perspective on human development and on the evolution of human consciousness. Developmental models assist us in perceiving the growth potentials across the human lifespan, culminating in conscious leadership. The course introduces various models of human development, such as Erikson’s psychosocial development, Kohlberg and Gilligan’s moral development, Fowler’s faith development and Kegan’s adult development. The course also explores basic elements of Ken Wilber’s integral theory, including the four quadrants, the difference between states and stages, and premodern, modern, and postmodern altitudes. Topics include models of consciousness, the relationship of Self/self, and the potential of integral psychology to deepen our understanding of and engagement with personal psycho-spiritual development as well as social/global change.

2.0 Quarter Units

This course introduces the basic principles of Living Systems Theory using theoretical and experiential components. Students apply these principles and practices to a selected area of interest (ecology, psychological development, community/cultural development, education, business or spiritual leadership, etc.). We also explore feedback processes, the interdependence of all life, creative emergence, individual development, family systems and the impact of systems thinking on organizational transformation and social change.

1.0 Quarter Units

Prerequisite: CNS 5017

Spiral Dynamics is a model of conscious, cultural evolution that differentiates eight distinct stages of personal and cultural development and carries great explanatory power when applied to the complexities of our emerging global world. These eight stages of development are values-based, delineating core values around which the eight world-views are organized: safety; power; order; success; equality of people; process-orientation; synthesis- orientation. Understanding the underlying values and world-views held by individuals and different cultural groups, and how change emerges through the spiral of conscious cultural development, is a powerful leadership tool for facilitating personal and social change. Students apply the 8-stage model to real-world situations on a contemporary issue of strong personal interest.

2.0 Quarter Units

Prerequisite: CNS 5010

The human brain, with its ultimate purpose for ensuring survival, organizing information, and meaning making, is also deceptive and limiting by its own nature. In order not to overload consciousness with billions of bits of seemingly irrelevant data, the brain constructs and projects a reality that we assume and believe is ultimate reality. Our default mode network operates to ensure we are focused on bits of information that serve the self, for the sake of survival and personal thriving. Yet when the brain is introduced to meditation, mindfulness practices, or psychedelics, we find consistent reported states of unity consciousness, ego dissolution, ah-ha moments, flow, increased empathy towards others, the planet, and one’s self, and greater creative problem-solving ability. Ample neuroscientific, therapeutic, and phenomenological evidence indicates that meditation, mindfulness practices, and psychedelics expand human consciousness, positively change world-views, and offer profound experiences of well- being. This course covers how meditation, mindfulness practices, and psychedelics operate on neurological and personal spheres. It also addresses how the integration of neuroscience, psychology, psychedelic sciences, and meditation practices is the cutting edge of human potential and healing.