2025 LOVING ROCK KARMA YOGA TRAINING PROGRAM

“Your role is to be a loving rock, so another person can push against you and pull against you, and you stay rooted in love.” —Ram Dass

How do we do this?

Applications for the 2024 “Loving-Rock” cohort is officially closed. Applications for the 2025 cohort will open in Jan of 2025.

This is like a “yoga teacher training,” except centered around karma yoga, the yoga of selfless service. The goal is to strengthen skills, compassion, and presence within the general community and to de-professionalize helper roles. This training is a central praxis of Sacred Community: Sacred Community awakening itself through compassionate action.

This is a one-year online certificate program, and it is designed for compassionate beings who feel called to deepen their ability to be a “loving rock” as a part of their spiritual path.

Hi, my name is Sitaram Dass

I spent my formative years in my mid 20s as a caregiver for my spiritual teacher, Ram Dass, who showed me the path of Bhakti Yoga, the yoga of service and devotion.

One day he was giving a talk to a group of end-of-life caregivers, and he said the following words: “Your job is to be a loving rock, so the dying person can push against you and pull against you, and you stay rooted in love.”

In that moment, every hair on my body stood on end, and a spontaneous thought arose in my mind— This is what I want to do with my entire life!

I spent the next 15 years trying to figure that out— How do I become a loving rock? This journey has led me to places like hospices, homeless shelters, psychiatric facilities, prisons, jails, group homes, meditation retreats, sufi zikrs, kirtans, yoga trainings, and eventually to get my master in social work and become a licensed therapist.

In many ways I am still figuring out what it means to be a loving rock, but I also realize that I have gained many skills along the way that others may find useful for their own journeys. I also see the sharing of these skills as the leading edge of this ongoing inquiry— How do I become a loving rock?

This program has developed from listening to the needs of the SCP community, and it seems to have grown naturally from the seeds of SCP’s core values, vision, and mission. I am excited to offer this training along with the help of some dear friends and wise elders.

2024 Guest Lecturers

(2025 guest lecturers may change and will be announced at a later date.)

  • Swapnil Abrol (he/him) discovered the Bhakti tradition through a formal Amazonian shamanic apprenticeship. Through connecting with Maharajji, he found himself returning to his once neglected Hindu roots. Now following the path of Bhakti yoga, he deepens his practice through devotional musical expression. Also an active participant in the world of business, Swapnil enjoys learning new ways of bringing love and compassion into worldly situations.

  • Steven “Stever” Dallmann, PhD is a spiritual practitioner, writer, teacher, and licensed psychotherapist. In 2008, he founded the non-profit Liberation Institute in San Francisco, a community organization with an innovative model of offering mental health services to the entire community regardless of income. Stever currently resides and practices on the island of Maui in Hawaii, from where he continues to guide the ever expanding Liberation Institute and is deeply involved in Hanuman Maui (The Ram Dass Loving Awareness Sanctuary), Aloha in Action, and various community and writing projects. steverdallmann.com

  • Pavan Das (M. Ceurvorst) (he/him) is a community organizer, multi-media artist, and nonprofit leader. He resides on Maui, where he serves on the board of Hanuman Maui: Ram Dass Loving Awareness Sanctuary. His time with spiritual luminaries like Ram Dass and Thich Nhat Hanh informs his commitment to cultivating a lived spirituality through which to effect social change. His service projects aim to foster resilience and prosociality in individuals, groups and communities through the skillful application of contemplative and devotional practices. pavandas.com

  • Anna Le (she/they) is a Vietnamese-American, Bay Area native, and licensed psychotherapist. She is a Bhakta, student of Ram Dass, and devotee of Neem Karoli Baba “Maharajji”. She utilizes compassion-based practices, mindfulness, and various spiritual modalities through a trauma-informed lens to heal others. She is interested in alleviating collective suffering and aiding in collective liberation. She holds a Master’s in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Sonoma State University and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from University California, Davis.

This Year-Long Program Entails:

Quarterly 4-hour trainings

  • Spiritual Peer Support 101

  • Group Facilitation 101

  • Apprenticing Grief

  • Advanced Spiritual Support

Ongoing personal development

Learning and Practice

  • Loving-Awareness

  • Nishkam Karma

  • Souls not roles

  • Reflective listening

  • Mindful and heartful listening

  • Honoring silence

  • Companioning not fixing

  • Spiritual friendship

  • Seeing Divinity within humanity

  • Transcendence and Imminence

  • Apprenticing grief

  • Basic knowledge of power, privilege, and intersecting oppressions

  • Cultural humility

  • Traversing nonordinary reality and nonlinear thinking

Seva: practice providing direct spiritual support through SCP

  • Individual Spiritual Support

  • Group Facilitation

Monthly Time Commitment

It is estimated that this course requires 8-10 hours of time each month. This can vary and it also depends on your own personal commitment. A sample breakdown of a given month is as follows:

  • 2-hour Q&A and class (some months this is a 4-hour training)

  • 1-hour refection group or partner exercise

  • 2-4 Satsang Hangs (1 hour each)

  • 2-3 hours of personal study (reading, listening to audio, or watching video)

  • 1 hour of homework through online discussion board

  • Daily personal practice

Sample Schedule:

    • Meet your new cohort

    • Get acquainted with the online class portal

    • Receive your syllabus

    • Sign up for first spiritual support session

    • Learn and experience the nature of Loving Awareness

    • Deepen study into various contemplative and devotional practices

    • Make a personal commitment to practice and be assigned an accountability partner

    • The first four-hour quarterly training is on how to be a loving rock in a group setting

    • Learn group facilitation skills

    • After this training you will sign up to practice facilitation of an SCP “Satsang Hang.”

    • To be a loving rock we first need to learn to tend to ourselves

    • Increase personal mindfulness and awareness skills of our body-heart-mind so we can be truly present with others.

    • Learn our personal triggers and develop a personal “operating and troubleshooting manual” so we can deepen awareness of our habitual responses and how to best respond

    • Learn the “microskills” of how to be a loving rock

    • Reflective listening

    • Mindful and heartful listening

    • Companioning not fixing

    • Second 4-hour quarterly training on the SCP model of spiritual support

    • What does it mean to be a spiritual friend?

    • How to witness both humanity and divinity and create an allowance for both to emerge

    • What does it mean to be a loving rock in the face of the world’s suffering?

    • Exploring the nature of power, privilege, and intersecting oppressions

    • Inspecting personal bias

    • Third quarterly training on how to show up for grief- for our friends, for our communities, and for our own personal lives

    • How to skillfully navigate nonordinary realities and nonlinear thinking.

    • How to integrate reality-shaking experiences into our daily lives

    • Synthesizing previous concepts into the model of SCP spiritual support

    • How to identify and work with common patterns of being “stuck” on the spiritual path

    • Class reflections

    • Future intentions

    • Personal commitments