Foundations Course
This program provides an opportunity for students to immerse themselves in a highly potent environment that is devoted solely to their healing and inner-awakening. Through intensive group and partner-centered experiences, students are helped to take necessary steps to create positive life change and to grow spiritually. Because there is a special power and momentum when a group of individuals gather in support of one another’s deeper journey, the process itself is greatly enhanced and accelerated over time as the group becomes increasingly cohesive and is able to sustain connection to greater levels of energy, love, and light.
All weekends take place in an interactive setting, in which sharing, discussion, and informal lectures are combined with group and partner exercises, meditation, and other practices that are designed to help still the mind, open the heart, and facilitate deep self-awareness. Students work with breath, sound, movement, and perhaps most profoundly, energy — the subtle yet dynamic life force that determines our quality of health and well-being, and ultimately connects us to wholeness. Although the focus is on self-development, the theories and practice of energy healing are also an integral part of the program.
Classes meet on selected weekends over four years. Students make a commitment to the program on a year-to-year basis; however, in order to experience optimal benefits, they are encouraged to complete the full program.
Foundations Course Introductory Weekend
Experiencing an introductory weekend prior to enrolling in the school is a prerequisite for the Foundations Course. In this way, prospective students can get a taste of the program before making a commitment to join the entering class. The introductory weekend is October 20 & 21, 2007. Those who are unable to attend in October may take the December 8 & 9, 2007 Foundations Course weekend as their introduction.
For those who decide to enroll in the Foundations Course, the cost for the introductory weekend can be applied towards the year’s tuition.
We understand that, ultimately, healing is about opening to our depth and the willingness to touch this essence in others.
We believe that by contacting the non-physical dimensions of our being — for example, expanded states of consciousness, the dynamic matrices of the human energy field, and inner wisdom — profound healing, life change, and spiritual evolution are catalyzed.
We stress self-awareness and recognize that by attending to the more visceral, felt experiences of our being we can help the real self to emerge and transform.
We hold a deep respect for the innate healing intelligence of the body.
We realize that participation in an on-going, dynamic group process with others who are similarly committed to their own growth is an accelerated way to evolve; through relationship we can learn to meet ourselves and others as well as nurture a more profound ability to enter into the healing space of the heart.
We acknowledge in everyone the depth of longing to know love, which is our true essence and the central purpose of life.
First Year
Students begin the work of becoming a cohesive group, establishing an environment of mutual trust and support. Students also:
- Practice a variety of healing methods created to connect them in deeper ways to themselves, others, and greater levels of consciousness.
- Learn how to interact with the energy field so that the life force can flow in more harmonious and vital ways.
- Draw upon several helpful, spiritually-based paradigms of human development as a way to identify and transform negative, self-limiting life patterns.
- Enter into a process of self-awareness designed ultimately to take them beyond the small ego self; in this way, they can begin to realize that they are more than their minds — that it is possible to find a way out of psychological pain and into the enduring experience of joy, aliveness, and love.
Second Year
Students continue to nurture experiences that support self-healing, inner-unfolding, and group connection. Students also:
- Explore in-depth their unique defense systems — especially through the lens of Characterology, a typology designed to show the ways that we have split from wholeness.
- Engage and enliven the visceral experience of the self through breath, sound, and movement.
- Complete a second year project in which students meet with a graduate-student healer for a series of sessions and then write a report that documents their experiences.
Third Year
Students have greater opportunities to apply the theories and practices experienced during the first two years of the program. Students also:
- Participate in an intensive, year-long practicum in which they (in the role of healer) meet with a fellow classmate for a series of healing sessions and then write a report about their experiences; the culmination of this practicum is the opportunity for the healers to step into greater self-awareness and to shine as who they really are during an oral process, which will be guided by a supportive team of teachers, class members and graduates.
- Assist at some first and second year weekends as a way to experience new perspectives and to expand their understanding of the healing journey.
- Spend time together on a retreat (or when possible, an extended trip), if the class so chooses. Past groups have traveled to Turkey, Peru, Bali, India, and the ancient power places of Celtic Scotland and Ireland, and have stayed in a variety of retreat centers in the United States.
Visiting Ephesus in Turkey
Fourth Year
Students integrate the experiences of the first three years of the program and begin to take healing and self-awakening to the next level. After successfully fulfilling all of the requirements of the program, they receive a certificate of completion during a graduation ceremony. Students also:
- Continue to explore the steps and challenges of the evolutionary journey as well as the path of the healer.
- Inquire further into the nature of human consciousness and the mind-body connection.
- Acquire more sophisticated ways to sustain the experience of their inner body as a field of energy, so that, as healers and seekers on the spiritual journey, they can more richly meet others and more fully experience their own divine essence.
Graduate Intensive Program
Graduates can elect to continue their journey in the school by participating in a graduate-level program, which offers a series of workshops and retreats designed specifically for those graduates who are deeply committed to self-exploration, expanded being, uplifting others, embodying the principles of healing in their lives, and discovering the unbounded reaches of love.
Sandra Barnard is the Director of the Full Spectrum School. She has spent decades in a process of intensive inner-searching and has studied with a number of healers, spiritual masters, and shamans. At age 34, she experienced an inner transformation that set in motion her life’s mission, as a healer and spiritual teacher, to help others discover the depth, power, and absolute freedom of living authentically, meaningfully, and more fully in the heart. In her work, she is able to adeptly guide others into the deep spaces of the self with compassion, skill, and sensitivity. She combines a theoretical foundation in Eastern as well as Western mystical and shamanic traditions with an extensive background in energy healing, body-centered psychodynamic work, group process, and many years of spiritual practice. Ultimately, she has come to realize that what matters most is to love and cherish others.
Bill Barnard, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, where he teaches classes in comparative religion, the psychology of religion, and various shamanic traditions. He is the author of Exploring Unseen Worlds, a long-time practitioner of meditation, and a student of tai chi and aikido. He brings a wealth of embodied and heart-felt insights to the Full Spectrum School as teacher of Characterology in the second year. He has a gifted capacity to facilitate groups and to help students contact the body’s potential for dynamic, fluid movement.
2007 - 2008 Dates
Meets Saturday & Sunday, from 9:30 AM - 6:30 PM.
(We often go later on Saturdays.)
December 8 & 9, 2007* April 5 & 6, 2008
January 12 & 13, 2008 May 3 & 4, 2008
February 9 & 10, 2008 May 31 & June 1, 2008
March 8 & 9, 2008
* Those who miss the October 20 & 21, 2007 introductory weekend can take this first weekend in December as their introduction.
Tuition & Fees
Please contact the school for information about tuition and payment options and/or to receive the Foundations Course brochure and/or the introductory weekend flyer.
Location, Travel & Accommodations
Meadville, a small college town in Northwestern Pennsylvania, is easily accessible by interstate and/or airport from Erie, Pennsylvania (the nearest city), as well as Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Buffalo.
We recognize that students come from all over the United States. Although accommodation arrangements are the responsibility of the student, a list of local motels and restaurants is available by contacting the school. Out-of-town students, however, often arrange to stay with classmates who live in the area.
