Are You Certified? Buyer Beware!

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Are You Certified? Buyer Beware in the Spiritual Marketplace

By Mark Stavish

The Certified Meditation Instructor

One of the most common topics of discussion that has arisen over the last four or five years is the explosion in various programs offering certifications in various esoteric, spiritual, and holistic practices. It seems that telling your potential client base that you are Certified is increasingly common and taken by both consumers and would be teachers as a testimony to competency. However, this simply is not true in most instances, and many of these certificates are not worth the time it took to print them. For example, I am familiar with several women locally teaching meditation classes. Last year they had no interest in meditation or any spiritual discipline at all. Now, after taking their six-week they are a “Certified Meditation Instructor”. Take it for what it is worth. Yes, they can talk you through the practice, but knowing them as I do, I would not count on them for the needed instruction – instruction based in experience – for when the crises hits. In fact, in discussions with them I have been told that meditation and spiritual practice “should be crises free”. I kid you not.

The Certified Yoga Instructor

There is also the current “certified yoga instructor” machinery out there. Churning out “instructors” who have never heard of pranayama, know the basics of meditation, or understand the limits of human physiology across the life-span. Thus, injuries happen, both of the physical kind and the psychological as psychic centers are awakened when stress is released, and suddenly, you have someone crying in the middle of your yoga studio, having neurotic ideation, or even what can be diagnosed as psychotic episodes because the instructor was incompetent. Intentionally incompetent? I doubt it? They probably believed the sales pitch they were given and passed on to their students. But “the path to hell is paved with good intentions”, and good intentions do not protect one from being stupid or injured as a result. What does it mean to be certified? What does it mean this person actually knows and is capable of imparting to me or others?

OM Times is a leading voice of the Conscious Community with articles covering the full spectrum of Conscious Living. Click here to see all we share.