120h Meditation Teacher Training.
May 13 - August 19 2026.
Blue Mountains + Online.
“The true practice of meditation is to sit as if you were drinking water when you are thirsty.”
- Shunryu Suzuki
A heart-centred, experiential immersion unfolding over 12 weeks, for those drawn to depth, clarity, and sincere aspiration.
Why this training?
Are you drawn to deepen your relationship with meditation — and, through it, your life?
This 120-Hour Meditation Teacher Training is for those called to deepen their relationship with meditation and share the practice from lived experience.
The training draws on non-dual and awareness-based traditions, self-inquiry, mindfulness and Buddhist psychology, heart-centred practices, and yogic approaches to breath, mantra, and subtle energy. While the curriculum is informed by a range of contemplative streams, the underlying orientation — and the personal journey of lead facilitators Rose and Alistair — is deeply shaped by Hridaya Yoga and the love and wisdom of Sahajananda, which continue to inform the tone, sincerity, and heart of the work.
These contemplative teachings are offered as experiential pathways to explore, not belief systems to adopt.
Whether your intention is to deepen personal practice or to support others, the emphasis remains the same: sustained practice, discernment, and embodied understanding — cultivating a genuine love for meditation that naturally carries into life.
Rather than memorising scripts, you’ll learn to guide meditation by understanding the inner process you’re inviting others into, allowing your teaching to arise from presence, clarity, and lived experience.
How we will learn.
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Wednesday 13 – Tuesday 19 May | Blue Mountains, NSW.
A five-day immersive silent retreat forming the experiential foundation of the training through sustained meditation practice, guided inquiry, and silence.
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Thursdays | 6:30–8:00pm (AEDT)
21 May – 13 August
(12 × 1.5-hour sessions)
+ Practicums 20 August & 27 August (TBC).These shorter, consistent sessions support integration and continuity. Each evening introduces a key theme and meditation technique, alongside space for practice, reflection, questions, practice teaching, and group dialogue.
Each week is anchored by a single technique, which participants work with throughout the week before moving on to the next.
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Saturdays | 10:00am–1:00pm (AEDT) selected dates between 30 May - 15 August:
30 May, 6 June, 20 June, 27 June, 11 July, 25 July, 1 August, 15 August.
8 × 3 hour masterclasses with experts in the field, allowing for deeper exploration of core themes, combining extended practice, teaching input, inquiry, and experiential learning.
And yes, you will be provided with enough ceremonial Soma Cacao to cover the Masterclasses, as part of the inclusions of the course.*Note - dates and times may change in order to accommodate our international guest teachers. Plenty of warning will be given, and we appreciate your openness and flexibility.
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You will commit to minimum 30 minutes meditation (sadhana) each day. You’ll be partnered with a “practice ally” to synchronise your meditation or share reflections each day.”Pre-recorded guided practices will be provided each week.
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Ongoing throughout the training, informal, progressive, opportunities to guide meditation and receive feedback.
Silent Retreat Feedback.
Who this is for.
This training is well suited to:
Dedicated meditation practitioners
Yoga teachers and retreat facilitators
Therapists, counsellors, and health professionals
Anyone feeling a sincere call to deepen their relationship with meditation
Note: this course is best suited to those with existing meditation experience, whether through a daily meditation practice, and/or attendance at a previous silent meditation retreat. Please write to us at hello@rosecousens.com if you’re unsure about your suitability for the course.
The Approach.
This is a heart-centred, experiential training.
Many meditation and yoga trainings place a strong emphasis on theory, history, technical detail, and an ever-expanding range of techniques. This can feel dense and difficult to integrate, with less space for practices to settle into lived experience.
This training takes a different approach. We prioritise coherence, depth, continuity, and play, recognising that meditation — and our understanding of it — unfolds in a non-linear way. Learning happens through direct experience and shared inquiry.
Philosophy is woven in only where it supports insight, and everything is oriented toward application in daily life.
The result is a training that feels joyful, rich and exciting, offering practices that continue to live and breathe well beyond the formal structure of the course.
Course Overview
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Across the Thursday evening online practice sessions, we return again and again to the foundations of meditation as a living practice and an ongoing relationship. Rather than approaching meditation as a performance or a project of self-improvement, we explore what meditation is pointing toward, why we practise, and what genuinely supports depth over time — including intention, simplicity, steadiness, and tenderness.
These sessions gently address common misunderstandings that keep practice stuck in the head, while offering a grounded framework for working with techniques as doorways into presence rather than ends in themselves. Through consistent practice, reflection, and dialogue, understanding is allowed to mature organically. Meditation is approached experientially: something we enter, taste, and learn from directly, week by week, as it begins to inform both our inner life and the way we meet the world.
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Meditation changes our relationship with mind. In this workshop we explore attention, thought, emotion, and the subtle mechanics of patterning, including how different states of consciousness arise and what they reveal. Rather than pathologising the mind or trying to “get rid” of thoughts, we learn to recognise mind as an appearance within awareness, and to meet it with discernment and friendliness. Psychological insight becomes useful here, not as theory for its own sake, but as a way of becoming more honest, more coherent, and less hooked. The aim is clarity without heaviness, and a felt understanding of what meditation is actually doing under the surface.
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A non-dual path still needs a body that feels safe enough to be here. This session brings meditation down into the lived terrain of sensation, breath, and nervous system regulation, supporting practitioners to recognise the difference between presence and dissociation, steadiness and suppression. We explore somatic ways of tracking experience, working skilfully with activation, and letting the body become a genuine ally in stillness. For teachers, this becomes essential: learning to guide in a way that is attuned, trauma-sensitive, and grounded in reality rather than ideals. The overall message is simple: embodiment deepens meditation, and meditation matures embodiment.
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Here we enter the heart of the non-dual undercurrent: the direct investigation of who we are. Self-inquiry is introduced as a gentle, precise practice of turning toward the one who is aware, and recognising the witnessing presence that remains unchanged throughout experience. We explore how to rest as awareness without spacing out, and how inquiry can be lived as intimacy rather than analysis. This is not philosophical debate. It’s an invitation to taste the simplicity of being, and to let insight arise naturally through attention that is quiet, curious, and sincere. For many, this becomes a turning point in practice, where meditation shifts from doing to recognising.
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This workshop explores the relationship between attention, breath, energy, and vitality, offering a practical understanding of how prana can support stability, depth, and joy in meditation. We’ll work with breath and energetic orientation in a way that is embodied rather than conceptual, learning how to sense when practice feels dull, scattered, over-efforted, or naturally alive. Prana also helps bridge stillness and daily life: when energy flows cleanly, presence becomes easier, and practice begins to spill into the way we walk, speak, and relate. This session is both grounded and luminous, offering tools that feel immediately useable.
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Mantra offers a different doorway: devotion, resonance, and the steadying power of sound. In this session we explore mantra as an embodied practice that gathers attention and heart, quietens the surface mind, and opens a felt sense of inner alignment. Rather than treating mantra as exotic or overly technical, we approach it as a lived method: how to practise, how to listen, how to let repetition become intimate rather than mechanical. Mantra can be deeply supportive for those who struggle with mental noise, and it can also reveal the non-dual dimension in its own way, when sound and awareness begin to feel less separate. The emphasis is on direct experience, simplicity, and genuine connection.
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Meditation doesn’t only happen in stillness. This masterclass explores shakti as the living intelligence of life itself, and how meditation can become an ongoing relationship with movement, sensation, creativity, and inner unfolding. We look at how energy expresses in the body and psyche, how to stay in contact with it without getting swept away, and how to work with intensity in a mature way. For practitioners and teachers, this brings vital nuance: how to recognise when “energy” is insight, when it is activation, and when it is simply life asking to be felt more fully. The invitation here is to let practice become alive and spacious, with joy as a natural by-product of honest contact.
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Meditation ripens in relationship. This masterclass brings the practice into the human realm: communication, intimacy, boundaries, empathy, and the messy beauty of being with others. We explore compassion as presence in action, not as a personality trait or a performance of kindness, and we learn how relational awareness becomes both a mirror and a teacher. This session supports the integration of non-dual insight with the heart, so that realisation expresses as care, steadiness, and sincerity in everyday life. For those who wish to teach, it also cultivates the essential capacity to hold people with sensitivity and respect, and to guide groups in a way that is attuned, warm, and real.
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karma Yoga is the practice of offering action itself — letting life move through us without grasping at outcomes or identity. In this session, we explore karma yoga as living meditation: meeting each moment, task, and relationship as an opportunity to rest in presence, humility, and love.
We look at how subtle motivations shape action, how attachment and resistance create contraction, and how service becomes liberating when it arises from inner stillness rather than obligation. Karma yoga, in this sense, is an expression of non-dual insight in daily life — action flowing from being, without a sense of a doer. The invitation is simple and radical: to allow life to act through us, and to discover freedom not by withdrawing from the world, but by participating in it wholeheartedly. -
Teaching methodology is woven throughout the weekly evening sessions and integrated gradually, so that teaching skills develop organically alongside personal practice.
Rather than learning rigid scripts or formulas, participants learn how to craft and deliver guided meditations that are clear, responsive, and inspiring.We explore how to find and trust an authentic teaching voice, how to speak from direct experience, and how to guide with confidence without over-explaining or performing.
Practical topics include recognising common challenges and misconceptions that arise in meditation, and responding skilfully in real time. Facilitation skills are developed through informal practicums, feedback, and reflection, supporting teachers to hold groups with steadiness and warmth. The emphasis throughout is on teaching as a natural, relational practice that grows out of presence rather than technique alone.
The Facilitators.
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ROSE COUSENS
Rose Cousens is a meditation teacher and retreat facilitator whose work blends deep contemplative practice with embodied, life-affirming integration. Beginning her journey in yoga as a tool for anxiety relief, Rose’s study expanded into long-term, immersive practice — including time living and training in Mexico, India, and Thailand — and over 250 days in silent meditation retreats, including a 49-day solitary retreat.
Her teaching draws on core principles from classical Yoga and Ayurveda, alongside insights from Buddhist Psychology, crafting a holistic approach that supports authenticity, self-reflection, presence, and sustained ease in life and practice. Rose shares meditation and yoga retreats across Australia and internationally, bringing depth, warmth, joy, and a commitment to making contemplative practice accessible to sincere practitioners.
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ALISTAIR JOHNSTON
Alistair started his spiritual journey in 2014 at a Buddhist monastery in the North of Thailand. In the years since he has practised meditation with various teachers, learned several styles of yoga, and sat many retreats. In 2018 he went to Mexico for a yoga course, and met Rose as he arrived at the front gate. Alistair now guides silent meditation retreats across Australia alongside Rose, and teaches with creativity, humour, story-telling and insight.
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RANDALL O'LEARY
Randall is the Founder and Director of Swara Yoga and a highly respected teacher with over three decades of experience in yoga and meditation. Practising since 1991 and teaching since 1995, he has guided thousands of students through long-form study, teacher trainings, and advanced breath and meditation practices.
His work centres on the cultivation of prana through breath, subtle awareness, and meditative absorption. Drawing from classical Hatha Yoga, Tantra, Viniyoga, and Tai Qi, Randall developed Swara Yoga — a sophisticated, breath-centred system that supports deep meditation and embodied clarity.
Initiated into an ancient Indian spiritual lineage, Randall brings rare depth, precision, and integrity to his teaching. His work has profoundly shaped Rose and Alistair’s own practice and understanding of yoga and meditation.
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DIJAN ALBAYRAK
Dijan Albayrak is an international meditation and yoga teacher, yoga therapist (C-IAYT), and creator of Inner Contemplation Methodologies with over two decades of embodied practice and study. She holds advanced certifications in yoga, meditation, and tantra, and blends ancient contemplative wisdom with modern psychological and somatic awareness.
Dijan’s work integrates classical meditation techniques, subtle energy practices, yogic philosophy, and somatic embodiment to support depth, presence, and insight in practice. She has co-founded and managed a meditation centre in Bali, leads retreats globally, and brings a refined, compassionate approach to teaching meditation and inner enquiry.
Alistair first met Dijan in Thailand 10 years ago, and introduced her to Rose. Dijan has been Rose’s coach for the last four years, and has initiated her into the Mahavidyas (10 Wisdom Goddesses) via her lineage, Shivoham Tantra. -

LUNA CABASES CORAL
Luna is a meditation teacher and Hridaya Yoga teacher trainer whose work centres on compassion, relational presence, and embodied self-inquiry. She spent over thirteen years teaching and serving with Hridaya Yoga in Mexico and France, facilitating silent meditation retreats (3, 10, and 30 days), Hatha Yoga modules, and Compassionate Communication workshops. Alongside extensive long-term retreat practice, Luna has recently deepened her studies in the Triple Vagal Method and Shadow EFT, integrating nervous system awareness, somatic embodiment, and non-dual heart teachings. She is deeply committed to creating safe, attuned spaces that support integration, healing, and the lived expression of meditation in daily life and relationship.
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TODD PEYTON
Todd Peyton, MA is a meditation and mind-body teacher whose work integrates depth psychology, somatic awareness, breath practices, and contemplative training. With a Master’s in Archetypal Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, extensive study in Jungian dream analysis, somatic embodiment, and years as a certified Kundalini yoga instructor, Todd brings a nuanced understanding of the mind, body, and inner life.
He has also undertaken immersive monastic training in Myanmar, learning to sit with the fire of experience and presence. Todd’s approach supports practitioners to explore meditation through psychological insight, somatic awareness, and subtle energy, making the inner landscape accessible and meaningful. -
MORE TO BE ANNOUNCED...
Investment.
The 120-Hour Meditation Teacher Training is offered as a single, integrated program. The investment reflects the depth of the training and includes both the in-person silent retreat and the full online component.
Total training investment: $2,200 – $2,900 AUD
The final amount depends on your accommodation choice during the retreat.
120-Hour Program Fee: $1,500 AUD
5-Day Silent Meditation Retreat (All meals & accommodation): $700–$1,400 AUD
WHAT’S INCLUDED
Your training fee covers the complete 120(+)-hour program, including:
Yoga Alliance Continuing Education certification
Five-day in-person silent meditation retreat
Printed course manual
Meditation Retreat kit
All meals during the retreat
Six nights accommodation during the retreat
12 x 1.5 hour weekly online practice sessions with Rose & Alistair (18 hours)
8 x 3 hour weekend masterclasses with International Guest Teachers (24 hours)
A 500g of ceremonial Soma Cacao to accompany the Saturday morning masterclasses.
A guided container for self-practice (minimum 40 hours)
Teaching practicums, and feedback
Note: Total program hours comprise of: Silent Retreat (45 hours) + Weekly live practice sessions (18 hours) + Weekend masterclasses (24 hours) + Personal Practice (40+ hours).Total counted hours meet Yoga Alliance Continuing Education criteria. Actual engagement exceeds 120 hours through personal practice and integration.
ACCOMMODATION (Retreat Component)
Accommodation options, subject to availability:
Triple share: $700
Twin share: $875
Private room (single bed): $1,300
Private room (double bed): $1,400
All rooms have ensuite bathrooms. Accommodation ranges from $700 (shared) to $1,400 (private). Rooms are allocated on a first-come basis once your place is confirmed.
SCHOLARSHIPS
We are committed to making these teachings accessible.
If the training feels right for you but the price is a barrier, a small number of partial scholarships are available. These are offered to support people who feel a genuine call to the training and are ready to engage sincerely, but for whom the full fee would make participation difficult.
If you would like to be considered for a scholarship, you’re welcome to indicate this in your application and share a little about your circumstances. All requests are treated confidentially and reviewed with care.
We ask that those who are able to pay the full fee do so, as this helps support the sustainability of the program and allows scholarship places to be offered. Write to us directly at hello@rosecousens.com if you have any questions about this.
Ready?
“You talk to yourself too much. You’re not unique in that; every one of us does. We maintain our world with our inner dialogue. A man or woman of knowledge is aware that the world will change completely as soon as they stop talking to themselves.”
– Carlos Castaneda
FAQs
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No. While this training does prepare those who feel called to teach, it is equally suitable for committed practitioners who want to deepen and clarify their own practice. Many people may join primarily for personal practice and integration, and allow questions about teaching to unfold naturally.
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This training is best suited to those with an existing meditation practice or prior retreat experience. You don’t need to be an “advanced” meditator, but you should feel comfortable sitting regularly and be open to self-inquiry and silence.
You’ll also need to be willing to commit to 30 minutes of meditation practice minimum for a period of 12 weeks.
If you’re unsure whether this training is the right fit, you’re very welcome to get in touch.
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If you are unable to attend the 5-Day Silent Meditation Retreat, please contact us at hello@rosecousens.com to discuss other options.
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All live online sessions and half-day immersions will be recorded and made available to participants. While live attendance is encouraged wherever possible, the training is designed to be accessible for people with work, family, or time zone constraints. However please note the sessions will be highly interactive, so to make the most out of the program it is strongly encouraged to attend all sessions live.
Some teaching practicums may require live participation, which will be clearly communicated in advance.
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In addition to live sessions, you can expect to spend time on:
Personal meditation practice (30 mins daily)
Reflective journaling or inquiry (10 mins per week)
Occasional peer practice or teaching preparation
On average, participants spend a few hours per week engaging with the training outside of scheduled sessions.
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Yes. Participants who complete the training requirements will receive a 120-Hour Meditation Teacher Training Certificate.
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Yes. You will receive a Yoga Alliance certificate which is recognised internationally. This certification counts toward Continuing Education hours for Yoga Alliance RYT holders globally.
Meditation teacher training sits in a space that doesn’t always fit neatly within formal education or licensing frameworks, and regulation across the field is limited. While there are some recognised pathways, many struggle to fully reflect the depth, experiential nature, and relational dimensions that are central to contemplative practice.
For this reason, the structure and content of this training are guided first and foremost by what we believe genuinely supports deep practice, discernment, and integrity in teaching. The emphasis is placed on embodied understanding and lived experience, cultivating the capacity to guide meditation in a way that is responsive, grounded, and relevant to real people and real situations.
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The training fee includes:
The full 100-hour training
The five-day in-person silent meditation retreat
All meals during the retreat
Six nights accommodation during the retreat
Weekly online sessions and half-day immersions
Teaching practicums and feedback
There are no additional fees for the retreat component.
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Yes. During the retreat, you can choose from:
Twin share
Triple share
Private room (single bed)
Private room (double bed)
All rooms have ensuite bathrooms. Accommodation is allocated on a first-come basis.
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Yes. Payment plans are available to support accessibility. Details are provided during the application or booking process.

