Testimonials - What students say about Luminous
Want to know what it's like to participate in Luminous programs? Read below to get a taste of what people share of their experience.
Mikey S. - LAI 2-Year Program Participant
The Luminous program has been one of the most, if not the most, life-changing systems of support I've received in my life. It's changed the way that I feel, it's changed the way that I interact with other people, it's changed the way that I navigate my life. It's helped me to be a better human being.
When Luminous was first described to me, I was terrified at the thought of joining because the picture painted was of people that were connecting open, vulnerable, and embodied. And these were things that not only were absent from my life, but things that were so scary that I would do anything to avoid them. But what this really represented was that I wasn't open. I wasn't connected to myself. I wasn't connected to my body. I wasn't in touch with my emotional experience. And I especially wasn't in a place where I could share that with other people. It created a sense of isolation where even though I was surrounded by people, I wasn't really connected; I wasn't really alive. The Luminous program has changed all of that. I feel a deeper sense of embodied belonging as a human being in this world.
So if you're a spiritual seeker like I am, and you look around, you’ll realize there's no shortage of programs out there. There are a lot of really amazing things from Buddhist meditation to deep Tantric work, to personal positive psychology. It's really endless. And Luminous is unique and special for a few reasons.
Luminous actually brings together the best across domains from attachment therapy to Tibetan Buddhism, to human energy systems and healing.
And it actually is one of the few programs that has a deep synthesis of healing and awakening. These are two things that are often separated in the spiritual marketplace, and Luminous offers a coherent integrated path.
One of the parts of Luminous has actually been the most supportive for me is that it's not just a school, and it's not just teachers that are “giving you wisdom”. It's a community and that community is deep and nurturing, and integrated with the healing path. What I've come to realize through Luminous is we can't do this alone. We really can’t. And Luminous doesn't just tell you this; they actually create a community which collectively embodies it.
And you have peers that love you and support you and are vulnerable with you and share your challenges and your achievements for a long period. As I've explored different communities and schools and teachings over the years, one of the metrics is finding people that I would trust my life with. It sounds extreme to say that, but when you're doing this deep work, you actually do need to be able to trust your life with these people, because in the healing process, you die and you die and you die again. And if you can't trust that you will be held and supported, then you won't be able to actually move through the healing process. And I trust Luminous and the people that create it, with my life. We die and we get reborn.
What I've noticed in the spiritual world is there's a lot of seeking of peak experiences. These are super valuable and can help guide us. Psychedelics and ayahuasca ceremonies are good for that. And even certain kinds of meditation retreats are good for that. But the thing that I've noticed, for me and other people, that's consistently missing is integration. And you can have as many peak experiences as you want, but if that's not brought into your life with practices and community, then it just fades away. And Luminous offers both. It offers the opportunity to go really deep and to taste our real potential, the true depths of who we are. And it also offers long-term continual fabric that we're embedded in which makes that experience a part of who we are from day to day and moment to moment.
Jason H. - LAI 2-Year Program Participant
There’s not a facet of life which the Luminous program doesn't touch, support and improve. I've been in personal development and growth for a long time [and studied] many different traditions. Some teachings go quite deep, but they don't actually reach the roots of the challenges that we face as human beings, as such dynamic experiences of being human. And this program really, truly illuminates the roots of why we behave in certain ways, what causes us to feel unwell or to not feel at ease and a sense of joy in life.
This is the only program I have experienced that has addressed the roots of why we suffer and not only address the roots, but show you the way to actually heal those things. I can't think of a better gift to life itself, than to actually embody a way of being well in the world and to relieve ourselves of suffering. This experience, this community, and these teachers bring so much understanding and so much embodied mastery of these practices that I feel I've hit upon something that is allowing me to truly live my life from a real sense of who I actually am.
I've never come across teachers that embody such unconditional permission and love. The school and this training is not about them. They're way-showers of the teachings. And the level of mastery that is transmitted through them is, in my experience, unparalleled.
Sindhu H. - LAI 2-Year Program Participant
Luminous contains ancient, often hidden teachings from Eastern lineages. Many of the esoteric teachings and the deep deeper essence of the teachings have been lost in the way Eastern philosophy is shared today. At Luminous I feel in direct contact with the deepest essence of these ancient teachings and through the practices I am directly connecting with living wisdom intelligence and the all-pervasive energetic field.
Viraja P. - LAI 2-Year Program Participant
What I love about the Luminous work is that there is an unfolding, like a flower blooming across the whole 2-year program. And then within each segment of the different modules, there happens to be a discovery within each of the segments of the content, through my own personal life experience.
What I've come to notice after doing two rounds now of the Luminous Awareness Institute is that there is some seamless perfection in what I'm experiencing.
What's coming to my awareness during the periods of time between the modules is very, very highlighted and relevant to the content of what we're going to be discovering and working with and healing and evolving in the modules. It continues to delight me and amaze me and create powerful transformations in my life.
I'll highlight three.
One is on my personal relationship with myself and within my own body.
I now have the ability to be in my own body, grounded, and have the potency built within me to create and interface with the world from there.
I would say in contrast to that, I used to have a degree of anxiety and uncertainty I wasn't even conscious of. The support of the Luminous program and the tools and community helped me embody a new potential, a new possibility.
The second area of transformation is my personal relationships. I hadn't been aware of things like bonding needs prior to Luminous. It's not an original Luminous concept. However, it's integrated and woven into the curriculum so much so that the modules correspond to our key attachment needs.
My attachment style was anxious, and I had a lot of relationships in the past where I was trying to get connection, but didn't quite know how, and I didn't know how to create a secure, bonded connection in my partnership that would help create more ease and more capacity for Awakening. And now I do. Through the work I've done with the Luminous teachings, the healings I've received, and the adjunct facility I've worked with to heal my attachment needs and wounds, I now have the most amazing, bonded, secure, beautiful relationship I've ever had in my life.
The third area of transformation is community: the way we are held. Luminous teaches our systems too to know that there is support, and to heal through the places that we didn't get support from our families or our primary caregivers. The program is a held safe space that [gives us] a greater capacity to really be present with each other, lean in, hold and support whatever's here exactly as it is. For my evolution and transformation to be held in a community and group of people who are willing and want to see me, love me, and accept me exactly as I am, has been profoundly transformational.
If you're thinking about doing Luminous, I would say only, “do it”. If you're ready for your life to change, your relationships to get better, your relationships with yourself, others, the universe, the divine (or whatever you may call that) to change through your own personal choices and efforts, but also through the vehicle of the community and the program that you're in, it's absolutely going to happen.
The experience I'm having now is of sitting in the epicenter of beauty. Where the tenderness and the vastness and greatness is one, and where all of our gifts are welcome and we are coming into right relationship with our supernatural, superhuman, extraordinary aspects of our being, and at the same time our very human, very vulnerable, very raw beingness. Where all is welcome just as we are. The wounds and the gifts.
Deb V. - LAI 2-Year Program Participant
Luminous is special to me because it's helped me recognize what is inside of me: the beauty, the perfection, the infinite possibility that exists now in me and in each of us. I operate and navigate in the world differently now. I'm able to be myself more. Able to be bigger and fill more space and not shrink. And I'm able to offer my gifts to the world.
Bryce W. - LAI 2-Year Program Participant
The profundity for me is the emptiness, the spaciousness, and the presence of more “masculine” paths being met and married with the more “feminine” fullness of being. This is not just a path of spaciousness and the emptiness of awareness, but it's also all of the riches that are arising through the body, through the emotions, through the mind, through nature. Luminous marries these together in a deep, intelligent, purposeful way.
It’s a more true approach rather than the tendency for [spiritual teachings] to be one or the other. It's a wedding or wedlock of what is actual reality.
To bring the ground of my own being into relationship with another, is for me the greatest gift. What’s happening now is that I'm seeing more clearly through the clouds and obstructions that we all present and protect ourselves with, into the truth of who we are. And then we can call each other out; like literally call one another forth into the reality and brightness of who we are. Not bypassing anything, but acknowledging the ultimate truth of who we are and what we're doing here. That's the gift for me.
Lincoln N. - LAI 2-Year Program Participant
For me, Luminous was a way to ground a lot of esoteric traditions I was part of; a lot of Tibetan Buddhist lineages, and also Tibetan shamanism.
There's also the understanding of your own psychology; understanding where the ruptures happen in the course of a person's growth and development
With Luminous there's a real integration with everyday life, because it's not just something that you do over a winter break for 10 days sitting silently, and then learn to integrate yourself. There are seven modules spread out over two years, and that allows you to bring the practices into real life and integrate them into your work life, and be able to develop better communication skills that you can bring into your relationships. I've been able to bring Luminous teachings into work, into service in my communities, to family life, and grow as a human being.
Luminous does a good job at marrying things like neuropsychology, attachment repair and modern neuroscience, with Buddhism, shamanism, and even aspects of Sufism Kabbalah. So it's a really cool melding of Eastern mysticism and the best of the West, which is science and technology.
There's a real emphasis on this view that you're perfect and you don't realize it. The teachers are coming from a place of seeing you as already perfected: they see you as already being abundant and whole. The way the healing happens is they help you to realize this for yourself. There’s a way of guiding you to the river of your own knowing and allowing the transformation that happens from there, some might call it grace.
Samantha S. - LAI 2-Year Program Participant
Luminous has been absolutely life-changing. I feel this incredible difference in my system from a year and a half ago when I started the program up until now. I have experienced levels of groundedness and depth that I never knew were available. I met parts of myself that I was simply at war with for years and was able to heal them on earth, in this beautiful environment that actually created sustainable long-term change versus the band-aid on bullet-wound approach of many other things that I've done in the last 15 years of being in personal development and spiritual development.
Raina and Anna-Lisa have an integrity and who they are and what they teach is palpable. You can feel it. The transmissions they bring through really land in a completely different way, they feel so real. And so the nervous system is really able to absorb those and truly change and transform on such a deep level.
Kingsley A. - LAI 2-Year Program Participant
Luminous changed my life and has enabled me to access levels of consciousness that I only ever dreamed of. The teachers are world-class. It has probably been the greatest investment of my life, and I feel privileged to have been a part of the program. I'm excited for the journey ahead.
Eric J. - LAI 2-Year Program Participant
This program has been one of the most transformational experiences I have ever encountered.
Luminous has shaped and changed how I interact with the world and the ways that I relate to myself, to others, to nature, to creation.
I feel like I have all these different parts of myself that I didn't know before, or that I didn't acknowledge or couldn't call forth. They’ve awoken and become part of my life. Through that, I feel more whole.
I feel like the ways in which I'm going to keep showing up, bring more of me, is only going to benefit my loved ones, my friends, my community, and anything else going forward.
So thank you Luminous for this magical time.
Ana Paula M. - LAI 2-Year Program Participant
Luminous has been instrumental in my life, in terms of my personal development, but beyond personal development it has awakened and supported the recognition of my spiritual unfoldment and growth. A lot of pieces of me that were in fractals now get to be united in a cohesive whole.
Luminous has been an incredible experience where I've gotten to touch parts of myself and parts of my essence I wasn't familiar with before. What that's allowed me to do in my day-to-day life, my business life and my personal life is bring in those parts of me that are incredibly deep ~ my wisdom qualities ~ and actually use them to create and manifest my reality.
Devani F. - LAI 2-Year Program Participant
Luminous Awareness Institute is by far one of the most profound personal development courses I've ever gone through. I wouldn't even call it a personal development course. It's so much more than that. Truly. It has allowed me to be in a state of well-being in my life, through my business, through my work, through my relationships. And that is absolutely priceless. I refer to Luminous Awareness Institute as a wizard school because it teaches you these incredible tools with energy, awareness and awakening, and how to use these gifts for yourself, for others and your work.
I connected to my soul purpose through this program and I've stepped into levels of power, confidence and magic in my life that I didn't even know was possible.It's been an absolutely profound experience and I highly recommend it to anyone that's looking for growth, understanding, and what they want to achieve in their life, and want to get there on a faster path. This is the program.
Stara L. - LAI 2-Year Program Participant
Luminous has been the most deeply transformational program I have ever participated in. I've done years of personal development. And for me, this program has been able to get deeper than I ever could have imagined. I receive responses from friends, from people who are close to me, about how much I've been able to shift, change and open in the last two years.
I really feel like I'm able to bring the gifts that my soul innately brought here, embodied [in] the world. And that's what Luminous does so well. It creates a space for each type of individual to shine, to feel like they are seen, to experience and work through any of the painful wounds that they received from childhood and be able to process those things so that they can move forward and clearly make an impact in the world. [It enables us to] connect more deeply with those we love, be in strong intimate partnerships, show up for our families, show up for our children and allow those ripples to shift things all over the world.
There are many different personal development paths. And what I have found with this one is it feels the most comprehensive. Luminous allows space for our own personal transformation to develop in a way that's different for each individual. There's an honoring of the soul's unique intelligence and the human’s wounds and pains, and it creates space for all of that within one incredibly curated program.
Luminous allows for a space for us to have awakening into our gifts and healing of our wounds at the exact same time happening simultaneously.
Ahram K. - LAI 2-Year Program Participant
Luminous turned my life upside down, but in a good way. I feel like I've done a lot of solo-seeking, and I feel like through Luminous I found something that I've been seeking for for a long time. Not only did I find what I was looking for, for my self but I've also found community.
I was challenged from the very beginning. I never identified as a spiritual person, and claiming that has always been scary because I had a lot of judgments about people who were spiritual or religious. I was on the fence about whether there really was a God and now I feel like I don't have a doubt that there is.
Jeff S. - LAI 2-Year Program Participant
I came to Luminous shortly after a powerful awakening experience. I grew up Jewish, with the traditional concept of God as something “out there” outside of oneself.
I was drawn to Luminous, as a community of people that are walking the path of awakening all at various different stages, but it is a group field committed to the fundamental principle that we are all God, we're all divine beings, and to be held in community in that way is just so powerful and special. Being supported in my awakening path and the realization that God is within, changed everything.
A second huge impact from the Luminous program was how it benefited my relationship with my fiancée. We were two months into our relationship when I started Luminous and the greatest prayer of my heart was calling in my life partner, my true love. I don't think it's an accident that she showed up about the same time that I started this Luminous program. We've really brought the practices of Luminous - of connection, presence and energy work with each other - into our regular lives. It's been incredibly powerful. We're getting married in a month.
