Ingvar Villido

Ingvar Villido
Born	(1962-03-02) March 2, 1962 Tartu, Estonia
🏳️ Citizenship	Estonian
💼 Occupation	awareness and Kriya Yoga teacher, education entrepreneur
🌐 Website	www.ingvarvillido.com

Ingvar Villido (born March 2, 1962) is an Estonian researcher, awareness teacher and public speaker. Villido is also the founder of Lilleoru; an Estonian based educational and ecological community, as well as Human 2.0 educational program He is best known for his pioneering work in practical awareness and personal sustainability based on his in-depth experience and empirical research on human capacity and potentiality.

He is the creator of the acclaimed course The Art of Conscious Change, described by European media as a “revolutionary teaching for humanity” which has been attended by 16,000 people from around the world. Participants include leading academic educators, businessmen, medical professionals, and mindfulness experts who attribute positive improvements in their health, mood, motivation, empathy, and happiness with awareness as the source of true stability in life.

Villido has authored several books, including the national bestseller “Emotions. Humanity's Biggest Addiction” (2018), which addresses human potential. His next book titled “Turning Point” (2018) presents the new paradigm of humanity development based on the conscious awareness. He also co-authored the scientific book “Personal Sustainability” (2018) published by Routledge, where he presents the primacy of active awareness as the best solution for the sustainability crisis.

In 2010 Villido started giving courses and lectures internationally - in the EU as well as the USA, Brazil and Russia. He has given over 3000 public lectures and workshops around the world on personal sustainability. By the end of 2017 over 15.000 people across the world had attended his courses.

In 2018 the international School of Practical Awareness, which he founded, will open in Lilleoru.

Ingvar holds the distinct honour of being a master teacher Acharya of Babaji’s Kriya Yoga. He also holds other respected recognitions in Buddhism, Dzogchen, and Vedic traditions.

Life

Ingvar Villido was born in Tartu County, South Estonia. His first experiences with yoga were in his teenage years, which was unusual in the Soviet occupied Estonia, where yoga was banned. His systematic personal practice began in 1981.

The 1980s and 1990s were a time of intense seeking. Villido learned and practiced martial arts, acupuncture, Raja, Buddhi and Agni Yoga at the Vladimir Antonov School in Russia, as well as Osho and Castaneda teachings, and received initiations into Buddhist, Dzogchen and Native American techniques.

In 1993 he  began developing the property that has been developed into the Lilleoru international educational hub and community. Villido´s awareness-based approach is the cornerstone for Lilleoru intentional community with about 120 active members in the core group of the NGO. The wider learning community includes the pupils of the The Art of Conscious Change course series, visitors of his open lectures, his Kryia Yoga students and the students of the The School of Practical Awareness learning center. Since 2007 Villido has been teaching Babaji´s Kriya Yoga.

Villido dedicated years to develop a set of methods and techniques which would help people deal with the automatic inner processes and realize their true Self. He simplified that teaching to the level, which became accessible to people without prior experience in yoga to improve their quality of life. He simplified his teaching to the level where it became accessible to people without prior experience in yoga, resulting in The Art of Conscious Change course series in 2008. Villido has described his method as the summa summarum of his practical experiences as a practitioner and a teacher.

Since 2010 his educational company LLC Human organises the Art of Conscious Change courses on the global scale across Europe (e.g. in Austria, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Macedonia, Luxembourg) and beyond (e.g. in Russia, USA and Brazil). In 2016 LLC Human became the most successful training company in Estonia. By late 2017, Villido had given over 3000 public lectures and over 16.000 people had attended his courses and lectures, making him a renowned speaker on awareness, personal wellbeing, emotions, human potentials, true identity and personal sustainability. Recently, Villido has started to share his perspective on human development also as an author, publishing his bestselling book “Emotions. Humanity´s Biggest Addiction” (2018) and co-authoring the research monograph “Personal sustainability” (2018).

In 2018 the international School of Practical Awareness, based on his teachings, opens its doors in Lilleoru. A simplified version of the The Art of Conscious Change method is being developed also for schoolchildren.

Ingvar Villido is married and the father of three adult children.

Teaching

Villido started teaching Raja and Buddhi yoga courses in 1992. Before starting to teach, Villido dedicated a decade for investigating the structures and functioning of the human inner world, testing out different techniques of influencing it and systemizing his experiences. To continue his studies of human nature, he founded the Lilleoru educational hub, inner research and practice with a group of his students in 1993. In the following years Villido received initiations from several lamas and yogis from the Tibetan buddhist traditions and Shri Muniraj, a disciple of Herakhan Baba. In 2007 Villido was authorized to teach Babaji’s Kriya Yoga as Acharya Ishwarananda by Marshall Govindan and received permission to initiate people into Babaji’s Kriya Yoga 1st level techniques. Since 2016 Villido is one of only four teachers worldwide who has the right to initiate yoga students into all three levels of Babaji´s Kriya Yoga. By 2017 more than 30 of his Kriya Yoga students had completed the training of becoming a Kriya Hatha Yoga instructor, teaching across Estonia.

As an awareness and yoga teacher, Villido noticed that his students had difficulties keeping their focus and motivation in the face of daily problems. He also observed that modern psychology offered only slight alleviation to their problems, considering most inner tensions inevitable. Villido spent years developing a set of techniques to help his students overcome these issues. He simplified this teaching so that people without prior knowledge of yoga would be able to use it properly. This resulted in The Art of Conscious Change course series in 2008.

The Art of Conscious Change courses provide practical methods for applying awareness in everyday life in order to master effectively any situations and problems. It was designed to help people to learn to orientate in their inner world, liberate themselves from their tensions and reduce the effect that negative emotions and thoughts have on one's life. Its set of methods enables people to independently improve the quality of their life and stay on the chosen track. By 2018, Villido has taught the ACC method for 10 years. Estonian media described it as “a revolutionary new teaching for humanity”. Currently a simplified version of the Art of Conscious Change method is being developed and tested for schoolchildren in Estonia.

Since 2010 Villido has been teaching The Art of Conscious Change also internationally. Most recently these courses entered the Russian (2017) and USA (2018) markets. By 2018 Villido had given the right to teach the first courses of The Art of Conscious Change series to seven instructors in Austria, Denmark, Estonia and Germany. In addition to The Art of Conscious Change courses and Kriya Yoga, Villido also gives regular open lectures in Estonia and abroad.

Villido aims to establish awareness as the new paradigm to upgrade humanity from life based on automatic reactions to action with awareness. His teachings are the sum of three decades of intense study and teaching of the phenomena of the inner world and ancient traditions, especially the Tamil Shaiva Siddhanta and Kriya Yoga traditions . He suggests that by shifting from an automatic, reflex-based way of life to awareness as the new paradigm, people can significantly improve their quality of life. In his own words: “I aim at human liberation by helping people to come out of the automatic processes, which I call the old paradigm. I teach people who they are and what has been given to them, showing them their latent potentials and abilities. A human being acting without mental and emotional automatisms uses the new paradigm – the paradigm of awareness. I call this upgrading to Human 2.0.”

In 2016, Villido began a dialogue with academic researchers, sharing his empirical research results on awareness and communities as keys to the sustainability transition. His workshop Awareness as the key to (Un)sustainability in July 2016 at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany was part of a research colloquium on the emerging topic of personal sustainability. Following this workshop, he was invited to contribute as a co-author in the research monograph “Personal sustainability”, which was published by Routledge in March 2018. In April 2018 Villido presented his approach to the role of emotions to personal sustainability at the international “Emotion Revolution“ conference in Norway.

Recent publications

Villido has authored several books and articles on consciousness, yoga, the role of emotions and personal sustainability.

Villido authored “Emotions - Humanity's Biggest Addiction” (2018), which focuses on the ways of overcoming automatic emotions that are limiting human potential. The book became an Estonian national bestseller. His article “Awareness as the New Paradigm for Personal Sustainability: A Practitioner’s Perspective on the Sustainability Transition“ in the research monograph “Personal Sustainability” published in March 2018 by the world’s leading academic publisher Routledge, where he summed up his empirical experience and presented awareness as the new paradigm for personal sustainability. In his article Villido suggests that unsustainability is very often a result of following automatic habit patterns. He argues that individuals can function sustainably in the long run only when the amount of automatic emotional and mental complexes disconnecting us from the surrounding reality are reduced and substituted with action with awareness. He invites people to exit the reactive mental-emotional paradigm and experience the new paradigm based on awareness of awareness, offering a new, more sustainable way of living. He suggests that the increased use of awareness is the key to achieving both personal and societal sustainability.

His book (2018) “The Teaching that Radically Changes Everything You Know About Human Nature and Potentiality” introduces new possibilities for humanity based on the greater use of awareness.

In his forewords to the Estonian editions of Marhsall Govindan´s “Babaji and the 18 Siddha Kriya Yoga tradition. Babaji's Kriya Yoga Publications.” (2013) and “Kriya Yoga Sutras of Patañjali and the Siddhas“ Villido describes the path of Kriya Yoga.

References

This article "Ingvar Villido" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Ingvar Villido. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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