That’s an excellent question. There are many factors involved in answering it (boy, don’t I sound like a consultant? Must be my day job intruding…)
I can only use myself as an example. That noted, when I first started studying I didn’t know I was studying. As a young child and like any young child, I spent lots of time with my immediate and extended family. Both sides of my family demonstrated talents and doing so was something we kept within the family, so I had group practice although it was family oriented and Grandpa always made it a game (probably why I want people to have fun when I teach. Plus many of my teachers emphasized that one can learn more when the learning is enjoyable and rewarding than otherwise).
Eventually my Grandfather started taking me around to others who were involved in The Practice but who had different skills, talents and trainings than he had. He (and all my teachers) really emphasized learning diversity so you could recognize your specialty. Kind of like the reason a good, liberal arts education is so necessary for anybody who specializes in a science.
Many of these teachers would involve me in group practice with other students. I would learn as much from watching my brothers and sisters (in The Practice) practice as I would from my own practice. It was kind of like studying a musical instrument; we would get together regularly for band practice (a group practice) and then go off to practice scales and different music pieces on our own, then come back for more band practice then go off on our own again, so on and so forth.
Another benefit to group practice is that I would learn by listening to my brothers’ and sisters’ questions and coming up with answers. This is something all of my teachers had us do, answer each others’ questions so we could more easily answer our own questions. Sometimes I’d be too shy or insecure or whatever to ask a question myself then be surprised when another student asked essentially the same question. I’d get my answer anyway and knowing that others had the same questions I had taught me to go ahead and ask.
From this I learned to trust myself (see NextStage Principle #2, “Trust Yourself“) and to always ask when I’m not clear on something (see NextStage Principle #34, “Never be afraid to appear a fool when asking a question“).
And always always always my teachers would offer gentle guidance and correction when we were off the mark in our answers. They were never harsh or retributive even when we were intentionally idiotic (something I excelled at, it seemed). All of them were always open to a good laugh but never at a student’s expense, only their own and always to demonstrate that they made mistakes, too.
And then there’s the ability to practice with others who were at different levels from my own, although there were restrictions on this. My teachers rarely allowed two people at close but different levels of Practice to practice together. The greater the difference in levels, the more likely they’d practice together and usually it was clear that one was a student, the other a teacher regarding the exchange. Also, after a certain amount of time in active, deliberate, intentional practice, everybody would practice with everybody. The caveat about close but different levels only applied to beginners.
I questioned more than one of my teachers about this because it seemed such a universal element in The Practice regardless of cultural origin. The response was fairly consistent despite language, culture, education, and pretty much boiled down to something like this:
Take two people only slightly apart in their learning. The older knows just a bit more, the younger just a bit less. The younger may be envious because the older knows just a bit more. “How come Teacher didn’t teach me that?” they say. Likewise, the older may become impatient because the younger knows just a bit less. “How come you don’t know how to do this already?” they say. Worse, the younger feels they are unworthy to know something and the older feels they are too worthy because they do know something.
Neither yet understands we each learn as we each learn. When the younger understands they know exactly what they need to know to practice where they are, and the older understands they know exactly what they need to know to practice where they are, then they’ve learned that their practice and The Practice has no room for egos because it is ego that makes one think they are less and the other more.
And in The Practice there is neither (see NextStage Principle #30, “To each of us is given a measure,…“).
So group training is excellent for someone who is just exploring (testing the waters, so to speak), someone not sure if they want to take on The Practice as part or the whole of their path, someone who wants to study and needs to work around other commitments, someone needing a refresher on specific elements, someone outside The Practice wanting to focus on specific elements to bring back to their own work (people studying Alexander Method, Feldenkrais, Reiki, Soma, Therapeutic Touch, Hands on Healing, psychotherapy practices, things like that), someone learning if “this” teacher is suppose to be their teacher (that’s NextStage Principle #55, “Sometimes the best lesson…“), et cetera.
Individual Practice/Training
The above deals with people already active in The Practice and those considering The Practice. Once someone has “declared” (I know, sounds like you’re going for a degree, doesn’t it? Like you’ve declared a major) that they want to be a student, all the teachers I know take that individual in for a few private, one-on-one sessions. Good teachers (my opinion) want to make sure the individual is making a good, informed decision, not just grasping at straws due to something happening in their life, and one-on-ones are excellent at revealing the deep reasons for an individual’s interest. One-on-ones also occur when students are referred from other teachers (we do that a lot because we know we don’t know everything and don’t want our limits to be our students’ limits. See NextStage Principle #54, “Never let your limitations be someone else’s limitations“) so that student and teacher can lay out some ground rules, share experiences and set expectations.
Students may be given individual, private training for a number of reasons. Perhaps the student has issues with group situations they need to resolve first, perhaps there aren’t enough other students for a group session to take place, perhaps the individual is coming for help (they need the teacher to exercise their Practice on individual’s behalf) and doesn’t want to study, et cetera.
The other part of this is that everybody who studies will have periods of one-on-one practice and training. Some of these will be quite intense and highly personal, especially when one is meeting their personal Guides and Totems, Power Beings, Protectors and the like. Very often such sessions can go on for days, what in psychological circles would be called degree absolute, and sometimes involve visioning (“vision quest”), sweats (almost all aboriginal cultures have sweats in some form or another), walkabouts, so on and so forth.
So Which One is Right for You?
The obvious answer is both and neither, depending on where you are in The Practice, how comfortable you are with yourself, how comfortable you are with others, how much you like to explore, how in tune you are with what’s already going on in your life, what questions you want answered, what questions you’re willing to answer, …
The real answer comes from within (they all do, at some point); which type of study is comfortable to you right now? Don’t worry about next week, next year or even tomorrow. How about right now? You can always switch (and you probably will or a good teacher will suggest it from time to time).
I’d suggest you start by asking yourself what you want to learn, what you want to do, what you’d like to change and how you’d like to change it. How much time do you have to put in? The Practice will give you as much as you give it and that can be a deciding factor for lots of people.
Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions (it’ll help me learn).
