I want to clarify something that Sonja was asking me about in last night’s session of ‘Integrity of the Heart.’ We were speaking about the fact that we cannot control our inner experience in the way we have been taught to believe, and that all of our different attempts to control the mind create an endless and futile struggle within ourselves.

First of all we need to be clear that I am only talking about our relationship with what arises in the field of our inner experience. Coming to grips with ‘the illusion of control’ does not mean that we are going to start shouting at our children, or pushing people out of the way in the line-up at the store, or throwing things out of windows! Our authentic self, the being we discover when we rest in presence or awareness, has a tremendous capacity for acting in the world with both wisdom and compassion. So this inquiry into control is focused on our inner world, on the arising of thoughts, perceptions and emotions. Can we actually control a feeling? Can we stop something from arising within us? Many people believe that this is what spiritual practice or meditation is all about, and I am afraid that they will be very disappointed, as I was, with the results.

Real inquiry requires a profound willingness to see things as they are, not as we imagine them to be, or as we would like them to be. If we look clearly at the nature of our inner experience, we will see, again and again, that thoughts, perceptions and feelings come by themselves, and go by themselves, and there is nothing we can do about them. One of my teachers used to say this to me a lot, and I had tremendous resistance to hearing it. I wanted my meditation to take me to a ‘good state’ a blissful place, a better moment. I couldn’t understand what I would get by letting everything be as it is.

What Sonja asked me about was something else—she was inquiring into the choices we have over how we respond to our inner experience. And this is where our freedom lies. As we spoke about last night, our conditioned mind has some very basic responses to our moment- to-moment experience. It will push something away, reject it, deny it, or supress it. Or it will try to change one experience or thought to a ‘better’ one. Or it will indulge in the experience, give it energy and food by engaging in it, believing in it. Often we indulge in very negative experiences-- we intensify them, make our suffering more powerful, without being fully conscious that we are doing so.

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Instead of approaching the practice of inquiry as if it is something foreign and difficult, we can understand it as something totally natural, which every child knows how to do, until she/he is taught to stop wondering, to forsake the body and look for wisdom in the mind. 

This is an email from a participant in a recent workshop, engaging in the kind of inquiry we’ll be doing in “The Integrity of the Heart.”
“Re the inquiry…
Wow. Yeah, it was profound. Standing on top of the parking garage to get a better view of the town and truly feeling (in my body) how love radiates, and feeling how as we collectively learn to receive and share love - it will continue to grow and expand. “Love is infinite”. I realized that even though I had spoken those words before - my understanding of love was quite finite.
My understanding of love grew on Sunday, as I stood on the roof of the parking garage. Thank you for the simple instruction - to go for a walk and ask “what is love?”. This is my new hobby.”
Sonja Podstawskyj Feb. 11. 2010

This training starts Monday Feb. 22nd, 7-9pm

In the beginning of this training you learn to recognize your natural state—the openness and ease of your own being. Once this state is recognized, you learn to rest in it, to spend more and more time here. And then you begin to rely on this awareness. When you need clarity, strength and inspiration, you rely on this awareness, instead of your conditioned mind.

The more we relax and let go of struggle, the more we can rest in awareness without needing to figure everything out, the more the power of this awareness reveals itself to us. We discover capacities and gifts we never knew we had: radical acceptance, natural clarity, and unconditioned gratitude.

Awakening to this awareness allows us to become fully ourselves, free and uncompromising in living our own uniqueness. At the same time, we experience directly that we are not separate from anyone. 

As human beings, we have all kinds of desires, but to be completely comfortable being ourselves, and to know we are connected to everything, is all we really need and want.

For more information about this training, click here: http://www.barefootjourneys.net/index.php/events/event/the-integrity-of-the-heart/

Did you ever notice how certain themes run through your life, rising up and falling away, only to appear again sometime later?  For me, over the last while, the theme has been passionate living. As a teacher and coach, I have more and more people asking me about how to live a life that is fully alive and creative.

“ I want to contribute, to participate, to find something that I’m really passionate about,” they say. “How do I do that?”

“I feel something calling me, but I’m not sure what it is. How do I find out? I don’t even know where to start.”

When I allow my heart to open to these questions, I sense a deep longing that seems to be part of our collective consciousness right now. I realize that each one of us was born to discover this way of being, of fully participating in life.  I have helped many people open to this passionate way of living through a process of exploration and free expression. If we really allow ourselves to engage in this process of deep inquiry, we begin to experience directly that who we are is not a fixed and static thing, but a flow of energy that is changing, flowing, and dynamic. We discover how to live from a place I call our ‘creative edge.’

I think a great deal of confusion, doubt and despair happen when we equate this creative edge, this place of passion and aliveness, with skill or knowledge. They are not the same. Learning a skill and gathering information are the kinds of things we learn in school.  Passion and creativity do not work like this. To connect with this part of our being requires another kind of learning and practice. This is more like unlearning than learning:  how to open, to let go, to allow ourselves not to know, to be a complete beginner. The mystic poet Rumi was pointing to this when he said, “The more skill you have, the further you are from what your deepest love wants.”

“You know Rumi is right,” one of my clients said recently, “There are things I really love to do, that I feel called to do, that I’m not very good at. But that doesn’t matter. I can learn, bit by bit, and if the passion is here, then I really have something to sustain me, to keep me going.”

“Yes, “ I replied, “When we find out what we really care about, it’s a very powerful resource. We can move through the obstacles in our way, fall down and get back up again. Failure is just part of the process. It doesn’t defeat us. We just keep going. No-one else told us that we should be doing this. It’s a genuine impulse, connected to our authentic being.”

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To a potential participant in 'The Integrity of the Heart' : "I'm happy that you are ready to do this training. I want to find a way to support this long--term interest and longing that I experience in you. That's one reason I am offering this training--I want to bring it up a whole notch in terms of engagement and levels of available support--so that you all receive the benefits of this training in a very practical and immediate way. So I'm inviting all of the participants to commit to being there for every session, and some of them are realizing, all by themselves, that this is how they want to show up." love Shayla

Learning to Support the Movement of our Evolution

Writing can be a very powerful way of doing inquiry, for the purpose of awakening and transforming our lives. All that it requires is a basic ground of willingness and commitment. Willingness to look at things as they are, not as they should be or could be—to face directly into the way it actually is, right now.

We can use writing for this kind of inquiry, asking ourselves basic and powerful questions like these: “What do I really want? What is my major obstacle? What happens to me when I don’t get what I want? What do I care about more than anything else? What is my strongest resource? Do I know how to ask for and receive support?”

We may think we know the answers to these questions, but we are not looking for a mental response when we inquire like this. We are learning to drop the question into our heart, into our body, into a place of deep listening. In this place, we are ready for whatever comes forth in response to the question. And this kind of response is not something old, something we’ve heard hundreds of times before. It’s new and alive and we feel it; we feel the impact of what we have discovered. That’s what makes the difference.

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I think learning to express yourself with freedom and creativity helps in all areas of your life:  physical, energetic, emotional, mental..and the practical side of life is not separate from the rest of it. This is the basis sense that moves me to work with people in ‘The Alchemy of Writing’ workshops and courses.

For things such as job interviews and grant applications, the same thing applies:  very often, the job or the grant will go to the person with the most developed capacity to express in words, who they are, what they are about, what creative intentions and values they are wanting to manifest through their business or project.

That’s the interesting thing for me, about learning to use words and language in a good way--you may be very gifted and talented at what you do, but if you can’t express what your work is about, what the benefits are, and how they actually occur...then it will be much harder for you to find and connect with potential students, clients and anyone else who might appreciate and support you.

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Beyond living and dreaming
there is something more important:
waking up
(Antonio Machado)

A man I work with was telling me about how he spent the Christmas holidays with his family. He went back home to the big city to spend time with them. Before he arrived, he decided to try something new: he followed the impulses and desires of his heart, his authentic being, instead of going along with conventional expectations and traditions. While he was there, the connections he had with his family and friends were intimate, surprising, and deeply fulfilling. One morning he had a spontaneous and life-changing conversation with his mother.

I was feeling a lot of joy as I listened to him speak. Then he said this:

“It was wonderful, to be so present and open with these people I love. And there was a lot of anxiety. It wasn’t overwhelming, but I could feel my heart fluttering a lot. And it was not easy to sleep at night.”

The kind of anxiety that was arising for him is what I call sacred anxiety. I used to experience it when I was engaged in a lot of public speaking. I learned, after struggling with it for a while, to welcome that anxiety, to open to it and let it move through my body. During that time I discovered that the best talks I gave were when that anxiety was present at the beginning, not the talks where I was calm and sure of myself at the start.

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