The Transformation of Consciousness

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/

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.

Click here for more...

Words to a friend who is organizing ‘the black ribbon’ campaign, in response to Canada’s black marks in Copenhagen: visit Rik Logtenberg, on Facebook and Twitter

We need to be very clear and hard--headed in the whole approach we take. I noticed when I listened to Michelle Mungal, our MLA, the other night, whom I love a lot, that she came across to me as enthusiastic, optimistic and naive..She kept saying things like “All Canadians care about the climate change, “ and I thought, “Well, Michelle, clearly that is not true, because I have friends that don’t even know what Copenhagen is..”

I don’t know if you are familiar with the work of Joanna Macy..it would be good to read some of her work, because she has been working for the last 15 years on helping to awaken people and mobilize their resources for skillful action in taking care of our environment.

Click here for more...

Reflections after being at our 350 candlelight vigil at City Hall

Standing in the cold last night, listening to how Canada has been obstructing the agenda in Copenhagen day after day, I struggled with a sense that this little blue-- green planet is pretty stuck, that most people are operating on a level of consciousness that is about survival, and being comfortable or distracted from difficulty and pain..

It was powerful for me to realize that Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who is now supporting this 350 movement, is someone who has been a part of enormous social change in his lifetime: the fall of the Berlin Wall, and of course, of apartheid..He was speaking this weekend about how demonstrations and petitions actually work, in the long run, as soon as there are enough people behind them.

That helped me a lot, because I find the general apathy and passivity of so many people can feel like a huge challenge. I was remembering when the Chinese invaded Tibet, and the Dalai Lama sent so many telegrams to the United Nations, asking for help, that they filled up a whole huge room. And nobody did anything. They left Tibet to its fate.

I actually had a good friend of mind on the weekend ask me, ‘What is Copenhagen?” That was a difficult moment for me--a shock to the heart.  I’ve been understanding that a more evolved level of consciousness allows us to keep persevering, the way Bill McKibben has, for the last 20 years, without getting overwhelmed, or angry at those whose capacity to participate is less developed.

Waking up from the emotional numbness, so that we can actually feel the enormity of what we are facing, is so crucial at this point. And then finding that place of freedom and balance, from which we can engage without being dominated by either fear or desire, is the other piece. I pray that more and more of us find our way to this level of consciousness, before things reach a point where they cannot be reversed.

I am looking right now at ways we can remain open to our interconnection and our collective destiny, realize that everything we do impacts everything else, without putting the kind of pressure on ourselves that overwhelms us.

I have discovered a lot about this recently, and will be addressing it in my writing, courses and workshops.. Letting ourselves really care, really engage, without losing our equanimity---what a fine balance this is..For me it is connected to our level of development, or evolution, and also to our capacity to rest as awareness, or the witness.

love
Shayla

This, for me, is a wonderful display of embodied spirituality:

“I am a man among men, dedicated to a life of meditative awareness. I am a man of Argentine tango, a man of organic wine, a man who makes his own biodiesel, a man in love with a beautiful woman, a man of intense passion, a man who harvests and eats wild mushrooms, digs clams and collects seaweed at the ocean, a man who feels and loves deeply, a man devoted to the idea of Zorba the Buddha, a man mending relationships, a man with a lot of opinions, a man growing and learning. A man whose heart aches and soars...an ordinary man, like you.”

Jun Po Dennis Kelly, Zen master, in an interview for the Mankind Project

I had forgotten that term Adya uses ‘affectionate awareness.” It is beautiful..

I often use the term awareness/presence for the very same reason--awareness so often has a feeling of being cool, detached and uninvolved. Which it is, but it’s so much more than that..It is intimate with everything, because it doesn’t stand back and watch--it watches from the inside, from the heart, from the core. That’s how it transforms everything it touches--because of the non-separation.