Willing to experience aloneness,

I discover connection everywhere;

Turning to face my fear,

I meet the warrior who lives within;

Opening to my loss,

I am given unimaginable gifts;

Surrendering into emptiness,

I find fullness without end.

Each condition I flee from pursues me.

Each condition I welcome transforms me

And becomes in itself transformed

Into its radiant jewel-like essence.

I bow to the one who has made it so,

Who has crafted this Master Game;

To play it is pure delight,

To honor it is true devotion.

By Jennifer Welwood

A transformational space is a training environment. made up of webs of special kinds of relationships, safety, freedom and challenge.

Transformational spaces:

1.     Provide a safe place away from ordinary identities and responsibilities.

2.      Support experience and discovery of what is currently disowned and hidden.

3.      Encourage creativity and experimentation.

4.      Do not expect perfection.

5.      Support other paths to development.

6.      Provide techniques and practices that give us full, immediate experiences of ourselves.

7.      Understand their own imperfections.

8..     Provide an anchor for community life that facilitates and fosters broad, creative interaction.

ZEN...

Zen is beyond words, a direct experience of the way things are, a personal journey to enlightenment at the end of which the seeker finds he is not a person and there was no journey.

Zen is knowing the mind, without using thought, living one's life by letting it live itself, choosing to have no preferences, becoming extraordinary by being nothing special at all. To understand Zen is to embrace paradox- to find the oneness that contains all opposites. Zen masters are sacrilegious and outrageous. They ridicule Zen teachings and each other because enlightenment is not something that can be taught, but only directly experienced for oneself. Zen cannot be understood by the mind, because it is about becoming aware of the mind itself.

These thoughts from the great Zen masters are not clever theories or philosophies, they are medicine. We suffer from the illness of the illusion of separateness. We believe that the world is full of discrete things, when in fact it is all one interconnected whole. We experience ourselves as conscious skin-bags living a transitory mortal life, when in fact we are the eternal mind of the universe.

Separateness is the sickness, and Zen is the cure. The entire world is a doorway to freedom, but people don't want to pass through. Zen is piling fresh fruit in a basket without a bottom. Zen is enjoying the ever-changing richness of existence. It is wonderment in the face of the miracle of life. It is witnessing things as they are. The holy man questioned for enjoying sex and money says he did it because, "So few are truly grateful for them."

Self-Actualized Beings

Have purpose, vision, and written goals

See current reality as an ally, not an enemy

Are constantly and deeply inquisitive

Are connected to life and others but remain unique

Realize they are a part of a larger creative process they influence but don't control

Remain in a continual learning mode, never arriving

Understand life is a process, a lifelong discipline

Find a way to be acutely aware of their ignorance and incompetence while maintaining a strong sense of self-esteem

See the journey as the reward

Hold deep values and commit to larger goals than the self

Continually strive for an accurate picture of reality

Develop a capacity for delayed gratification

Tell the truth

Allow the subconscious to do its job

IF

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or, being lied about, not deal in lies,

Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,

And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;

If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with triumph and disaster

And treat those two imposters just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,

And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;

If all count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -

Yours is the earth and everything that's in it,

And - which is more - you'll be a self-realized [sic] one!

Rudyard Kipling

A Psalm of Life

Tell me not in mournful numbers, life is but an empty dream!

For the soul is dead that slumbers, and things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou are, to dust returnest, was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, is our destined end or way;

But to act, that each tomorrow find us farther than today.

Art is long, and time is fleeting, and our hearts, though stout and brave,

Still, like muffled drums, are beating funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle, in the bivouac of life,

Be not like dumb, driven cattle! Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no future, howe'er pleasant! Let the dead past bury its dead!

Act, - act in the living present! Heart within and God o'erhead! \

Lives of great ones all remind us we can make our life sublime,

And departing, leave behind us footprints on the sand of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another, sailing o'er life's solemn main,

A forlorn and shipwrecked other, seeing shall take heart again.

Let us then be up and doing, with a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"You are sacred. All peoples are sacred. Everything is sacred... We are all accountable and responsible for what we see around us, because, as we are all are connected and related, everything we do, think and say affects everything and everyone else."

Little Crow, 1933-2004

Help me this day to love myself. I can't give away anything that I don't have myself. If I am to love others, then I must love myself. If I am to forgive others, then I am to forgive myself. If I am to accept others as they are, then I need to accept myself as I am. If I am to not judge others, then I need to lighten up on myself. Let me experience this power of love...

Yoga has lasted thousands of years because it works

Hatha Yoga involves moving the body into different and novel positions and relationships.  These changes in the use of the body bring about changes in the mind.  Rather that trying to effect the mind directly, which is far more difficult, Hatha Yoga allows us to work from the tangible, familiar arena of the physical body.

…In using the body to transform the mind, the body is also transformed.  It is recalibrated, revitalized, harmonized; brought to a functional peak, both anatomically and physiologically…  It is these physical benefits that make it so popular.  But, because these incidental physical benefits are connected to the intended psychological benefits, Hatha Yoga has a remarkable capacity to deliver far more than one might originally intend.  Looking for a lithe, slim body, we also find a calm, clear mind.  Hoping for strength and stamina, we also find increased determination and concentration.  Wanting to be free of back pain, we find also freedom from compulsive anxiety.  Seeking relief from asthma, we find also unlimited reserves of physical and mental energy.  Trying to release tight shoulders and a stiff neck, we find also a new find of enthusiasm and joy.

Our ability to engage directly, fully and freely with the dynamic of life is hindered by deep layers of tension.  Rigidity and inflexibility in body and mind restricts us to a limited range of responses to life.  Hatha Yoga is designed to free us from all limitations.

Hatha Yoga is a remarkably fruitful process.  Its practical aim is deep self-acceptance… it acts as a mirror to reveal to us exactly what we are on every level of our being.  We can then use this revelation to harmonize these different aspects of ourselves, and live our lives from the rich, integrated wholeness of our being.

Dynamic Yoga, Godfrey Devereux

Love is presence with unconditional attention,

acceptance, appreciation, affection and allowing

others to be as they are.

I do not become good by trying to become good, that is just another manifestation of the egotistic confusion that resulted in more than 100,000,000 humans being killed by humans during the last century, I become good by allowing the good that is already within me to emerge.  Tolle

The one who, being really on the Way, falls upon hard times in the world will not, as a consequence, turn to that friend who offers him refuge and comfort and encourages his old self to survive.  Rather he will seek out someone who will faithfully and inexorably help him to risk himself, so that he may endure the suffering and pass courageously through it, thus making of it a "raft that leads to the far shore".  Only to the extent that a man exposes himself over and over again to annihilation, can that which is indestructible arise within him.  In this lies the dignity of daring.

Thus, the aim of practice is not to develop an attitude, which allows a man to acquire a state of harmony and peace wherein nothing can ever trouble him.  On the contrary, practice should teach him to let himself be assaulted, perturbed, moved, insulted, broken and battered - that is to say, it should enable him to let go his futile hankering after harmony, surcease from pain, and a comfortable life in order that he may discover, in doing battle with the forces that oppose him, that which awaits him beyond the world of opposites. 

The first necessity is that we should have the courage to face life, and to encounter all that is perilous in the world.  When this is possible, meditation itself becomes the means by which we accept and welcome the demons, which arise from the unconscious – a process very different from the practice of concentration on some object as a protection against such forces.  Only if we venture repeatedly through zones of annihilation can our contact with Divine Being, which is beyond annihilation, become firm and stable.  The more we learn whole-heartedly to confront the world that threatens us with isolation, the more are the depths of the Ground of Being revealed and the possibilities of new life and Becoming opened.

Karlfried Graf von Durkheim

Not Here

There’s courage involved if you want to become truth.

There is a broken-open place in a lover.

Where are those qualities of bravery and sharp compassion in this group?

What’s the use of old and frozen thought?

I want a howling hurt.

This is not a treasury where gold is stored; this is for copper.

We alchemists look for talent that can heat up and change.

Lukewarm won’t do.

Halfhearted holding back, well-enough getting by?

Not here.

-Rumi

“Yoga cultivates cardiovascular health, and musculoskeletal strength and flexibility.  Yoga tunes up every organ system – respiratory, digestive, reproductive, lymphatic, and nervous.  It cultivates the body’s capacity to heal and dramatically reduces the negative effects of stress.  With regular practice, we breathe better.  We sleep.  We digest our food better.  We feel better.

Many experience moments of sharply increased mental focus and clarity…energy and stamina, emotional evenness and equanimity…a profound sense of well-being…and there are the not infrequent stories of truly miraculous healings – physical, emotional, spiritual.”

Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self