It’s Monday afternoon in England where I’m spending a few days with my daughter and her family before heading off to the Sahara for the Desert Experience. I led Soul-Life this past weekend in Switzerland (aka Together! You and your Soul). I loved it! It is the first time I have presented a weekend version of this workshop that previously occupied 4 or 5 days. In the days before it began I was asking myself, could people in so short a time experience the essence - not an airy-fairy quasi-spiritual mind-trip, but what it really is to meet life here and now in deep connection with your own soul? And in a way that could have a lasting effect so that back in their daily lives they would find themselves living their soul’s life, and would both care and know how to never again live disconnected?
I only created this workshop a couple of years ago, which by my count - stretching back through nearly 40 years of leading workshops - makes it pretty new. The way I fulfil my love of art is through working continuously on the workshops and courses I have created across these decades. My art is to make them inspiring, engaging, transforming, and beautiful! The art work happens always as I lead the workshop. During those days, as I am waking up in the morning, I cruise in hypnagogic space – the creative space between sleep and full wakefulness - and my meditation is to immerse myself totally in what is happening in the workshop. I am with the participants, I am delving deep into what happened the previous day or days since it began, and I LISTEN!
It’s not like work. I am simply a space in which something may emerge. Sometimes I see simple practicalities that can enhance everyone’s experience. Sometimes I find myself vividly aware of particular individuals, and I know then that they are telling me something I need to hear. It is my learning time. Everything that has touched me about being with this circle of participants is moving in me, and too the journey on which I am guiding everyone. Whichever workshop it happens to be, during this first hour or two of the new day I am opening a deep space in my own soul, into which something new may come. I am inviting inspiration. Then I let go and when something comes, it is a kind of thrill that always takes me by surprise. I don’t know how many times an insight has come to me while I’m taking my morning shower. It is always unexpected.
So it has been this weekend, leading Soul-Life. During the 2 years that this workshop has existed it has already gone through several radical changes. I decided to offer it for a weekend so that people who find it hard to take time off during the working week could still come and have a profound experience of the art of being. And when I was considering what could I give in a weekend that would really make a difference, SOUL was the song that came.
Philip Pullman wrote an extraordinary trilogy (His Dark Materials). The novels explore life in a parallel universe in which everyone comes into life with an animal that is their most intimate friend, ally and guide. The worst thing that could ever happen to anyone in his fictional universe was to be severed from their personal animal. The metaphor for what happens to us when we are cut off from our own soul is irresistible.
In our world this disconnection is normal and chronic so that sometimes we live in complete forgetfulness of how life is when lived with soul. To restore the connection is why I created Soul-Life. In a sense it is the hidden element inside all my workshops. The Tantra workshops like Body, Heart & Soul, for example, are a way to bring people, through their attraction with sex, into the opening and awakening of their whole being – yes, all the way through to the blossoming of their soul-life in their sexual intimacy.
The same is true of every door through which The Art of Being is offered – death, childhood experiences, relationship, and all the other themes that are addressed by my various workshops and courses. They are all to bring people into EXPERIENCING their body-feelings-heart-being-soul, all integrated into each other and all infused with the mystery that we call spirit. The particular workshop or course through which this happens is just a matter of what is attractive to you. I’m not personally interested in any organized religion because all religions give people beliefs. And as I see it, believing is just a substitute for experiencing. I want to create for people ways that they can experience their inner life so fully and wakefully that suddenly one day - and yes, always unexpectedly! - they are flooded with the experience of the sacred spirit, the infinite, the source, God: call it whatever you like, it happens when our inner realm is wide open. And that can only come about when we are in friendship with all our feelings, all our inner energy states, all our inner experiences – when we are in friendship with all our inner weather! THIS IS WHAT THE ART OF BEING SEEKS TO GIVE PEOPLE. THIS IS MY INSPIRATION AND THE DRIVING FORCE OF ALL MY WORK.
So leading Soul-Life this weekend has left me today, as this late October Monday afternoon light begins to fade into a hazy, golden English evening, deeply touched that in the short space between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon, their soul’s awesome presence made itself felt for everyone who was there! Ah, how to say in words what this means? To call it a spiritual experience misses the essential. To give the essential its real name is to call it human! Our soul-life is what we live when we are utterly and totally alive in our perfectly imperfect, fallible, vulnerable, powerful, heart-awake, feeling-everything-and-touched-by-all-that-life-is-giving-us-in-this-very-moment BEING! Then yes, we experience the spirit that is always and for ever flowing in all that is, but the experience we are having is our true and total celebration of the life we are humanly living in all its colours – the soft, the wild, the light, the dark, the happy and sad and easy and challenging - all! Soul is life lived with all the elements of our human nature vibrantly alive in us, AND awake to all that is here now, AND with our innermost being connected with the great mystery of spirit. When in our full humanity we are invested with the universal and infinite, then life is a soul experience. What we then give, in our way of being from day to day, enhances life for everyone with whom we are connected. And this, as I see it, is how we say Thank you, for the gift of our own being. I am, therefore I live. I am, therefore I give. With love.
Blog Archive
About Me
- Alan, The Art of Being®
- I’m a guide for people who sense there is more to life and being, and are open to discovering it! Background: I studied psychology at London and Oxford universities. I trained with the best, including Dr. Carl Rogers and the great mystic, Osho Rajneesh. Around 1988 I founded The Art of Being® as a path of personal growth and spiritual awakening. In 2003 I won the UK’s Kindred Spirit award for work in the field of personal transformation. For 37 years I’ve been offering experiential workshops, mostly in Europe and the USA, opening the personal themes that touch us all most deeply: our connection with our nature, feelings, heart and soul; with sex, love, intimacy and relationship; with our death, birth and childhood traumas. I trust in everyone’s potential. I love the surprise of being there as people discover themselves, and I know better than to try to make this happen. My gift is to create the space where people can come to celebrate all it is to be present in their whole being. In my workshops I give my full presence and a rich repertoire of processes and meditations created over the past three decades, plus awesome music, to guide people into the vast mystery of BEING HERE NOW.