SHANTI-ALEGRIA!

Home again on Maui, waking up this morning to a cloudless sky and a thousand shades of green. Hardly a ripple out there on the sun-bright Pacific, and sitting here with a cup of tea, in shorts and T-shirt, it’s almost chilly - a cool 16 degrees (Celsius). Never mind, in a couple of hours it will warm up, even here in the shade! Sorry, I have to tease you all a little bit, knowing that where you are, chilly means what it says!

This week this lovely house celebrates its 10th anniversary. December 16, 2000 I moved in while the builders were still busy putting in the finishing touches. In these 10 years nature has wrapped the house into its green arms, surrounding its stand-alone splendour with a glorious chaos of trees, bushes, bright blossoms and insistent weeds that in other lands could well be house-plants. As the house has become home and the garden has grown, so in my soul have I. When Carioca, my dear Brazilian soul-brother whose songs you hear all the time in my workshops, first came to visit two years after the house was built, he had just brought out a new CD called Shanti and Alegria. It means Peace in Sanskrit and Happiness in Brazilian. Over dinner in a local restaurant he asked me if I had named the house and I told him I was still waiting for the name to reveal itself to me. “I have it,” he smiled, and in a beautiful ceremony of singing and silence, we christened Shanti-Alegria. Many visitors have commented on how much they feel these qualities here.

As this first decade of the twenty-first century closes out, I see with deep gratitude that my personal journey has been towards the realization of peace and happiness in my being. When I look back on all the fighting, the struggle and the heartbreak that I have had to come through, I can only put my hands on my heart, turn my face skyward and whisper, “Mahalo! Thank you!” In my gratitude there is always too the quiet apology to all those with whom I had to battle, with whom I was sometimes less than fair. I know we are all doing the best we can and that sometimes our best is not so great. But unlike the law, life does not want to punish us for our mistakes. It wants us to learn from them. I’m constantly helping participants in my workshops to love themselves a little more in their imperfections, even when their transgressions seem unforgiveable.

I’m not exempt. I have done my own share of things that were not so easy for people - including me! - to forgive and forget, and I know that it is there that I have been brought to my knees and learned things that I couldn’t learn standing tall – like compassion, humility, and forgiveness itself. As we grow and heal, we naturally apply what we learn to ourselves as well as to others. Then we can be happy and at peace. Shanti, alegria!

Next year a new Shanti-Alegria will be born, and even if southwest Bohemia in Czech Republic knows the real chill of European winter, the setting for the new Art of Being community is enchanting. There too our friends who have visited have felt the peace and happiness that Martina and I experienced from the first moment we entered the property in Pasečnice last Spring. The two Shanti-Alegria’s are one! As time goes by they will become joined not only in spirit but through our presence in both places. One of my visions is that people living and working in Shanti-Alegria Cz will eventually get to spend a few weeks or even months in our Maui casa. I imagine them on assigment here, looking after the house and garden, enjoying the delights of this Hawaiian paradise, and bringing to fruition creative projects for The Art of Being. There are all kinds of projects simply awaiting the energy of a good team and many of them can be done just as well on Maui – things I have not had time to do myself, like making books and high-quality CDs from my Art of Being workshop recordings; editing and compiling into book form all the articles I’ve written over the years; enhancing the Art of Being website and developing our social media networking resources to reach many thousands more people; producing Art of Being manuals for teachers from the plethora of processes, guided trance-journeys and meditations that I have created and refined over the past three decades. Many of these I have wanted to handle myself, but you see how long it takes me just to write one book! And there are earthy projects too, like building one or two little meditation gazebos so more visitors can have their own private spaces.

This is where we are going. This is how The Art of Being is being brought step by step now towards its full blossoming. In the end, it is not about any place, it is all for our inner awakening. This is the real purpose of Shanti-Alegria.

NB: You can read more about the vision for the new Shanti-Alegria Cz here.