This is part of a message I am sending to graduates and teachers of Art of Being trainings. When I read it, I see that it's something for everyone. So, here, for you, even if we never met:
Once upon a time – perhaps recently, perhaps long ago – we met each other. We travelled through all kinds of inner spaces together and encountered each other in ways that were sometimes profoundly challenging, sometimes exquisitely intimate, sometimes wildly ecstatic. Whether you were with me in The Art of Being Training or the Body, Heart & Soul Training, everybody shared the same deep longing – to be open and awake in their whole being. Sometimes, always unexpectedly, it happened. The longing was fulfilled! There were even moments when it seemed to be happening for everybody. Usually it lasted just a little while, and even so it could be life-transforming. As the Sufi mystic Rumi said, "One glimpse is a blessing." The glimpse was something to carry in your soul as an inspiration, a key. The course does not exist that can in itself keep us for ever open and awake. That is good! It is in our life, day after day, year after year, that we have to keep learning this art of being.
Inevitably there are times when we fall or lose our way; we are, after all, only human. Then the longing is our key. If we fall asleep and forget all about the inner mystery, the longing fades until we do not even notice what we have lost. But if just the memory stays alive in us, we still have the key, and life has its ways of enticing or provoking us to use it: it brings us wonders and challenges to wake us up and open what we have closed in ourselves.
How beautiful too that the adventure goes on for our whole life! To accept it is to be for ever coming into being, for ever arriving where we have never been before: Ah! in this, here, how! And don't leave me out! Life insists on educating me with its invitations, blessings and the testing times too. I live in gratitude because in all of this I feel unconditionally loved by the eternal spirit that moves in all of us and all that is. When life brings me an unexpected gift, I learn. When I am hurt by life, I learn. It has become easy to live in gratitude for the light that illuminates, and for the darkness that deepens my sensitivity. So I learn to live in awareness, love, trust, compassion and acceptance, to be light and playful, to care deeply, and above all, to keep being here anyway! I hope it so for you too.
Aloha, alan
