Keep Being Here Anyway! Alan's personal Art of Being

Vaclav Havel, Bon Voyage!

2011-12-19T12:56:00.000Z

Maui, Hawaii, Sunday Dec 18

Martina came down to breakfast this morning in tears. Shehad stopped to glance at her Czech website on the way, and so learned thatVaclav Havel had died a few hours earlier. I’m not Czech, but hearing the newsI felt like I could be. Some months ago I thought, a little too casually, thatI would love to meet this man. I am enough in Prague now that I could alreadyhave tried. I didn’t know time was so short. He died in his sleep early today,surely some years sooner than would have been the case had he not dared tostand against the Soviet oppression of his country. He was a playwright who because he was loved became thepresident of Czechoslovakia and subsequently of the new Czech Republic.

Isn’t that amazing! No political gamesmanship, no wheelingand dealing, no contrived image, no pursuit of power. Simply a man who livedhis love of truth and freedom with that rare courage and commitment that could guide his country out of the prison of communism, and do so withoutbloodshed! When the 18-day Velvet Revolution restored Czechoslovakia to its ownpeople, he had to be asked to become president. Years later he told David Frostthat it was the most difficult decision he ever had to make.

I imagine that Vaclav Havel found something of prison in thepresidency. It wasn’t a role he would have chosen for himself, though he evidentlydid what he could to liven it up. Maybe in taking it on he saw the opportunityto inspire his countrymen to come alive again, to shake off the apathy withwhich human beings habitually anaesthetise their despair when things seemhopeless. He wanted the Czech people to find their hope again. He had neverlost his and in that lay his magic. It came from a profound understanding. “Hopeis not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty thatsomething makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

Thirteen years later he stepped down at the end of hissecond term as president of the Czech Republic. His choice to walk out on thesoul-less machinery of politics was yet more reason to love him. Clearly, forHavel himself leaving politics was a real liberation. He was happy to return tohis writing and for the remainder of his life he expressed his hope bysupporting human rights activists around the world. Predictably, the presidencyhe relinquished fell into the clutches of the mediocre orthodoxy that todayruns the Czech Republic. Next Friday theleaders of many nations will attend his funeral in Prague. I wonder how many ofthem got there by living Havel’s mantra that “truth and love must prevail overlies and hatred”.

Martina and I spent some of this morning in meditation withthis man who feels to me like an unknown friend. I think it is how he isexperienced by millions of people around the globe. Then I looked on theinternet at what was happening in Prague - Wenceslas Square filling with men, women andchildren coming to light candles and pay tribute. The scene brought to mind afew words of Shakespeare. One playwright talking of another:

“His life was gentle, and the elements

So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up

And say to all the world 'This was a man!'”

Sitting with Vaclav Havel in his death, as we pray for him Iimagine his soul’s departing prayer for us: I can hear him gently asking,“Won’t you all please learn to live what you loved in me?”

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Only an unreal life lacks magic!

2011-12-18T01:42:00.000Z

To people who live only in the mind, magic is an illusion. To open into your whole being is to experience magic happening in your life. It comes from your ability, in being deeply open, to engage with life’s unbounded mysteries, with that which is not confined to logic and knowledge. Then you see through the illusions that cause so much hurt and fear in people’s lives and in the world at large. When we are really present, magic simply shows up in our intimate connection with here-and-now existence

Love the Shadow!

2011-10-23T17:23:00.001+01:00

Last weekend in Berlin I presented my Love and the Shadow workshop for couples, and added some follow-up homework assignments to help the couples carry the gifts they found in the workshop into their love relationships at home. Today I posted an mp3 recording I made during the workshop on a website. It is all about the assignments. I gave it the title, “LoveShadow…” - at least, that’s what I thought I had done. When it arrived in my mailbox so that I can send it to the participants, I found instead, “Love_the_Shadow…”

What a beautiful mistake! This is exactly what the workshop is all about - learning to love the shadows that usually undermine love in our relationships because we don’t know how to love them - neither in ourselves nor in our partners!

If you ever participated in Love and the Shadow, and would like to download the mp3, just send me an email (alan@artofbeing.com), with “Love the shadow!” in the Subject Header. It is an English-German recording.

Aloha, alan

Talking to the group at end of workshop

2011-09-22T19:08:00.002+01:00

This is a transcript of my closing words to the people who participated in The Universal Experience workshop (an intimate encounter with your own death), at Waldhaus Zentrum in Switzerland last weekend (Sep 16-18).

“I love how we change the world through changing ourselves. I really know from bitter experience how the world can hammer us down again and again, or just drag us into cul-de-sacs and all kinds of nonsense. When you catch the magic of really BEING HERE, it gets to matter so much that you will go to the ends of the earth to look after it… When you get to love this quality of being present in your life, you realize that it’s not just about being celebrative and happy. It’s also about being really creative, because when you are in touch with your whole being, you are in touch with your magic. You can really play with existence as it is happening and you live this with trust because you are connected with the mystery that you have been travelling through these past days. When this matters, the world can grab you and take you off on side-tracks but you never forget what it is to really be here, and when you lose touch with it, it matters to you to find it again. Sometimes that is as easy as putting on a piece of beautiful music. And sometimes you lose yourself so much in the world that you need something like this experience to find the connection again. Sometimes too you just want to open new doors and go deeper and deeper into the mystery of being.

My workshops serve these needs, but whether with me or anybody else, my own personal hope is that THIS, THIS BEING FULLY PRESENT IN YOUR LIFE matters to you so much that it becomes your invisible treasure. When you feel in your heart and your soul that you need this space again, then come again - to me or to someone else.

Personally I choose to work with what I consider to be life’s essentials. That is why I lead a lot of sexuality workshops. Sex really matters! And those workshops are no more intellectual than this, your encounter with death. My sexuality workshops are sexual! A lot of people call this Tantra. Tantra is a far mystery that we can touch eventually. Before we can touch it we have to make friends again with our male-female nature and release ourselves from all the nonsense that this civilization puts on us - mostly exploitation or repression of sex. The BODY, HEART & SOUL workshops are my response to this. You know, I’ve asked many thousands of people, “Who celebrated your sexual awakening?” Let’s see! Raise your hand if your family or community celebrated your sexual awakening.

Three of you! That is miraculous. That is the most ever! Usually no hands are raised. That brings to about fifteen the sum total of the people who have raised their hands over the past twenty years that I have been asking this question. So yes, I work with sex, with death, with relationship, with your child and your soul, and with the art of being who you are!

OK, that’s all from me. I look forward to seeing you again, and if I don’t, I wish you a really beautiful life!”

About the new Art of Being Teacher Training

2011-08-08T03:20:00.000+01:00

Hi friends,

This is a blog especially for people who may be interested in joining this new training for teachers. It is a kind of supplement to the information on the Art of Being website. Aloha, alan

On completing the Teacher Training you are free to use the material I make available to you – group processes, meditations, guided journeys and so on – in whatever way serves your work with people. In any case, I encourage you to design your own processes. And whether it is mine or your own, the material is not what the training is about. It is ABOUT YOU and the deepening of your presence, trust, compassion, ease, wisdom and practical know-how in working with people.

The material will be used so that trainees who want to lead workshops can lead short sessions in the training, providing real examples through which we can all explore what The Art of Being means in the reality of working with people. For this you are all free to use my material or your own. Using your own gives you the additional gift of being able to use the group’s experience and feedback to refine your creations.

I am happy to give you some of my material and to help you use it effectively and creatively. I know that some who want to lead groups, especially if they are only now starting out on this path, feel much more relaxed and present if they already have a little repertoire of material to use.

Your recognition that you have something to offer and wish to better meet the real needs of the people you work with is in my eyes your sensing of own treasure. What I wish and work for with you and all the trainees is to help you in every way I can to unearth all your gifts, and learn how in your work with people to keep on finding and giving more of your gold! It is what keeps me passionate about The Art of Being after four decades of leading groups. I rejoice in the never-ending nature of the adventure.

The homework assignments of creating events - open evenings, one-day workshops, weekend events, etc - are entirely optional and are so that those who know they want to work with groups can discover all that this means - the challenges they face, the realisations of what they can accomplish and maybe even the miracles that happen in being an Art of Being teacher or as you may prefer to see yourself, a person teaching the art of being. What really matters, and is the essence of the training, is the blossoming of your own art of being in working with people.

The death of a good man

2011-07-09T21:48:00.001+01:00

I’m touched this morning by the news of the murder in Guatemala of one of Latin America’s greatest and most loved folk singers, the Argentinian Facundo Cabral. I want to share with you a little of what I read today, especially something that he said in an interview in 2008:  
"I love life so much because it cost me so much to enjoy it. From the cradle to the grave is a school, so if what we call problems are lessons, we see life differently."
And here (courtesy of bbc.co.uk) is more about this much-loved man: 
'Cabral became famous in the early 1970s as a protest singer in Argentina. His wife and baby daughter died in a plane crash in 1978. Guatemala has announced three days of official mourning. Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize winner, Rigoberta Menchu, travelled to the scene of the killing and openly wept. "For me, Facundo Cabral is a master," she said. "He loved Guatemala greatly." The presidents of Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela were among those sending condolences.
'In 1996, Unesco declared Cabral a "world messenger of peace". His most famous song was No Soy de Aqui ni Alla (I'm Not From Here or There), which was recorded in a number of languages.
'Guatemalan fan Edgar Palacios, 54, told Reuters the singer would not be forgotten. "Facundo Cabral died but his music will never die, just like John Lennon died but his music never died. Cabral wasn't just from one country. He was a universal man."'
Bon voyage, Facundo!

Being...Opening... Learning... Thank you!

2011-07-03T10:45:00.001+01:00

My friends, this is the long version of the letter I wrote and shortened for the July Art of Being e-letter

I’m writing this e-letter in the garden of a dear friend’s country villa in the hills of Umbria, north of Rome, catching my breath and enjoying with Martina a very Italian holiday after an epic Spring season of workshops. Sitting here under the shade of a persimmon tree in the fragrant morning air, nature teasing all my senses, how could I wish to be less than present in every cell of my being? Next week we return to Maui for our summer break. En route, in the busy streets of Prague and London, on trams and trains, and amidst all the flurry and bustle of airports and plane-travel, it will good to be just as present.

I am deeply aware of how much has been touched in me during this 4 months on the road. I am alive with all that is moving in me from the 69 days I have spent in Art of Being circles since we left Hawaii in late February. I wish I could convey in a short e-letter what it is that sustains me through such a schedule, and indeed inspires me to create it in the first place. People do ask me, including other seminar leaders, and all I can ever say is, “It’s the art of being.” Meditation to me means BEING WITH WHAT IS, and this is what I have been practising now for nearly 4 decades. My work and my life are one. The simple principle at the core of The Art of Being applies to me as much as to the people who come to my workshops, and of course to all beings everywhere always: the more I open, befriend and awaken in myself, the richer is my presence in the life I am living.

It is this quality of BEING HERE NOW that determines how fully we can celebrate life. Everyone is somewhat present, but the whole kaleidoscope of our nature, feelings, heart, self and soul is available only to the degree that we have opened our personal inner space. This happens through dissolving the stuff of our psyches – healing our wounds, letting go of our attitudes and fixations, and making friends with the fears that fuel them. It is all this stuff that keeps us too preoccupied to be more than functionally present. Art of Being workshops are alchemical crucibles where we turn our stuff into the gold of heart-and-soul awareness.

I am about to write an article for Connection magazine on what it means to be a teacher. Writing this e-letter is an apt prelude; to me, a good teacher is a learning adept – someone who is skilled in the art of learning and who understands that what enriches and liberates people is not BEING TAUGHT, but LEARNING! At dinner a couple of days ago my host, Mario, was telling me that one of his sailing friends has kept his child out of school throughout his childhood because, “I won’t let school disrupt his education”. Yes, most teaching is only schooling.

The Art of Being is very real education. Every time I am in the workshop circle, like everyone else there I am learning. My way of giving my gifts to the people who come to be in the circle with me is every moment a deep learning experience for me. I learn from everyone there and from THIS THAT IS HAPPENING HERE AND NOW. Existence is my teacher. If there is more soul and more spirit moving in the workshops nowadays it reflects the learning that continues to open my own heart and soul. The greatest gift I receive from my work is that like everyone there I keep opening more deeply into the mystery of my own being.

So to all of you who sat and danced and laughed and cried and loved and opened with me in some of these 69 days, a great Thank you! – for all that I learn in being with you. And thank you too that you care as I do to bring more love and awareness into this lost world through becoming ever more of your real being in it, and in your soul more free of it too. My wish and prayer is that you may keep celebrating your own magical being, and let every day be an Art of Being meditation bringing you many golden moments where “All that I am is one with all that is”.

With love and aloha, alan

Mystical Tantra really happened!

2011-06-01T11:15:00.000+01:00

My friends,

It is two days since the MYSTICAL TANTRA workshop in Czech Republic ended. Here are some of my after-thoughts that I just sent to the participants.

My work is different from most other teachers because I do not want to feed your minds more than necessary. We are so trained to live through our minds. We are taught to THINK life. This is sad because our thinking dominates so much that we cannot EXPERIENCE life as it is happening. We think, criticise, judge, and so we miss what is happening here and now. And we do not realise that our thinking protects us from all the feelings and inner experiences that we have been brought up to fear – tears, joy, libido, excitement, anger, and perhaps deepest of all, fear of the mystical and spiritual that is so much more than our own person. The mind is a great resource: I could not write this without it. And it is also sometimes nothing more than a defence mechanism. Whenever we do not want to feel, we think instead!

I designed this workshop to bring you out of your minds and into a total experience of Tantric life happening here and now – yes, to blow your minds in a really beautiful way! And this happened a lot. I am still in awe. MYSTICAL TANTRA REALLY HAPPENED!

And then afterwards it can happen that the mind wants to put everything back the way it was before you opened up. As long as your mind wants to control the show, it has to fight against your total being. Then it comes up with all its usual attitudes and opinions and judgements and may even want to invalidate your experience so that it can regain its control over you. So please don’t be concerned if you are a little confused. That just means that your mind hasn’t yet been able to fix everything back in place. Trying to think everything out keeps you in a very limited experience of your life: it is like being on the phone all the time while life passes you by.

Honestly, I think your confusion is much more valuable than anything your mind does to overcome it. If you say hello to your confusion and let it be, it gradually dissolves, and you find that you can keep living in intimate connection with all your inner experiences - your feelings, energies, awareness, intuition and the mysteries of your soul. Instead of running your life, your mind has become a valuable servant of your BEING. Living this way, YOU ARE a rich and magical experience of life happening here-and-now. Bon voyage!

A Spring morning in the Art of Being Training group

2011-05-18T11:27:00.000+01:00

It’s one of those sublime Spring mornings in the countryside of Switzerland. I’m at my favourite seminar-house in the world, Waldhaus Zentrum in the lovely Emmenthal, among wild-flower meadows surrounded by green hills and happy cows. We’re into the fifth day of the new Art of Being Training. Outside, just as the old Sufi poet Rumi said, “All of nature swings in delight, singing without end.... what a blessing!” Bird-song and funky farm fragrances waft through the open windows. In here I can write these few sentences while the participants sit in small groups preparing to go into a deep journey called “Life-story”. The first round of the adventure took place yesterday evening. Is it the full moon, or the potency of the process, or this overwhelming Springtime energy of nature, or the fact that we have been moving deeper and deeper for five days now into the mysteries that we all contain and so often disregard? I guess all of these are contributing to the extraordinary richness of awareness, presence, passion, feelings and sensitivity that everyone seems to be buzzing with this morning. Yes, it is really a blessing to BE HERE!

Out of sad life, into soul-life

2011-05-09T19:22:00.001+01:00

The day after I finished leading the Soul-Life workshop in Munich last weekend, life sent me a beautiful post-script to a beautiful happening. Out of the blue I came across a letter that I received 11 years ago from my dear friend, Michael Barnett. It was after a very special reunion weekend for the Rajneesh sannyasins who had lived with Osho (Bhagwan as he was in those days) in his ashram in Poona, India in the 70’s. Out of the 120 sannyasins living in the ashram in those years, 75 of us showed up. In his jewel of a letter, Michael commented on “the two blisses, one from awareness or consciousness, one from love” that we danced between with Bhagwan.

That weekend in 2000, at the amusingly named Ghost Ranch in the desert, we soared together on the bliss of love. Mostly we were meeting each other for the first time in 15 to 20 years. What we had experienced in those wild, pioneering years with Bhagwan - and I’ll use the name by which we knew him back then even though now he is universally known as Osho - opened our hearts and woke us up, day after day after day! Most of us had migrated from our very Western sex-and-drugs-and-rock’n’roll rebellions of the 60’s to adventure into the mystical fusion of sex-and-meditation-and-rock’n’roll with an enlightened Master in India. Our personal Odysseys were as hair-raising as was the mythic journey of Odysseus; ashram life had a way of confronting each and every one of us with our personal fears, our childhood wounds, and the deeper layers of our Western conditioning that even the sixties could not exorcise. To traverse our dark inner labyrinths and to transform our self-destructive demons, there were two great qualities that every one of us had singularly to discover and develop in ourselves. Whether we knew it or not, we were learning to trust and to be courageous.

If you follow the metaphor, to fly on the wings of love and awareness is only possible if you have trust and courage. And as long as you are still living in the clutches of your wounded and culturally inhibited psyche, it’s very hard to even get above ground, never mind flying! Then too there’s the practicing, day after day in your life, until love and awareness become your natural way of engaging with whatever life brings. The ongoing practice constantly calls for your trust and courage so that you gradually become strong and established in both. How beautiful is that!

I’m writing this not only because my friend’s letter inspired me to do so, but also to send to all the people who took part in the Soul-Life workshop this past weekend. It was all about this! So here is your post-script from me: Please, my friends, look after what you found. When something in your life drags you down, turn it into a journey just the way you did in the workshop, and go all the way until you come into your soul-connection with the infinite, and so out into the light and the lightness of being, here, now. This is how you learn to rise - again and again and again - on the wings of your love and awareness. Dive deep, fly high!

Happy Easter from the lost-and-found dept.

2011-04-24T09:21:00.002+01:00

Ah, Easter Sunday morning at Waldhaus - my favourite seminar centre - leading the Body, Heart & Soul workshop. Chatting over breakfast about how people come to workshops to discover themselves, and then afterwards can get lost again when they return to normal daily life in this very lost world of ours, I have this happy realization that "Oh my God, I'M THE LOST-AND-FOUND DEPARTMENT!" In my own life I don't know how many thousands of times I've gotten lost. A long time ago I learned to accept that it is actually an important experience, because when I was lost, my soul ached to be found again. I chose a life in which finding myself when I got lost could keep happening, and so gradually, through repeatedly getting lost, I've been able to practise finding my way home. Like learning to play a musical instrument, the practice is what matters. And this morning, I laugh at the insight. Yes, my workshops are so that people can find themselves, then get lost again, and come again to find themselves. Or maybe they find themselves some other way. But here it is, for those who choose The Art of Being as their way to get back home, I'm the lost-and-found department!

I wish you all a blessed and beautiful Easter,

With love and aloha, alan

Talking about The Art of Being Training is a way to talk about the art of being!

2011-04-20T13:39:00.002+01:00

Andreas: Alan, what is The Art of Being training?

Alan: Well, first of all let's talk about trainings, as such. The reason that people want to do a long training is because meeting again and again over a period of eighteen months, they become a deeply bonded family-community. Everything goes so much deeper when people get to know each other intimately. And the e-group that is part of the training means they can also be in very meaningful daily contact with each other, so that the learning and healing process never stops!

What is special about The Art of Being Training?

You know, in essence, The Art of Being gives people a way through the layers of personality and ego that keep people so preoccupied with their self-image - which is the way we learn to function in the world. The way our world is, we grow up learning to judge ourselves, so we feel like we're not good enough in certain ways. These become areas inside ourselves, like rooms in our house that we should not enter: that's bad, that's wrong, that's sinful. I should do better? I'm not good enough. We develop our personality to function well in the world, and that means that we also design it to survive these inner judgements.

Art of Being workshops, besides all the other resources they offer, enable people to become aware that their personality is only a costume, a disguise. The Art of Being is about discovering this BEING that we mostly learn to keep hidden inside it – not just hidden to others, but to ourselves!. It’s amazing how many human beings live and die never realizing that they are not their personalities. It sounds rather grandiose when you say it in words, but honestly, if you live and die thinking you are your personality, it means that YOU never lived!

The Art of Being journey is really a journey out of the head—which is so busy with the image and the personality—into your whole being. It brings you into your feelings, and especially helps you make friends with the ones you have learned to fear or judge. In a nutshell, The Art of Being is a process of making friends with whatever you're not in friendship with in yourself. As you make friends with it—whether it's your sadness, or your excitement, your playfulness, your sexuality, your openness to the mysterious in existence—whatever it is, as you become sensitive to it it becomes incorporated into your being, it becomes who you are. And it becomes your awareness of existence. As you become more and more sensitive in this whole kaleidoscope of feelings, there comes a point where your heart opens, where you discover love as an aspect of being, and you become eventually a being who is in love—not with this person or that person - you may be! - but the point is you grow into being in love with being itself, with existence, with life. And when that happens, when your heart opens and you can receive life with the totality of your feelings, then you begin to be receptive to the intangible, the mysterious, the mystical. Opening more and more fully into yourself eventually connects you with your own soul.

You talk a lot about soul. Is it an important aspect of The Art of Being Training?

The saddest thing about our normal “civilized” world is how it contrives to alienate us from our own souls. So many people have lost their intimate soul-connection. When that happens, our experience of life is limited because we have lost touch with that which gives our personal life and our personal experience its real magic, its real wonder, its real beauty. If we don't have that then we are in a way consigned to try and to get the best of what we can do with life. That’s when the personality takes over and starts running the show. It’s the best we can do under the circumstances. That’s really sad!

So is The Art of Being a way out of this sad state? Does it make people’s lives happier?

Absolutely! When you like who you are, when you are in friendship with all that you are, being happy is your way of being. Then even when something happens that brings sadness or anger or pain or fear, you don’t have to run from it into the old antics of your personality. You can keep being here! This is why my book – and really it’s almost finished now! – is called KEEP BEING HERE ANYWAY.

And this journey into being is about much more than being happy. When you really open into your whole being, your soul-connection gives you an ongoing awareness of the eternal spirit that is alive in all and everything that is. Call it God, the Source, whatever. You don’t have to believe in it. When you are present in your whole being, it is present in you! So The Art of Being is a journey that first connects you with your nature and your feelings. Through this your heart eventually opens and you discover what it is to be fully present in your whole being, and suddenly you are here, in your very soul. Once that happens, you live every day in a new relationship with existence that includes the mystery that I call spirit. It is our connection with our own soul that gives us our spiritual awakening and awareness. No belief is needed, only the experience of becoming all that you are!

Who is this training for?

It's really for everybody who has a sense that there is more to life than what they are living. It's for people who feel a certain kind of - I call it creative discontent. You know life is okay, it's ho-hum, it goes along well enough, I can be very successful, but…! This but is a longing moving very deep in them. If you have that longing, you resonate with The Art of Being. I could say The Art of Being training is for people who hear about it and say 'Aha! This is for me.' They read this interview, for example, and something speaks to their longing, to what they are looking for. When I think of the kinds of people who have been in Art of Being trainings, the spectrum is so wide. And that's what I love—it's not for a certain kind of person, it's for anybody who feels this longing for some kind of inner enrichment, realization, and healing too. Yes, it's also for people who live with wounds they have learned to survive, and would like to be free of them. It's for people who are not content with their lifestyle and seek real change. It's for people who are turned on by the experiences that they've already had in Art of Being workshops and want to go deeper. And of course it's for people who are seeking to guide others. I love it when teachers come to Art of Being trainings, because one of the things that is so important for me is to recognize as a teacher that the best teacher I am isn't someone who's giving the answers. The best teacher in me is this one who can create the space where someone can learn what they have come here to learn. To me, a really good teacher is a learning adept—someone who is good at creating the space where people can LEARN WHAT THEY ARE NEEDING TO LEARN. Spoon-feeding people wise and enlightened answers only keeps them dependent on getting answers from others. A good teacher is doing something totally different - opening doors that invite people to discover through their own experience. The other kind of teaching only feeds the mind.

What makes The Art of Being safe for people as a path of personal growth?

Love. You know, even though I had such a rough childhood, I knew from the beginning that my mother loved me. I discovered that fact in a very important moment. I had to go through years where I had lost touch with love and to find it again was my journey of personal healing. I am so grateful to my mother. I think it is because of who she really was that I love people the way I do. What makes a workshop space safe is that there is love there. And it's not only my love; there are so many people sitting in the circle who are in touch their own love. When there is love present, it lets you be. Its very presence says, I celebrate your being. I support your being. It is this quality of love present in the circle that makes it safe for people to adventure into places that can be really scary for them, because they come into workshops carrying their fears in them. That's why they come: they long to be free of the fear that has cramped their lives for too long. Love makes it safe for them to go their journey, and presence, consciousness, gives them a guiding light. As Osho used to say, love and awareness: the two wings of being!

A new Art of Being-Training begins Sat 14 May 2011 at Waldhaus Zentrum, Switzerland (24 days spread over 18 months).

Death as a guide to living happily

2011-03-31T19:40:00.000+01:00

My friends,

I am at the beautiful Pegasus Seminar-house in northern Germany. Tomorrow morning I begin guiding yet another Universal Experience - extraordinary and life-transforming encounter with one’s own death. Travelling here today I found something I wrote not so long ago about this workshop. I hope you find it valuable. With love and aloha, alan

Death as a guide to living happily

At the beginning of The Universal Experience there is a process during which participants are given the opportunity to remember all the significant goodbyes of their lives, those that were really endings. To remember these is to say hello to one of the most tender aspects of our humanity: that by our very nature we become attached to people, places, experiences and things that we like and love – and sometimes even to those that were not so pleasant too, just because, like an unhappy childhood, they were so much a part of our lives that we feel them as belonging to our very selves.

The feelings that are stirred in us by our attachments belong indeed to our childhood – feelings like joy, sorrow, longing, heartache, need, helplessness, affection and love. We stay attached to all kinds of past experiences, with usually no idea at all that we are holding them and they are holding us.

Usually it is only when a catastrophic goodbye happens – the death of a beloved or the ending of our marriage for example – that the buried feelings heave upwards. We do our best to survive the upheaval and get back to normal as soon as we can. What we don’t understand is that ‘normal’ is not in this instance very good for us: surviving such experiences is a poor substitute for whole-heartedly embracing them. When we learn to embrace and accept all that the great goodbyes of our lives open in us, we grow in awareness, in wisdom, and in love.

The greatest goodbye of all is our own death. It is the ultimate let-go. When we sit silently and listen with our whole being to the fact that this universal experience will therefore one day be intimately our own, it invites us to learn how to let go and to truly say goodbye so that we can be happy living our life here and now.

A few words to a friend about the dark night of the soul

2011-03-19T18:54:00.000Z

This is a really important time for you. The door that I talked about is open - that is why you feel that there is no protection in front of your heart. The protection was the wall that kept you safe, but it kept you safe from your heart. Now the wall is falling down, leaving your heart and all your feelings open. This of course makes you also afraid. It is so unfamiliar to you to be so open, and you cannot be open on one side - the sweet, light and beautiful - without also being open on the other side - the dark and scary wounds that you carry, mostly from your childhood, in your psyche. It sounds so simplistic to say it, but it is true nevertheless that all you need to do now is stay open - keep feeling everything, including the fear, WITH FRIENDLINESS. Loneliness, despair, emptiness - allow yourself to experience all of these, until they are no longer frightening to you. They are demons guarding the treasure! If you allow yourself to embrace them, you will find your way to a happiness that is no longer haunted by fear. But you have to be willing to go through the fear to find the light. It is what mystics call, "the dark night of the soul". And everyone who really means to awaken to their whole being has to come to, and dare to pass through, this night. Embrace your inner experiences whatever they are. And know that here is a friend who has travelled this path and so can be in spirit with you as you walk yours.
With love, alan

Learning to keep being here anyway!

2011-02-20T23:13:00.001Z

My friends,

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

A little reflection of what it is like to be in a long Training with Alan

2011-01-20T03:41:00.000Z

TALKING TO THE CIRCLE OF PARTICIPANTS ON THEIR GRADUATION AT THE END OF THE LAST ART OF BEING TRAINING (2008-10)

I was remembering as we started to go around the circle here that at the end of the last Body, Heart & Soul Training which also ended just a few months ago, I said that it was the best training that ever happened. I was laughing with them about the fact that I had said that about the previous training and that I would probably say it about the next training – which is this one! And you know it´s beautiful that it actually feels this way.

I feel myself so nourished by the power, the depth, the truth and the authenticity with which you all participated in this training. To put it simply: I love how much you all really meant it, because it is what we really mean that really matters. I feel tremendous gratitude to you all that you dared, that you trusted, and that 17 months later you are still here. And truly I don´t think I have ever seen such widespread transformation happening in a training as happened in this one.

Listening to you now is wonderful testimony to what we lived here, and I have my personal experience of each of you. And you know, in these 17 months I have gone through changes too, just as I have for the last 17 years and 17 lifetimes! I love this dance of being, the infinity of it. I love that we are always at the beginning. For me there is nowhere else to be that really matters. The moments when I´ve really felt this were when I´ve sat here and witnessed and felt some of you having to so struggle in your personality stuff, when you were held by the wounds of your childhood and upbringing as I once was myself. The first chapters in my book tell the whole story.

So witnessing you in your struggles I have had beautiful moments, recognizing that the only thing to do in the end is to dare to let go - to find the courage to simply let go of the personality and its story. Your personality stuff, like everyone’s, is such a mess that the only place that it is good to be is actually the only place that it matters to be - here and now, present in your whole being. This is where you discover that all your resources, your creativity, your brilliance, your playfulness and all that you can give to existence, to other people, to this crazy world - the best that you can give – all comes from your being present. It is only ever discovered in this moment. There is no time for theory because the moment doesn´t have enough time to contain a theory. Watching you discover this! You let go and your presence is brilliant. It may be for only a few seconds, it may be for much longer. Anyway it changes you. For ever! This is for me what transformation is all about.

And your words today have put a golden seal on what the training is for. You give me such an incredible encouragement and affirmation to keep offering these long trainings. Where we go we can only go because we choose to be here with each other on this long journey. The depth of this 4th circle contains the 3rd and the 2nd and the 1st Circles. And in the months between each of the 4 circles, when I may be sitting on the other side of the world, I see all the emails going back and forth in your e-group. Even when I don´t have time to read them all, even if I only flip through, I feel how everybody is talking to each other. Yes, and sometimes me, too, and what I´m feeling is not all the chit-chat but the soul of all of us with its intention of awakening, opening and healing. I´ve never felt this as vividly as I have in this training.

And C…, you said that we broke your heart again and again. I see how beautifully open is your many-times broken heart! For me this is one of the deep blessings and gifts of this space, this Art of Being circle. I don´t really think that anybody´s heart gets broken here. I think the break which is already there comes into the open. Your wounded heart breaks open.

And all of your, for the tears that you´ve shed and the pain that you´ve been willing to feel, for the fear that you embraced, for your willingness to climb through the anger to the vulnerability that it was protecting, for your trust and your courage to find what really matters in you - I feel so close to you all! This is how we learn to celebrate our lives with love and awareness.

And R…., really it gives me such a beautiful feeling to hear you say, “Alan, I didn´t like you at first.” The kid in me likes it that you didn´t like me and you came to like me! I also recognized something very important in what you are saying. I know that some of you have liked me from the beginning. What really matters is that those of you who didn´t like me kept being here. You let it not matter. Something in you felt the need to be in this training regardless of who Alan is. It´s funny, because that is how I am here. It´s not completely my choice. I serve something that makes it necessary to be here. What I serve is the same thing that keeps me up until 4 o´clock last night making this 30-minute meditation for you, even if Alan wants to go to sleep.
I have to honour what really matters and I encourage you always to trust that your little personal dislikes are not important. If you make your decisions dependent on them, you live a very small and limited life. What we live here becomes vast. The invitation is to let it become infinitely vast. It happens when we don´t get hooked on little likes and dislikes. Coming into the present is always a letting go of them. In the here and now there is no liking or not liking. This is one of the sacred mysteries.

Oh, and one of you said something about being a workshop junkie. The only thing I want to say about this is: we are all addictive. It has to do with the power of the second chakra. What makes the difference is what we get addicted to. It is very creative to be addicted to something which helps to grow out of being addicted.
I trust that I will be seeing many of you again. And to those of you that for whatever reason I won’t, I wish you a beautiful life, and I know that we are dancing soul-to-soul. Bon voyage!

A mystery to be experienced

2011-01-06T01:02:00.000Z

I too have the sense that you and D are recognizing each other across life-times. What is important is to understand that whatever you are recognizing has its influence but does not determine who you are for and with each other in this life-time. That is for you to discover here in this life-time, and it may be completely different from how you have previously been connected. The one constant is the soul connection, and this can manifest in so many different ways - as lovers, friends, parent-child, even as adversaries! So yes, keep letting go of your expectations - you do that beautifully! - and keep opening to what is and what is not. As Osho used to say, life is a mystery to be experienced, not a problem to be solved.

I trust you will not mind that I put this last paragraph on my blog. Of course I will omit D's name, but writing this to you personally I realize it is something that many people need to hear.

Alan and his grand-daughter wish you all a very merry Christmas!

2010-12-24T07:47:00.002Z

Alan's Christmas message And you can see it much more clearly at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dpld-e0evM4

SHANTI-ALEGRIA!

2010-12-15T09:04:00.000Z

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.

BEING IN LOVE!

2010-12-09T10:27:00.000Z

I wrote this back in July for the Berlin magazine, Sein, and just now came across my original English version. So here it is.

To be present is all that really matters. Without it, our being is accidental, uninteresting, uncreative, unsafe and unloving. When we are really present to what is happening here and now we experience life with a kind of brilliance – in both senses of the word. We sense and feel everything vividly because all our receptors are turned on and tuned in to all the nuances that this moment contains. And we can play, respond, create and work brilliantly because when we are totally present we are one with all our personal resources and talents. We are unconcerned with all the stuff that keeps us otherwise preoccupied. Our genius – and we all have one – can come out and celebrate, which it does by being brilliant!

When we come out of our preoccupations into this state of total presence, we are also in love. It cannot be otherwise because our heart is an integral part of our totality. To be here now is to be in love. It manifests in the way we make love with our beloved, of course. But also in the way we greet a friend, or say thank you to a shop assistant, or dig the garden, take the dog for a walk, listen to music, play the piano or tennis or the fool. It is even there in the way we disagree with a colleague at work or do menial household chores, face impossible predicaments and deal with death. Our presence expresses itself as a lightness in our being that celebrates life’s blessings and can accept with grace life’s challenges. When we are, our love is. And all of this is why we love people who are truly present. When asked what quality they most desire in their man, women again and again say, “Presence!” Of course, it applies also the other way round, and all ways round!

When I was going through the darkest passages of my life (you can read about them in my book next year!) what saved me were the people who showed up, who REALLY showed up, because they met me with their being. They loved me. Not molly-coddling and “there, there, everything will be fine!” but real love - presence that cared for what I was afraid of in myself, that loved me before I could love myself. The first time it ever happened changed my life for ever and is why I do the work that I have been doing for the past thirty eight years – creating the space in which people can open and awaken into BEING. By being loved, over and over again, I learned gradually how to love.

When I came up with the name THE ART OF BEING for my work, back in the eighties, my heart was less open than it is now. My workshops reflected this. They were much more confronting than they are now. Like the participants, I had to fight my way into being and loving! They were wild happenings and what made them precious was that always, finding our way into being, we found the love too. My workshops were my teachers as well as my vocation. But the love was a precarious thing that came and went. I was still too afraid to stay open to everything going on in me – too many childhood wounds still pulled me back into fear, and fear closes the heart as it closes so much of our inner being. I would fall back into fears I thought I had grown out of until they seized me by the throat and shut me down again. I remember how naively sure I was, the first time all the doors opened, that I was open and awake for ever. Then life showed me how much I had to learn, how much I had still to befriend in myself, with more than a little help from wise friends.

The other day Inanna, my eighteen year old god-daughter, said to me, “When I come to your house feeling stressed out, I always become peaceful and relaxed. I feel so easy here… actually it’s not your house. It’s you!” It was the sweetest recognition of what my life is about - to create an ambience in which people come to love who they really are. My work, The Art of Being, is to catch the moments when they don’t, and to find ways to help them wake up and love being here, anyway. Death, sex, relationship, childhood wounds, soul retrieval – no matter the workshop - they are all one journey into being here now, being in love.

Armistice Day 2010

2010-11-23T06:15:00.000Z

Maybe there was a little hole in my trust. I was instantly captivated when my friend, Sabine, told me early this year about the Qi Gung seminar she had recently led in the Moroccan Sahara. It was precisely where I had travellled 45 years ago. I vividly remembered my first taste of the desert. I was a young man hitch-hiking across Europe, going where the rides took me. When I reached Gibraltar, taking the ferry across the narrow strait to Tangiers and north Africa, if a little scary, was irresistible. Casablanca, Marrakesh, Fez, the Atlas mountains – and THE SAHARA! It was 1965 and my world was opening. I said yes to the adventure, and fortune blessed me. I made it to all those places and traveled all the way down the fabled Vallée du Draa and into the desert.

“Let’s take a group there together,” Sabine suggested, and even as the words came out of her mouth I knew it would happen. Another wheel was about to come full circle. This time we would be an Art of Being caravan trekking on camels into the Sahara, with Sabine leading a Qi Gung class as our daily early-morning meditation while I brought us all together each day to support our opening to the vast mystery around and within us.

And so it was! For 5 days our Berber team guided us on our camels into the Sahara. At the end of each morning and afternoon they set up camp and cooked our meals - desert-style and surprisingly good. From the start it was clear to me that the real group-leader would be not me, but the Sahara. Yes, while the Berbers cooked, for an hour or two we would gather in a circle on a carpet they laid out for us on the desert sand; and then I would let go and let be. I didn’t have to formulate and structure anything beyond this. In fact, I WAS NOT TO! I was to allow this to be THE DESERT EXPERIENCE. The vision excited me; in this too I was falling back through the decades. I could be with the circle of participants the way I was for the first 12 years that I led workshops; just sitting there with everyone and letting things happen naturally. My only responsibility, to keep the space open and free of distractions – this time so that the desert could come into us and we could lose ourselves into it. Like Van Morrison sings in one of my favourite songs: “Just you and me in nature, in the garden, and the father…”. The desert our garden, its spirit our father.

I loved the idea. Or did I? Had I come to doubt its simplicity? Did I carry a little fear that instead of bringing us deeper than ever into being, the vast Saharan expanse might wear us away until we were as inconsequential as dust in the desert wind? WAS THERE A HOLE IN MY TRUST?

How could I have doubted anyway, leader though I was, that the desert would also work on my being? Even before I left Europe for Africa, existence began to grind me down with a snarling brute of a cold. By the time my plane flew into Casablanca all I wanted to do was lie down and sleep for a couple of days. As it was, I had to wait 8 hours for my connecting flight down to the town of Ouarzazate on the northern rim of the Sahara where the twenty-first century disappears into times gone by. The plane’s departure was delayed, and it was 2 in the morning when I reached the hotel where we were all to meet up with each other. I was dead on my feet. Next day it was all I could do to show up. I looked and felt like a ghost. We headed south in 3 jeeps for half a day to a lovely oasis hotel and before dinner we convened: brief hello’s, practical matters, and the most rudimentary introduction I’ve given in years. Whether I wanted it or not, I was as minimal as in my guiding vision. It was all I could do to speak at all, or even to look at the people who had come to be on this adventure. Next morning, harassed by a minor sand-storm, we hiked into the desert for an hour to meet our Berbers and to climb aboard the camels that would become personal to each of us for the next 5 days. The Desert Experience had begun.

I felt ill. Nevertheless, riding a camel in the Sahara took me almost immediately into a space where it didn’t matter what was going on in my body. The desert had me! For the first 2 days in our Art of Being gatherings I said almost nothing. I didn’t even call the participants to the circle. I wasn’t going to do any more than really necessary, so if people took their time showing up, so be it. They did – both take their time, and eventually show up – and so casually that it was almost unrecognizable as an Art of Being circle. The demands of being present in my depleted body, my nose running, throat clogged with mucus, eyes red and watering, all left me with little inclination to guide or influence what was happening. My mind said, “This is wrong. You should at least tell everyone to join the circle”. But deep inside my physical misery I was glad and wonderfully amused. The desert had made its position clear and demolished any plans my doubts might contrive to take control and run its own programme. Whatever happened among us would come not because I was leading the group but because the desert had us. Yes, we are here to discover THE ART OF BEING IN THE DESERT.

After those first two days, as my energy returned and I came alive again, it was with the happy trust that the desert was indeed giving each of us whatever we needed. I felt more and more engaged with everyone, and at the same time – and I could see that it was so for everyone else too - deeply alone. During the second day’s trekking I remembered The Canterbury Tales. In the fourteenth century Geoffrey Chaucer wrote his long narrative poem made up of stories told by various characters as they traveled together through England on a religious pilgrimage. That evening I shared this with the circle and suggested that we could do something similar, each free to tell the circle a deeply personal story. People liked the idea, and having proposed it, I opted to begin. Don’t ask me what the stories were that were told in those circles. They were extraordinary treasures, given and received in the desert with the promise that there they would remain. What we took home was what they touched, moved, healed and transformed in us.

When the sun went down, clear silent cold descended as though the desert belonged now to outer space. Despite my cold, I wanted from the first to belong to it. I made my bed each night in the sand dunes and slept not under the stars, but among them. In the desert night, eternity is all. With the break of day, time returns and with it the life of nature and being, here, now, with the sun rising and the dunes glowing gold.

I’m writing this on a train, traveling from Boston to New York just 6 days after we came out of the Sahara. It’s Veteran’s Day – in England, Armistice Day – when the Western world remembers those whose lives were cut off in their prime on the fields of warfare. Outside, the same sun that heats the desert illuminates the chill autumn leaves. If you gaze upwards, even in this unquiet hub of human civilization the same blue sky whispers of eternity. In the desert, life and death both feel closer, and both are held safe in the arms of eternity. Death can be so unkind. It is good then to remember eternity. Sometimes it is the only consolation, and always, for ever, it is the blessing.

Our soul life is our real life!

2010-10-25T16:03:00.000+01:00

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.

FINDING WHAT WE LOST: THE ART OF BEING

2010-09-26T23:00:00.001+01:00

Life is infinitely richer than the version that nearly all of us are brought up to accept. This is true whether we are privileged, gifted and successful, or challenged by circumstances to settle for less than we wish for. In either case, there is a way of being and living ourselves that has over many centuries become lost. We have manufactured a highly developed world in which we are brought up to forget some of our most precious human attributes. We learn to neglect and even reject our nature, feelings, heart and soul and to live according to the agendas of our mind and body. These are severely limited when they function without the other attributes that we have lost. Then, no matter how earnestly we chase after the life we long for, we can never live it because we lack the qualities that make it possible. All we can do is find compensations for what we are missing in ourselves; our hi-tech civilization is designed to supply them. But it cannot sell us happiness, self-awareness, love, playfulness, integrity, warm-heartedness, grace, compassion, creativity, trust, spiritual awareness, soul-consciousness, courage, authenticity, and all the other beautiful attributes that come with being fully present.

Our civilization should indeed give every one of us all of these attributes as we grow up, so that as adults we can live with an unshakeable grounding in our own being. This is what education really is. It should give us the self-awareness and presence that inspires us every day of our lives to celebrate our personal gifts and to honour everyone else’s. Instead, it feeds us agendas of success and failure, and drills us to perform who we think we should be. Instead of loving the gift of being, beginning with our own, we function competitively, trying to look good in the eyes of others, to come out on top, to not care because we don’t feel good enough, or to punish ourselves or others for failing. These are just a few of the agendas that our personalities devise, simply in order to survive, when we are missing the gifts of our real being.

For thirty seven years I have been learning how to bring this real education back into people’s lives. It began with my own experiencing of all that this means. It is too much to tell here. It is the essence of my forthcoming book. Over twenty years ago I gave this work a name: The Art of Being®. As many of you who are reading this know, Art of Being workshops and courses invite people into an astonishing transformation of existence that happens whenever we come fully into our being. The Art of Being® is a journey of deep inner opening and awakening to all that is, within oneself, in one’s relating with others and in one’s connection with existence. The essence of the journey is befriending along the way all that you are not in friendship with in yourself. This is the only way that it is possible to come fully into your whole being. Anything that you judge, reject, diminish, deny in yourself becomes a closed no-go area. As long as there is anything within you that you cannot embrace, you can never be fully yourself. Then you can have all the intellectual understanding in the world, but you can never experience the real magic of being fully present.

Throughout all these years my life has been uncompromisingly devoted to making Art of Being experiences richer, deeper, more beautiful. Yes, and more acceptable too, because, if you really mean finding your whole being, you sometimes have to travel through difficult and scary terrain in your psyche – always to find gifts that make it infinitely worthwhile. Throughout these years the journey has kept on deepening. That is inevitable because it leads us eventually into the most mysterious and enlightening realm of all, where our being becomes one with our soul and through this awakens to the spiritual essence of all that is. Once this happens we don’t need religious beliefs or priests or gurus; we have our own understanding borne of our own experience, and our whole life is lived in communion with the infinite source that gave birth to all the religions in the first place! Our own life becomes a prayer of gratitude and the celebration of what we are grateful for. Being!

The longing to live every day what people experience together in Art of Being workshops is why I have carried in my soul for 25 years the vision of an Art of Being community. Now it is on the brink of being born. Here you can find out more about Shanti-Alegria Cz!

My birthday present!

2010-09-13T08:37:00.000+01:00

Thank you all for your sweet birthday wishes! There’s something good about having a 9/11 birthday - no one has a problem remembering! I spent my birthday leading THE UNIVERSAL EXPERIENCE (the intimate encounter with death workshop) in Czech Republic, and I think my most precious birthday present was the inspiration I received on the morning of my birthday - suddenly seeing how to take this experience even deeper for people. I've been leading it now for almost twenty years, always enhancing it with new touches to make it deeper, more beautiful, more graceful. I thought by now, after all these years, I would only ever be adding small touches to refine it further, but what came to me Saturday morning were two radical new developments. Of course, the 53 participants did not know because they had never done it before, but I could see how their encounters with death touched new depths, and therefore new heights. I love my work! It keeps becoming more mystical. I think that is one of the blessings of becoming older. Next weekend I lead it again in Switzerland at my favourite seminar house in the world: Waldhaus!

I think I know who I am!

2010-09-12T09:23:00.000+01:00

If you want to learn to swim, don’t look in a book. Jump in a pool! Thinking about it won’t help much either, at least not until you jump! Most of what we call education lost touch with this basic principle long ago. On life’s physical plane, life compels us to learn by experiencing. When it comes to abstracts, we have to think. But the vast realm of our personal inner life - our instincts, feelings, sex and other energies, intuitive awareness, and deepest of all our soul-consciousness that awakens us to the spiritual dimension of existence – all this we can only know through opening to the experience of it.

This seems so obvious, but the calamity of our educational system is that much of this inner wisdom has been commandeered by the mind. We spend the first two decades of our lives to THINK ABOUT IT! Intellectualizing dominates what happens in educational establishments throughout the world. We become verbal processors! We feed our thoughts with words, but as Carl Jung said, “Words don’t put the butter on the parsnips.”

It isn’t that verbal thinking is bad. I personally regard music and language (in that order) as humanity’s two greatest discoveries. I know some people would argue with the issue of whether they are discoveries or inventions. My intuition says that they are gifts belonging to the boundless mystery of existence, and we have been blessed with the innate ability to find them.

Be that as it may, education went off the rails and got side-tracked into schooling when it elevated thinking so high it came to REPLACE experience, instead of serving it. When it comes to our inner being, “I know who I am” often means, “I have a set of intellectual concepts about myself”. I may even cultivate a special vocabulary to demonstrate my self-awareness in the same way that New Age pundits fabricate quasi-spiritual concepts to impart cosmic wisdom – for example explaining how WE all have to get ready for the next great human quantum leap in 2012. The same game on a grander scale: this we keeps me safely distant from myself.

Being able to talk about ourselves, we can avoid those real and often humbling personal encounters with what we don’t accept - and may not even be aware of - in ourselves. Yet it is those encounters that bring us home. Nobody dives that deep without coming into their darkness, and only in daring to embrace all we find there do we eventually BECOME the whole being our mind can only think about. It is here we confront the loneliness that masquerades as our high aloneness, the beggar hiding in our guru trip, the pretender in us who has to fake what we can’t feel, and all those other personality performances that keep us from celebrating ourselves for real!

This isn’t really surprising. Our schooling taught us how to think our way out of whatever we grew up fearing and mistrusting in ourselves. For twenty years now, when I’m leading or speaking about sexuality and Tantric workshops, I have asked people, “Raise your hand if your parents, family or community celebrated your sexual awakening!” There is always a shockwave of silence for a few seconds, and then people begin to laugh. And of the literally thousands of people I have asked through all these years, perhaps a dozen hands have shown. Of course, sex is not the issue, so I don’t only offer Tantra and sexuality workshops. The issue is the fear, often unconscious, that compels us to limit ourselves and that thwarts our real potential in all kinds of ways. Thinking cannot help us embrace what we fear. For that we have to dare the deep waters of our feelings and the hot lava of our passions. Befriending all that we are, we can authentically live all that we are. Then our intellect can serve, instead of usurping, our real being.

So what is The Art of Being®? And what is Tantra?

2010-08-17T00:21:00.000+01:00

Aloha friends,

It’s a long time since I actually said what my work is all about in a couple of simple paragraphs.

The Art of Being® is a path of personal growth and spiritual awakening. You learn to befriend what you are not in friendship with in yourself. You reconcile with your male-female nature, restore full connection with your body and all the life happening in it, and learn to befriend whatever you are afraid of in yourself so that you can be alive in all your feelings. This opens your heart and brings you into total presence in your being. This in turn awakens you to your soul, through which you come to experience the spiritual in existence. So that you can celebrate all the gifts of being you, and participate happily and creatively in your life.

And what is Tantra? The answer depends on who you ask. So here is my picture of what it is. Zen says, “Not this, not this, not this…” To come to the same realization of your being, Tantra says, “And this, and this, and this…” It asks you to embrace all that you are and all that is. It is a way to learn how to keep being here. It invites your total presence in your body, feelings, heart and soul. Sexual intimacy is not Tantra, but it is an exquisite way to discover Tantra simply because it is – or should be – such a pleasure! It is Tantra when it becomes the invitation is to live with total presence in all aspects of your life - taking a walk, dancing, playing tennis, disagreeing with a colleague, and even facing death (which is why one of my most important short workshops is The Universal Experience. Tantra means “the weaving together of all that you are and all that is”. One being, one with all. And this is The Art of Being!

Revenge is a plate that should always be served cold!

2010-06-29T08:47:00.000+01:00

Aloha! It’s summer, so a little light diversion into the realm of soccer. I love the beautiful game, and the hiding Germany gave England on Sunday in the World Cup Round of 16 was deserved. Yes, the disallowed goal was criminal, and who knows what would have happened if... But beauty is long gone from the English game. Then I read this commentary - don’t know where it originated, but it shines a light brighter than video replay technology on the darkness within the human psyche.

“...No goal. Neuer hastily scooped the ball up. Play went on, with Germany regaining their attacking vigor en route to a decisive 4-1 triumph. Lampard, at first ecstatic about what he (and the millions watching live and on TV) had seen, looked sick to his stomach. Commentators worldwide seized on the moment as a miscarriage of justice and a case-in-point argument for implementing video replay at the top level of world soccer.

Meanwhile, the members of West Germany's 1966 runners-up side could have a well-deserved chuckle. After 44 years, the English had finally fleshed out the ghost goal that won them their only World Cup. That year, the two teams were level at 2-2 at the end of regulation. Eleven minutes into extra time, England striker Geoff Hurst took a pass from midfielder Alan Ball, turned, and fired a shot that hit the underside of the crossbar behind keeper Hans Tilkowski.

Sound familiar? The ball bounced down, close to the goal line, and was cleared by a German defender before Swiss referee Gottfried Dienst and Soviet linesman Tofik Bakhramov stopped play to confer. On Bakhramov's evidence, they awarded England a goal. (Asked, on his deathbed, how he had been sure it was a goal, Bakhramov replied: "Stalingrad.")

Ironically, video evidence studied by engineers at England's own Oxford University has since proved that Hurst's shot landed a few inches short of being a true goal. For 44 years, the Three Lions' lone championship amidst a history of heartbreak has rested on one Soviet's lingering World War II resentment and the illusion of a score.

England and sports analysts may cry foul, Lampard may feel hard done-by, and onlookers worldwide may believe themselves defrauded of a well-struck goal. On the balance, though, the Germans were owed one.”

So yes, bring in the technology, but something else is needed, something that heals the embittered soul. There is nothing sweet about revenge.

My life and my work are one.

2010-03-26T13:23:00.000Z

The further I travel through my life, the more mysterious becomes the path, and the happier I am to be where I am anyway. My new Art of Being workshops are never really my creations. I simply feel called by the mystery I serve, to now offer this particular avenue of self-realisation, healing and awakening. I did not decide a year ago that my new workshops would focus on the soul and the mystical, but when I reflect on it, I see that not only in the new ones – Soul-Life, Mystical Tantra, Into the Mystic (the graduates’ workshop) – but in all my Art of Being groups, SOUL is vividly present. Whatever the workshop, it is where I am coming from, and it is the quality of presence that I am hopefully inspiring people to awaken in themselves, because it is our soul-consciousness that brings out and opens all the gifts in our being. In the process we become happy and beautiful beings, good enough for existence! Aloha, alan

BEING AFRAID OF WHAT WE LONG FOR

2009-11-05T12:48:00.000Z

Talking to participants in the Soul-Life workshop
Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, USA, Nov 4 2009

I know what I mean for people who come to my workshops. I know what my vision is and therefore the purpose of the work. It doesn’t matter what the theme is - whether it is death or sex or relationship or childhood regression or soul or being. These are simply different entrances. What I mean for everybody who comes is to create an invitation to open deeply into their being and to open up the areas where they are not open.

Where you are already open I don’t have anything to do but sit here and enjoy openness with you. Some people come to my workshops just for that, to enjoy the openness with me. And by openness I mean being available to one’s feelings and being present and awake with all that is going on and happy to live this here now. PRESENCE! That’s my meaning, my vision. And because of how I experience life, I have a trust that anybody who chooses for whatever apparent reason to come and be in this circle, even if they don’t know it, MEANS the same thing. Often they don’t know it and they come in and my trust is they would not be here, they would not be drawn to be here, if they did not deep down in themselves mean the same that I mean.

Our intentions are deeply the same. Whatever the theme is, I know what I am inviting, and it is always only an invitation. I don’t want to MAKE you go anywhere in yourself, I don’t want to MAKE you open. I trust that if I extend the invitation you are going to pick up on it when you are ready. And like I said yesterday, being ready really means being ALMOST ready. The invitation gives the little nudge that precipitates you into realizing, “Oh my God, I mean this, I want this, I’m willing to open!”

I simply wait for the moment to invite you. I don’t have to try and make it happen. I can’t. I don’t believe in trying to make it happen. There’s a certain moment when suddenly we’re there. And it can happen for anybody at any time. That’s where I come from. And in every workshop I lead, until that moment happens for them, I watch people being afraid of the invitation, being afraid of where they wish to go! And I totally understand that because I remember when I was afraid of what I longed for!

Aloha to you all!

2009-08-06T08:58:00.000+01:00

Hello friends,

It occurs to me that you might enjoy to hear something personal from me, so this is an off-the-cuff letter to give you a little glimpse of what is going on in me and my life these days.

I’m on Maui, having a quietly busy summer retreat at home with my lovely wife, Martina. Ah, did you know that finally, after so many years of living the alone adventure, and much to my own surprise, I surrendered to the adventure of being married? It will be a year in November. I’m loving this dance! I really had come to a deep acceptance of spending the rest of my life enjoying my own company and that of friends and occasional lovers.

If you want to know how much this really means to me, you will have to wait a little longer, until my book is finally in print. It IS on its way, and I’m excited. It is the story of my life and my work. It is my own expression of the art of being!

Many times Osho used to say to us, “You have a song to be sung, you have a dance to be danced!” He longed for us to let existence receive the gift of our unique being, and he was happy when we found our Yes for celebrating the magical mystery that we each are. So what I most wish is that my book will inspire people who are not sure that it is really OK to pour their being into existence. I wish for all beings to become creative rebels against their own conditioning and to discover their very reason for being.

Martina and I? She is 31 years old. I am 65. We met in Prague when I was teaching there. She is Czech, I am English. I learn as much being with her as she learns being with me. I have never felt so completely accepted, and I know she feels the same. It makes our being together very simple; and light. We love each other the way I have always felt lovers should love each other. No possession. No demands. No expectations. For me, “I love you” has always meant, “I celebrate your being.” That is how it is between us. Our friends love us too, and that is a beautiful affirmation.

For the first year we were together I was very conscious of the glances of passers-by and people sitting at nearby tables in restaurants and cafés. I felt as though they were reflecting my own inner critic. I used to say to Martina, “I love being with you, but you know, this is not going anywhere. I’m too old for you and you are too young for me.” All she ever said was, “What’s the problem?” Somewhere along the way I realized that I was no longer busy with the issue. It really wasn’t a problem.

In 3 weeks we’re on the road again for a couple of months: you can see my itinerary on the calendar page of this website. It still amazes me that I choose this crazy commute from one side of the planet to the other. Living on Maui is the gift I give myself for living a life in service. I don’t mean service to the people who come to my workshops though I do love serving them. I mean serving the mystery that requires me to do this work. It is spiritual service. This is what sustains me, what keeps me going. People ask me where I get my energy from. It comes because I am doing what I am supposed to be doing. There’s more to this than I can put into words. It isn’t just that I serve this mystery. Without it there would be no point to existence. And because this is what it is all about for me, there is so much that does not matter at all. Honestly, I think people can only take the soap-operas of their lives seriously if they live oblivious to the mystery.

OK, enough for now. I need to sleep. I send you all my love and aloha.
alan

GECKO TALK 2

2009-03-26T19:21:00.000Z

Soul-to-soul with G…
Alan talking in the Soul-Life workshop, 2008

In the world, around you there will always be people who care and people who don’t care. There probably were people there who cared when you were born, just you didn’t know, or they didn’t know how to show you. It seems there wasn’t anyone there to really show you how to care for G…. And so you left something behind. Maybe you feel it, maybe you’re finding it, touching it now in these minutes here; and maybe not yet. It’s OK either way.

What really matters is for you to find a new way of being in this world. It’s your learning now. It’s clear to me that you did a beautiful and necessary and brave thing in leaving this dead marriage. Your children may or may not understand that. The point is that although you did a brave and beautiful thing in leaving, you also did the same thing you did when you were born. That was when you first abandoned yourself. When you left your marriage you abandoned yourself again.

Your new life, your real life, is totally about discovering and reclaiming and embracing the one who was abandoned. And it’s not something that you do once and it’s done. It’s something that you have to discover over and over and over again from now on. There are patterns, habits of despair, hopelessness, resignation that you’ve learned. They’re like deep ruts that have been worn into the road, and the wheels fall easily into them and run along them. They’re like the old habit of abandonment that you learned to live in. And that’s why learning to live connected with your soul is not a once-and-for-all done thing. You have to keep on learning it, again and again. Every moment is for learning it.

And there’s one very practical feature of your life that I think you really have to pay attention to and look after. It’s good that your children [almost grown up] know that they are welcome to come and visit you whenever they like, that you love them, that they can come and find you whenever they want to be with you. Not that you will for sure be in whenever they knock on the door; it helps if they let you know when they want to come. But what they discover is that you are not showing up at their house every other day.

You don’t tell them. Just in living your life and learning to love yourself again you discover that you are not about making everybody else feel OK, and you’re not trying to make yourself feel OK by making your children feel OK. Your life isn’t any more about trying to make anyone feel OK. It’s about discovering what it means to celebrate your own soul-life.

You allow your children space - including the space to miss you – in which they can discover what you mean to them. As it is they don’t have to discover anything. They just have to take from the plate that is served to them. It’s time for them to discover you, and they can only do that if you are living the mystery of your life rather than endlessly accommodating yourself to their lives - not even to their needs but to the status quo that they live in.

Let them discover you, their mother, as a by-product of you discovering her. And you can also let go of all the other ways that your ordinary everyday life is like this, where you’ve just been accommodating yourself to other people’s programmes. You can let go of these as you discover them. That is part of your journey of reclaiming G….’s soul life. At the centre of all this is your real inspiration and your love in being. It is for you to keep on discovering from now on.
©Alan Lowen 2008

GECKO TALKS!

2009-02-25T17:34:00.000Z

For many years, when I’m leading workshops at home in Hawaii, a cute and mysterious thing happens. When I say something that is really significant, really matters for someone in the circle to hear, or that just feels like the kind of truth that seems to come from beyond me personally, a gecko will twitter. It doesn’t happen all the time, but frequently enough that it affirms Shakespeare’s assertion that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies.

I’m going to begin using this blog in a new way. GECKO TALKS are taken from those conversations I have with the participants in my workshops that have the significance that makes them worth sharing here.

Aloha, alan

GECKO TALK NUMBER ONE

DEPRESSION AND A TEADY BEAR
© Alan Lowen, 2008

“First, you have to get yourself a big teddy bear! Really! And you know, it doesn’t surprise me that you should experience panic after receiving so much affection and connection in the circle. Just the way you said, “Thank you!” In that was your expression of how little you’ve been able to allow yourself that. And I guess that you’re afraid of affection. I also guess that your depressions have to do with your fear of affection. What happened here yesterday evening was that you were able to feel safe and trusting enough that you could allow yourself to be vulnerable. That touched people’s hearts, and they could give you the affection that you long for.

The fear doesn’t go away just like that, so it’s easy to imagine you going home and you’re very vulnerable and open and sensitized. That means that all the doors are more open than usual and so all sorts of colors can come through from the psyche, including of course your fear and panic, because we opened that door.

This is why I say you need a big teddy bear to have in bed with you. You need to make friends with that panic. What you’re given here, I hope, helps you to realize that your fear is only your fear! I know it can feel enormous, and still it makes such a difference to know that your fear is only your fear, and that lying in your bed at night you are actually totally safe.

It is really important for you to feel as much as you can - all the colors! Go to really heart-wrenching movies! Read books that will really touch you. Listen to music that makes you cry. And whenever you feel depression coming on, find whatever you can, including friends, including connections, including knocking on their door and falling into their arms, that helps you to feel! Sometimes you’ll find yourself crying a lot, you may sometimes find yourself laughing more than you ever did as you realize the comedy of it. It matters that you feel! So that when the panic comes, there’s an invitation in it. Instead of, “Oh my God, how do I survive this, how do I get back to reality?” the invitation is to do the really brave thing, which is to say hello to the fear that is inside the panic. This is why it’s good to have a big teddy bear that you can hold while you’re feeling the panic. That’s an important part of what soft toys are for kids, and it’s the little kid in you who needs this. There isn’t always somebody there who can mother or father you. Then having something like a teddy bear that you can hold and cuddle gives you a way to make friends with the panic.

And if you really want to add a bit of comedy, when you buy the teddy bear, christen him ‘Panic’. I mean it!

It’s beautiful to see you laughing and to feel your tears in your laughter. And it can be like this a lot, that you let the tears come and suddenly you’re laughing as well. Or you’re laughing and the tears come too. And you know, going to the movies is really good for this. You can really cry a lot in the movies. Nobody knows, and if they do, they don’t mind. They’re probably crying anyway! I remember when I was 16 and I went abroad for the first time. I went to Finland, and in Helsinki I went to the movies with my friends who I’d gone to visit. I can’t remember what the movie was. It was a tear–jerker. I was astonished. The whole cinema was crying, really out in the open. And there I am, this 16 year-old English boy, holding it together with his stiff upper lip.”

“Did you cry?” (asks a woman).

“Yeh, but much more secretly! It was a few years later I started crying out in the open. So every way you can, feel, feel, feel! And make that your medicine when you feel your depression coming on. And when you can’t find any medicine, then let the fact that you can’t find any medicine and so the depression is right here be so heart-breaking that it makes you cry!

And there are times when all you can do is to sit in the dreary emptiness of it, and it’s very important that when that happens you also are willing to make friends with this dreary emptiness, so that there’s nothing happening in you that you’re not making friends with. Whatever is coming, you know that your commitment is to make friends with it. Yes, sometimes it’s like that. “Oh my God, how can I make friends with THAT?”

With trust, with courage, with commitment; and with the recognition that what you’ve been doing all these years doesn’t work. Surviving doesn’t work. Surrendering is the befriending. “OK, I surrender to you. Come!” and you let yourself feeling whatever you feel in embracing what you don’t want to embrace. It’s feeling it that brings the friendship. Difficult assignment? Yes, but it’s so much better than all the pharmaceuticals! And the latest research is saying they don’t work anyway.

You have to let go of the notion that it should be easy. It doesn’t mean it’s got to be difficult, but in the nature of your healing it sometimes is. “OK, I’m willing to make friends with the difficulty of it also.” And what helps is just to remember how miserable it is to just survive depression. It’s much more inspiring to be a warrior. And in a way you are a heart-and-soul warrior. But you’re a warrior whose fight is to make friends with what he’s fighting. You’re the peaceful warrior, and it’s not always easy. Nor is being depressed. That’s never easy! So learning to feel is simply worthwhile and intelligent even if it’s not always easy. And if you mean it, you learn how to use the world to help you feel; music and movies and teddy bears, friends, lovers, broken hearts – all of it!

“Is feeling fear a feeling?” asks Friedrich.

“Yes.”

“And depression is the opposite of feeling?”

“Yes! De-pression. Pressing down. You know, what you do when you’re depressed is this: this is time, the horizontal plane (spreads hands outwards sideways, and this is intensity, the vertical plane (hands rising like they are holding a tube). Depressed people are not allowed the intensity. They got so scared of it when they were young. So they press the intensity down, and since it can’t go up, it goes out sideways. You press down the intensity and it spreads out across time. Depressed people are just endlessly gloomy. What you can’t feel in intensity over a short time, you feel very dully over a long time. So the healing is allowing yourself to feel more and more. Then it doesn’t have to be spread out across days and nights and weeks and months. It becomes feeling and emotion that you experience over quite short periods of time very strongly. And when you discover that you are only afraid of that intensity, you can allow all your feelings. And one of the primal feelings that you’re going to allow is this being afraid. Allow yourself to feel it more and more! When you don’t allow yourself feeling being afraid, when you press it down and it spreads out across time, it’s the state that we call petrified – turned to stone.”

“That’s my experience. Depression is not allowed because it’s not good for me and for others. I probably relate it to everything that is connected with pain. Actually my impression is that my feelings are quite strong, but becoming visible they do harm to me.”

“That’s what you’ve learned. And the harm happens in the lack of friendship towards your feelings. That’s why learning to be friendly towards them is so important. Then they are no longer potentially harmful. They are part of your joy in living.
© Alan Lowen, 2008

On the eve of a new adventure...

2008-09-12T21:58:00.000+01:00

Hello!
I’m in Switzerland, and tomorrow I begin a new Art of Being Training at the beautiful Waldhaus Zentrum where I’ve presented my major programmes in Europe for about 17 years. For the next 17 months we - the participants, the assistants and I - become a kind of family community whose bonding is our commitment to keep being here, in this circle, all the way through. It is impossible to describe the depth of our journey together, or the psycho-spiritual heights that we touch along the way. Or the extraordinary transformations of being and consciousness that everybody goes through. On the eve of such an adventure I’m always vividly aware of the people who are right now making their way across Europe, and even from the USA, to join the circle. I remember the Trainings I participated in many years ago, and how every single person mattered. What happened to each of us touched all of us, and the happenings were - as they still are - all about awakening, opening and becoming all that we are really here in this life to be.

Reflecting on all of this, I came across something I said to participants in a 2-year course a couple of years ago, at a point midway through the journey when a few of the 40-odd participants were struggling with what they were coming up against in themselves and in the circle. Here is some of what I said: “... you have all dared and trusted to be in this long relationship with each other. The simple fact that you all live in a basic trust that no one in our circle will walk out creates an extraordinary space. It is what makes the deepest experiences accessible.

“This is why I put so much energy into keeping you all mindful of your commitment to keep being here anyway. I do it knowing that sooner or later, if you're lucky!!! you are going to come up against the idea, belief, feeling (however it comes) that "I've had enough. I'm leaving." Why lucky? Because there are very few people I have ever met who do not harbour somewhere, often deep down in their psyche, an adamant refusal to meet some aspect of themselves. Sometimes you get mad at me because you sense, rightly, that I'm not going to save you from whatever it is that you would rather not meet in yourself. Not that I’m going to push you into it. But as I see it coming up in you, I am going to do all I can to help you say hello to it - dark as it may seem to you - because I know that in your hello lies your redemption, your freedom, your happiness, your consciousness, and above all, your potential opening into the deepest treasures of your being, and of BEING itself. It’s only dark and rejected until you befriend it!

“I honour you all that you dare to trust enough to go the whole journey. I love you anyway, because I CAN love you. I can love you because I have been this journey myself. Not that it ever ends! My life is this journey happening! I have had to break, fall, dissolve and rise countless times. I trust life to confront me with whatever in my being still needs my loving, unconditional acceptance. I know that the things and people I don't like are my teachers. I know that my responsibility is to be willing to sense, feel, embrace and so befriend whatever they touch in me. This is so because I have chosen to pursue consciousness and love as the essence of being and the meaning of life. So it must for you and all of us if we wish ever to be whole, healed, fully awake and able to use all our inner resources. Even Albert Einstein, who was not only brilliantly creative but also a man of spiritual awareness and deeply human compassion, was apparently using a mere 15% of his cerebral cortex. OUR POTENTIAL IS UNIMAGINABLE!

“One more very important thing. That there is darkness to be encountered is in our very nature. It brings us gifts only to be found in our darkness. To avoid the dark is to be like the drunk who is searching for his door key under the bright street light. When asked where he lost it he says, "Over there!" pointing to a dark stretch of the road. "Then why are you looking here?" "Because there's more light here."

With love and aloha,
alan

Time flies, soul too! Part 2: Where I'm coming from.

2008-04-11T13:29:00.001+01:00

People tell me I work too much. But you know, for me it is simply that I am serving something that is beyond me.
Some years ago I did try to stop. I smile at the recollection: man proposes, God disposes! But it wasn’t a flippant or casual thing. I was in a deep soul-struggle with my work and my life, and I needed to believe that I had to let go of The Art of Being. For a little while - several months - I did just that. Looking back on it now, I see that I was doing something really necessary. I was getting MYSELF out of the way. When I did so, I found what I was missing. I was missing it just because it had become too tangled up in me. Indeed, I was working too hard.

When I let go, when I wasn’t there any more, I found the space of the inner connection from which I have always loved working. I love it because it is so clearly what I am supposed to be doing. It’s my talent! To teach the art of being is my art of being! And the most beautiful thing about it for me personally is that what I’m teaching doesn’t seem to me to originate in me. I’m just a good channel, in the way that good musicians and composers, actors, playwrights, poets or artists are good channels for what comes through them.

Many years ago my old Master, Osho Rajneesh, told me to get out of the way when I was leading my workshops. Then there is space for real awareness and presence and love and creativity. I feel always immensely creative in the workshops. All the processes and structures and meditations that I’ve designed were created there and then, in situ. And when I’m exploring deeply with an individual or couple I feel inspired by being there. But the magic that happens - and sometimes it does seem so! - is precisely because I’M NOT IN THE WAY. That’s what I mean when I say I’m serving something. Something that is calling to our potential to be conscious and in love, and soul-connected. I don’t think I’m nearly as creative as what I’m serving!

And this was why I had to come back. That caused some chaos and some disappointment for the people who were ready to take over leading my workshops. But I had to. My soul was speaking very clearly. Quitting was like a schoolboy playing hookie! I have always loved what Richard Bach wrote in one of his books. It goes, more or less, “Here is a test to see if your mission in this life is complete. If you’re still alive, it isn’t.” My mission is the art of being, manifesting as The Art of Being®. It’s why I’m here. It’s what I love, It’s what I have to do. I feel privileged and honoured that it is so.

Time flies, soul too! Part 1

2008-03-28T14:37:00.000Z

Hello!

These past weeks I’ve been on a whirlwind workshop tour around Europe. I still am! Yesterday Love and the Shadow, my annual workshop for couples, ended in Switzerland, and now I’m in Prague relaxing before presenting my brand-new Spiral workshop next weekend. The theme is the expansion of sex into soul.

It is with some fascination that I look back over the workshops of this tour and see that soul has been the major theme. I didn’t consciously plan it to be so. The sub-title of Body, Heart & Soul 4, that I led in early February, is “Love: the essence of Tantra”. It is a journey of surrender, in love, to the beloved. And the ultimate beloved is not anyone ‘out there’. I think that each time I have led this workshop over the past years, the opening into the ultimate beloved - the Beloved! - has become more and more vivid and present for all the participants, and for me too of course. It is an opening that happens when we come all the way into connection with our own soul. That is when, in sexual intimacy, we discover the real meaning of Tantra.

So there was the soul theme, present at the very beginning of this tour. Of the six workshops from then until this final one in the Czech Republic next week, the two new ones are both soul-journeys (the other is Soul-Life that I presented in Berlin a couple of weeks ago).

It isn’t just in the workshops, of course, that the soul is so calling me. For 35 years my workshops have mirrored my own journey. It’s why The Art of Being remains enthralling and why I always have the sense, when I begin the workshop, that I’ve never been here before. I love the infinity of being! These past weeks I’ve been noticing that my personal journey is rather like the title of the all-encompassing course I created 20 years ago for people to heal their sexual wounds and re-discover the celebration and the spiritual potential in their male/female nature: yes, BODY, HEART & SOUL! Now, at 64 years of age, (and still feeling young in my being!), I have the sense that I’ve come to the soul of that title. Body and heart are included naturally. We don’t lose our nature, we just expand its boundaries as we deepen. This gives me a sense of profound excitement about the workshop here next week, and too about the new, 17-month Art of Being Training that I begin in Switzerland in September. It is such a blessing to work with soul!

More in a day or two!

Ah, and just one more thing to say right now. If you have been paying attention to this page and the website that it serves, you will no doubt have noticed that the TanZ’n’Tao web page (see previous blog entry) has disappeared. I took it down because the Forum format I was using is too easily spammed, so rather than you getting each other’s book, music, movie, etc recommendations, well, you can guess what was coming your way. If any of you has a good suggestion about the best way to bring the TanZ’n’Tao web page alive, please send me an email: alan@artofbeing.com

With love and aloha, alan

TanZ'n'Tao! YOUR Art of Being page!

2008-02-05T18:29:00.000Z

Aloha! Yes, here comes TanZ’n’Tao!
Tantra says, “And this, and this, and this, and this...”
Zen says, “Not this, nor this, nor this, nor this...”
Tao says, “This is it.”
Which just about covers all and everything!

The new TanZ’n’Tao Bulletin on The Art of Being website is where you will be able to share with others your greatest discoveries of books, music, concerts, happenings, workshops, courses, and so on. There are (see next paragraph!) a few final glitches to be sorted out, so after just a few days online, it’s now off-line and will be back once it’s working properly.

If there are a few glitches at first, be patient! This is a new adventure, so mistakes may happen. And you know how I regard mistakes: they are beautiful opportunities for us to learn! Enjoy, and if you have any suggestions, I’m listening!

I’m on my way to Europe now for a new tour of workshops. Have you looked at HAPPY ANYWAY! - the workshop in Switzerland at Schloss Glarisegg Feb 20-24. It’s new - the first was in Berlin 3 months ago, and it was more than I had even imagined when I created it last year. I was inspired to do so by my Universal Experience workshop; the intimate encounter with one’s own death that many of you have already experienced - still the most popular of my short workshops (3 days). The Universal Experience is a life-transforming journey through encountering the mystery of our own death.
HAPPY ANYWAY! is also an exploration of letting go, in this case related to the extraordinary fact that many people are living their lives quite successfully in terms of what they are doing and achieving, and yet ARE NOT HAPPY. If you want to know more, go to HAPPY ANYWAY!

I have to catch a plane!

With love and aloha, alan

Riding the wave, or not, and being happy anyway!

2008-01-18T02:43:00.000Z

Aloha,
I just published a new podcast called Happy Anyway, recorded in the Happy Anyway workshop in Berlin a couple of months ago. Here’s an excerpt. To hear the whole podcast CLICK HERE.
Love from the High on Life vacation workshop on Maui!
alan

ABOUT WAVE-RIDING!
So it’s a matter of when you’re ready,
When you’re ready to ride the wave…
You have to let yourself just feel it totally.
When you’re ready you will
And until you’re ready you won’t.

And ready doesn’t mean it’s done!
Ready always feels like “No, I’m not ready yet!”
It’s like standing on the 10 metre board and looking down,
And your intention is to jump
And you went up there cos you’re ready.
And you stand on the end of the board and you look down
And you say,
“Shit, from up here 10 metres looks a lot further than it did from down there,
And I’m not ready for this.”
And then I jump,
Or I don’t!.
Either way I’m not ready
And the difference is if I’m ready I jump anyway.

In the end it doesn’t even matter if you jump or not
It matters that whether you jump or not, you’re happy anyway
And by happy anyway I mean that you’re willing to be where you are,
In friendship, in opennness, in consciousness, in love.

The most beautiful New Year message I wish I'd written myself!

2008-01-08T08:25:00.000Z

Aloha friends,
For once, I want to give you not my words, but the words of an old, wise friend I’ve never met. You may well have seen and heard him - he’s a celebrity comedian-actor - and this message that he put out to the world is one we all need to hear. Enjoy! May 2008 be the year you let your soul guide you every step of your way. With love and aloha, alan
PS: And by the way, if you like my words too, you can always find more of them on the listen/read page of my website (www.artofbeing.com).

A Message by George Carlin:
 The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider Freeways , but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less, we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgment, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness.   We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom.
 We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often.   We've learned how to make a living, but not a life. We've added years to life not life to years. We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We conquered outer space but not inner space.. We've done larger things, but not better things.   We've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. We've conquered the atom, but not our prejudice. We write more, but learn less. We plan more, but accomplish less. We've learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less.   These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships. These are the days of two incomes but more divorce, fancier houses, but broken homes.. These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill. It is a time when there is much in the showroom window and nothing in the stockroom. A time when technology can bring this letter to you, and a time when you can choose either to share this insight, or to just hit delete...   Remember; spend some time with your loved ones, because they are not going to be around forever.   Remember, say a kind word to someone who looks up to you in awe, because that little person soon will grow up and leave your side.   Remember, to give a warm hug to the one next to you, because that is the only treasure you can give with your heart and it doesn't cost a cent.   Remember, to say, 'I love you' to your partner and your loved ones, but most of all mean it. A kiss and an embrace will mend hurt when it comes from deep inside of you.   Remember to hold hands and cherish the moment for someday that person will not be there again.   Give time to love, give time to speak! And give time to share the precious thoughts in your mind.   AND ALWAYS REMEMBER:   Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.   If you don't send this to at least 8 people....Who cares?    George Carlin

It is Christmas!

2007-12-24T12:10:00.000Z

Christmas is very special for me. During the five years of my childhood that I spent in a Catholic orphanage, it was the one week of the year that I could revel in a real family life. My mother’s parents had ten children, and they would all be there, squeezed into a little terrace house in north-west London. My grandmother was a true Cockney - born within the sound of Bow-bells - and our Christmas was a Cockney fandango! My grandfather was Jewish. No matter. The celebration wasn’t religious. It was family!

To this day I hold to the tradition. In my Hawaiian home Christmas really happens! As I write this, it’s the early hours of Christmas Eve. The house is quiet, but tomorrow there will be twenty of us sitting down to dinner. This evening, as now, I’ll sit here late into the night, listen to sacred Christmas music and let it connect me with the mystery. I don’t mean just the Christian nativity. I really don’t know who Jesus was, any more than I know who Buddha was, or Lao Tzu, or Moses. I trust that they were all blessed with the light of the spirit just as I trust that Shakespeare, Goethe, Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Wordsworth, Whitman, Michelangelo, Turner and... and... and... were all blessed with the gift of pouring the spirit into existence through their words, music, art.

I am touched by the way the world is touched by Christmas. That’s why it’s so good to sit quietly and open to what is happening. There’s such an outpouring of soul, such an opening to the eternal spirit! A couple of years ago I spent Christmas in Prague, alone. I went to a midnight mass. I’m not a Christian, and I would guess the same was true of a good proportion of the throng in that jam-packed church. I went, as so many must, for the spirit. It calls to us in countless moments and personally I love to give a little time every day to listening. There is nothing more precious in existence. It’s beautiful to gather together with others to celebrate this sacred mystery in a holy place.

I am in love with the mystery. I wish people could give up trying to define it but I accept that they need their myths and movies. For me, Christianity, like all the world’s religions, is just another movie through which we can manage the mystery. It really doesn’t need our management! It offers us so much more than what we do to it. And this is why I love Christmas. All over the world as I sit here writing, people are engaged with CHRISTMAS! And this has been so for thousands of years. Yes, the pagan correlate of Christmas long predates the nativity. I’m not interested in that movie either, by the way. I am simply touched because every winter, at this time, far back into our human heritage, something in us answers, en masse, to the call of the holy spirit in existence. No wonder we are all so engaged. It’s in our blood, our bones, our marrow, our collective unconscious.

And there’s the beauty! In all the tripe and trivia that infest Christmas there is something that we can touch into with all our senses if we choose. Tapping into the collective unconscious we can awaken. I think many people do. It isn’t necessary to go anywhere. The ethos is carrying humanity’s collective soul. Our awakening, that is always personal, transforms our collective unconscious into our transpersonal consciousness. We can be one together. We can be in love.

Have a happy Christmas, and in whatever Christmas movie you choose to be in, listen to us all. If we all listened, there would be peace on Earth!

Aloha, alan

Music, presence and intimacy

2007-11-17T10:06:00.000Z

My final workshop of the year, just two weeks ago, was at Kripalu, lovely center deep in the autumn countryside of the north-eastern USA. The workshop days began with one of my variations of The Art of Being meditation - dynamic happenings that consistently evolve through high-energy expressive movement into profound stillness. I always play music when the meditation ends, and I’ve never thought twice about why I do so. It seems natural.

It was a pleasant surprise, one morning, to find myself out of the blue reflecting on the matter with the group. It connected me with why I have such a deep love for the musicians - people like Carioca, Miten and Deva Premal, Peter Makena, and quite a few others - who are some of my dearest friends. Here, more or less, is what I said to the participants:

“The songs that I play after the meditation I play because the musicians are so intimately connected with what they’re singing. They are the expression of intimacy happening in the realm of music. They are totally in love with what they are bringing into being in that moment. My hope is that even if you’re not aware of this, their music communicates anyway so that you feel drawn by it into the present, carried by it into your own intimate connection with what is happening here now.

“This is the essence of all intimacy, and a way for us to learn it. Our awakened sensitivity allows us to be touched by what is happening and in touch with what is happening. When existence is made beautiful, as it is by such music, it is easy for us to be in love. Awareness and love! As my old Master, Osho Rajneesh used to say, ”these are the two wings on which we fly.“ To open into this is the purpose of the meditation and of the music.”

High on Life 2008 is our final Hawaiian vacation workshop!

2007-11-02T02:10:00.000Z

As a result of recent changes to local law, The Art of Being®, like almost all other non-hotel vacation retreats, can no longer offer its vacation workshops on Maui. THIS IS OUR LAST HAWAIIAN HIGH ON LIFE! HIGH ON LIFE 2008 is our Goodbye to Maui! vacation retreat.

It’s so special to be on Maui in the whale season. If you’ve been waiting for the right time, IT HAS TO BE NOW! To make it as easy as possible for you, we have extended the Early-Bird discount if you register before November 20th. FOR COMPLETE DETAILS, GO TO HIGH ON LIFE 2008

And if you can’t come for the whole 3 weeks, come for the 2-part And if you can’t come for the whole 3 weeks, come for the 2-part Tantra High on life that begins January 20th, Tantra High on Life that begins (and give yourself the 2 “Aloha Maui” days Jan 18-19 to settle in and meet everyone).

We would love you to join us!

OK

2007-10-18T01:41:00.000+01:00

Podcasts are working again. Enjoy! There are more on the way in the coming days. Aloha, alan

Small podcast glitch

2007-10-16T06:46:00.000+01:00

Good morning! Just a quick note to say that the podcasts are off-line while a little important detail is being fixed. They will be back again today or tomorrow.
Aloha, alan

Total Presence

2007-10-12T12:28:00.000+01:00

It’s lunchtime, 5 days into this 12-day intensive workshop. We’re 10 men and 10 women. This is the workshop for which I try to keep an even balance of men and women. This time I didn’t even have to try. Existence provides!

The ambience in the circle is quite magical. I’m thinking, Ah, if people really knew what happens in Total Presence, there would be 10 million here! I recorded my talking this morning before the participants went into their deeply personal small-group explorations - rituals that will go on for the next 3 or 4 days. Listen to the new podcasts on the listen/hear page of the website ("Be good with your anger" and "The angry orgasm for lovers") and perhaps you’ll catch something of the vibe! It’s a beautiful day in the realm of being...here...now. Isn’t it always!

aloha, alan

BURMA

2007-10-06T22:19:00.000+01:00

I want to make a suggestion that's been on my mind for a while. It's so simple, and could be profoundly effective. It is that everyone everywhere who cares adds the single word BURMA to all their email communications and internet actions. If this caught on it would be such a powerful message. The name means so much just on its own, and there is the possibility that it would spread all over the place. Even more enlightened and caring corporate bodies may catch on and use it. Just the single word BURMA appearing in all kinds of unexpected places, for no reason other than to say, "We are aware. We are watching. We care!"

Imagine what this would mean to the people of Burma! Imagine its impact on the sick regime that has tried to obliterate Burma by changing its name to Myanmar! Imagine its impact on the Chinese who are so busy with their Olympic image, and on the Russian and Indian governments that believe they can disregard with impunity the suffering of the Burmese people for the sake of their trade deals.

So I invite you to spread this message all over the place. Translate it into your own language and pass it on! And of course, from now on, just include the word BURMA in your email communications.

It's worth a try!

Aloha, alan

Hello again!

2007-10-03T18:29:00.000+01:00

It’s been a while since my last entry. Since my birthday I’ve crossed the world, from Maui to Europe, travelling and teaching and spending the little free time I’ve had working on the fine details of the new websites (English and German). The German version of this website will be up and running any day now.

There are a few finishing touches to be added to both sites, especially the TanZ’nTao page. This is where you will be able to share your discoveries - books, movies, music, happenings, etc - that you think others would like to know about. The title was originally created for a New Year workshop I led a couple of years ago in Switzerland. it is a composite of Tantra, Zen and Tao that perfectly describes the whole spectrum of possibilities: and hopefully what you want to share will be just that, a lively array of turn-ons to the art of being.
Here’s food for thought:
Zen says, “Not this, nor this, nor this, nor this...”
Tantra says, “And this, and this, and this, and this...”
Tao says, “This is it!”

Have a beautiful day anyway. Aloha!
alan

It's my birthday!

2007-09-11T10:31:00.000+01:00
Yes, 9/11 is my birthday!
And my birthday wish is very simple:
MAY WE ALL BE HAPPY!

With love and aloha, alan

Light AND dark!

2007-09-11T10:25:00.000+01:00
This morning I posted this message to everyone in my 2-year Body, Heart & Soul Training group. It's for all of us! So here it is!

Hi ...... and all,
You are part of the richness of being that is manifesting, it seems, all through the circle. Yes, something is happening that is so essentially what the Training is designed for. People come and participate in BHS1 or 2 or 3 or 4, and find the precious gifts that are wrapped in those processes, of course. But what the Training does is to open the floor and break holes in the walls of your psyche in a transforming and awakening process that goes far beyond the bounds of the 4 workshops. It is happening because you have all dared and trusted to be in this long relationship with each other. The simple fact that you all live in a basic trust that the others in our circle will not walk out creates an extraordinary space. It is what makes the deep accessible.

This is why I put so much energy into keeping you all mindful of your commitment to keep being here anyway. I do it knowing that sooner or later, if you're lucky!!! you are going to come up against the idea, belief, feeling (however it comes) that "I've had enough. I'm leaving." Why lucky? Because there are very few people I have ever met who do not harbour somewhere, often deep down, in their psyche, a wilful refusal to meet some aspect of themselves. What we do if it comes up is to project its "badness" onto someone else. In the Training, I'm probably the best target because you all sense, rightly, that I'm not going to save you from this self-judgement that you attribute to others. Nor am I going to push you into it. But as I see it coming for you, I'm going to do all I can to help you say hello to it - dark as it may seem to you - because I know that in your hello lies your redemption, your freedom, your happiness, your consciousness, and above all, your potential opening into the deepest treasures of your being, and of BEING itself.

I honour you all that you dare to trust enough to go the whole journey. I love you anyway, because I CAN love you. I can love you because I have been this journey myself. Not just have been either. My life is this journey happening! I have had to break, fall, dissolve, rise countless times through my own wilful limits. I trust life to confront me with whatever in my being still needs my loving, unconditional acceptance. I know that the things and people I don't like are my teachers. I know that my responsibility is to be willing to sense, feel, embrace and so befriend whatever they touch in me. This is so because I have chosen to pursue consciousness and love as the essence of being and the meaning of life. So it must for you and all of us if we wish ever to be whole, healed, fully awake and able to use all our inner resources. This is as I see it an endless journey. Even Albert Einstein, who by all accounts was not only brilliantly creative but also a man of spiritual awareness and deeply human compassion, was only using 15% of his cerebral cortex. OUR POTENTIAL IS UNIMAGINABLE!

One more very important thing. That there is darkness to be encountered is in our very nature. To avoid it is to be like the drunk who is searching for his door key under the bright street light. When asked where he lost it he says, "Over there!" pointing to a dark stretch of the road. "Then why are you looking here?" "Because there's more light here."

With love and aloha,
alan

An ecstatic interlude

2007-09-02T17:08:00.000+01:00
Aloha!
I'm at the Omega Institute, immersed in a weekend of heart and soul nourishment with some of my most beloved friends. This isn't a time to sit at a computer. Nature and music... and the sacred. May you, wherever you are, be bathed in this too....
More in a few days, love and blessings, alan

2007-09-01T07:21:00.000+01:00
Hello!

This new website has been many months in the making. Jan now has her own Art of Being website, though it's not operational yet so she's still using the old Art of Being site. I'll also be posting her workshops on my calendar for the next couple of months, though it may take a few days to get the information from Jan because she's travelling in Germany right now, and I'm also on the road, at the Omega Institute in upstate New York.

The German-language website will take a few more days to get together, and even this English-language site has a few glitches to be ironed out, but I didn't want to wait any longer to open the new site.

It's been a formidable task to get everything together. The process of writing new texts and editing old ones these past weeks has been much more than just that - a kind of very personal workshop about all that my work means, to me as much as for all the people who come to participate. Creating this new website has been a regeneration of my own art of being.

Enough for now! Aloha, alan

Alan's first blog

2007-08-31T16:55:00.001+01:00
Welcome to the new Art of Being® website!
I'll open my gossip column in the coming hours.
Aloha, alan