The Earth-Heart Institute of Vision and Healing and The Total Human™
Vision Quests, Spiritual Retreats, Women's Retreats, Kundalini Yoga & Meditation, Creativity Retreats, Personal Intensives
July 2006
 Welcome to the quarterly newsletter collaboration between the Earth-Heart Institute of Vision and Healing and The Total Human™. Collectively, we offer Vision Quests, Spiritual Retreats, Women's Retreats, Kundalini Yoga and Meditation, Creativity Retreats, Personal Intensives, Healing, and Spiritual Counseling. This newsletter offers thoughts on a chosen topic with simple awareness exercises, meditations, or yogic tips that relate to the topic. We also update you on our class schedules,recommend books or products that relate to living a healthy and conscious life, and offer some web links to check out that support a greater and more unified Vision of the world, the expansion of the human spirit, and the protection of the environment. If you are not interested in receiving these newsletters once each season, you can click on the “unsubscribe” button at the bottom of the page.
Click on our names (above) to visit our complete websites.
With all your science can you tell how it is, and whence it is,
that light comes into the soul?
--Thoreau--
Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.
--Leonard Cohen—
PERSPECTIVES
What an idea: Light gets in through the cracks, gets in due to what we perceive as our imperfections. Our imperfections are in fact a window of opportunity when it comes to increasing our experience of the Light within us. The cracks in us are what save us from a life of mediocrity, of maintaining the status quo. They are what enable our Light to penetrate more deeply into our experience of being.
It’s all part of a duality, the play of opposites. We don’t know the light unless we have the dark. We don’t experience the compassion of our fellow human beings without the difficult occasions where great compassion and a helping hand are needed. We don’t achieve growth without the occasions that require us to expand our perspective to include something new and unfamiliar.
You can also look at this idea from the opposite direction because “as without, so within”. The cracks enable the Light that is already within us, the Light from our soul, to emerge from behind the carefully constructed mask we live behind, the mask we create to give the impression of right behavior, right appearance, the correct façade.
The cracks in our façade allow us our moments of something real, interrupting our constructed patterns and way of being. They throw us off for a moment, so that something authentic can be experienced through the path of the crack itself. It’s not that the crack, the imperfection, is our Reality. It’s the break in the façade that allows Reality a place to enter our lives.
In the Vision Quest, we explain that Personal Vision doesn’t only include what we perceive as our talents and gifts, but also includes our blocks, our personal issues, and our buttons that get pushed. Because if we really pay attention, those blocks, and issues, and pushed-buttons give us a big clue into our unique path of our Grand Vision, and our very distinct voice in living that Vision. It’s the “cracks” where the Light gets in (and out).
We hear a lot about the duality of this world, and about transcending the duality to achieve inner peace. But transcending the duality isn’t about rejecting the duality because what we resist persists. It’s about fully embracing both sides of the experience, fully embracing “the cracks” as well as the Light that enters through them or is released from them. In doing so, we realize that they are both facets of the same thing, two notes that together create the greater harmonic. In this way, we create a Total experience that’s greater than the sum of its dual parts. We can then begin to experience the Oneness.
Allyson
HELPFUL PRACTICES
EXERCISE:
This is another “perception shift” exercise. (We’re big on those). Try to catch yourself in a moment when you’re feeling overwhelmed, when you’re feeling like a victim in your experience, when you’re in fear of the future, in fear of what you might lose, and you’re having trouble feeling or seeing any other reality than that. For example, during a moment of looking at the bills piled on the table, not knowing how you’re going to pay them this month, fearing that you’re going to lose your house if you can’t pay your mortgage. A lot of people seem to be experiencing that this year.
Catch yourself; acknowledge your feelings, your fear, as real at the moment (“This is how I’m feeling”). Then stop and look around you, and find the beauty surrounding you. Find something amazing, find something breathtaking, find something you love, look at something you feel grateful for – these things are all around you -- and let that feeling in. Walk outside, look at the birds at the feeder outside your window, the flowers in the garden, your child, your spouse, the wonderful place you live in right now (no matter what happens next month), you’re here now!
It’s not about denying that you feel fear or sadness or overwhelm. It’s about acknowledging it, and then realizing it can actually assist you in learning to appreciate what you have while you have it if you just shift your perspective and remember to really see and feel and appreciate the beauty and great gifts around you while they’re there. Enjoy what you have right now no matter what temporary obstacles are presenting themselves!! How many times do people regret not appreciating something while it was in their life, right in front of them?...
COURSE UPDATES
Click on the underlined links below to read about a particular class, or go to Earth-Heart Programs or The Total Human™ Programs to read about other classes not listed here, and Student Comments to read comments from past participants.
For anyone in the local ( Los Angeles) area, Allyson is running a 1-afternoon Mask-Making Workshop in Topanga, Saturday July 15 th, 10am to 2pm-ish. $40 ($45 after July 1 st). PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED. Click on the class name to go to the page where you can sign up. This workshop is part of Topanga’s Jupiter Fire Performing and Media Arts Festival.
If you missed signing up for the July Vision Quest in the NJ Pine Barrens (July 1-8), you can still sign up for the last Quest of 2006 in Boulder Creek, CA (Sept 17-24), and Quest among the giant redwoods… (If you are in the NJ area, you still have a couple of days to sign up, but only if you’ve Quested before. There’s not enough pre-Quest internal prep time for someone doing their first Quest).
Call us ASAP if you would like to try and make it last minute for the Seven Levels of Quest program beginning on July 2 nd, running simultaneously with the NJ Vision Quest (the only time it’s being offered on the east coast over the next few years!) And here are still a few spaces available in the Quest Protector course (July 11-20), also in the NJ Pine Barrens.
NEW COURSE !! Malcolm’s Advanced Level Intensive will be running simultaneously with the September Vision Quest in Boulder Creek, CA. This is open to anyone who has completed a Personal or Couple’s Intensive. Call or email for more information.
Allyson’s Kundalini Yoga and Gong Meditation workshops at Yoga Desa in Topanga, CA will start back up in August or Sept after a brief summer break while traveling.
These are the last Personal Intensives available through the end of the year . Only 2 Intensives are scheduled per week. Dates fill up very quickly.
Tues Sept 5 – Sun Sept 10 (only one spot left)
Sun Oct 8 – Fri Oct 13
WORLDWIDE “WEB OF LIFE”
We want to support organizations out there who are working for the uplifting of humanity. If you know of websites that are doing really good work in the world, email them to us for possible inclusion in a future newsletter. We’d like to help get the word out.
http://www.ucsusa.org/
The Union of Concerned Scientists was founded in 1969 by faculty members and students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who were concerned about the misuse of science and technology in society. Their core groups of scientists and engineers collaborate with colleagues across the country to conduct technical studies on renewable energy options, the impacts of global warming, the risks of genetically engineered crops, and other related topics. They share the results of their research with policymakers, the news media, and the public.
http://www.newdream.org/consumer/marketplace.php
The Center for a New American Dream's Conscious Consumer Marketplace makes it easier for you to buy environmentally and socially responsible versions of everyday items-from coffee to paper to energy for your home.
http://us.video.aol.com/video.index.adp?mode=2&pmmsid=1645315
Not necessarily “for the benefit of humanity,” but this is pretty funny, and laughter is a good thing.
Many blessings to you all,
Allyson and Malcolm |
