Advanced RP Teacher Mentoring Program

Level II ∼ Catalyze deep healing and transformation

Fridays 10:30 am – 12:30 pm Pacific (zoom room open 10:10 am)
Jan 27, Feb 10, 24, Mar 10, 24, April 14, 21, May 5, 12, June 2, 16 (tentative)

Living a Life of Inquiry

Focus for January 27th:

Spiritual Maturity and the Relational Field

Spiritual maturity can be seen as the realization of the fundamental unity of the relational field.

Spiritual realization is a process of laying bare this underlying reality.
It is a process of dissolving the subjective limitations and distortions of our essential being.

The experience of existing as a human being, of being alive to ourselves and the world around us,
of responding to life with insight, emotion, and sensation, increases as we release our subjective organization.

1. Meditate in ways that support you and your life. Attune to the relational field as you’re doing dishes, having a cup of tea, or taking a walk. Attune with your study group.

2. Read Chapter One to explore Judith’s insights about living as a healing presence in this world. Focus on quotes that inspire, challenge, or confuse you. Let a quote move through you as you fold laundry, take a shower, or doodle. (Less can be more!)

3.. Meet as a study group to share what’s most alive for you. Your study group is there to support you as a human being, in being alive to yourself and responsive to the world around you.

Guidance for Friday January 27th: As a group, choose one concept to explore with our whole cohort in 10-20 minutes. Look at the simplicity of the sample somatic inquiries below as inspiration.

Organize according to each person’s interests. One possibility:

A leads 2-3 minute meditation, B guides 3-5 minute somatic inquiry, C facilitates a few minutes of dialogue with the whole cohort, D offers 2-3 minutes of closing insights.

Somatic inquiries into the tensions and contraction patterns in your body allow us to sense into the entanglements of our energies, emotions, physical sensations, thoughts or beliefs, perceptions. We can even sense into the purpose of these organizational patterns and how they weave our lives.

Engaging in somatic inquiries can help us recognize and release holding patterns and awaken into a more joyous, creative, senuous, and liberated life.

 

 

Access each session’s confidential (for your eyes and ears only) recordings.

“Why a sangha?

“Alone we are vulnerable, but with brothers and sisters to work with, we can support each other. We cannot go to the ocean as a drop of water—we would evaporate before reaching our destination. But if we become a river, if we go as a Sangha, we are sure to arrive at the ocean…

“You need a sangha; you need a brother or sister, or friend to remind you what you already know. The Dharma is in you, but it needs to be watered in order to manifest and become a reality.

“A Sangha is a community of resistance, resisting the speed, violence, and unwholesome ways of living that are prevalent in our society.

“I’ve been a monk for 65 years, and what I have found is that there is no religion, no philosophy, no ideology higher than brotherhood and sisterhood. Not even Buddhism.

“In society, much of our suffering comes from feeling disconnected from one another. Being with the Sangha can heal these feelings of isolation and separation. We practice together, share a room together, eat side by side and clean pots together. Just by participating with other practitioners in the daily activities we can experience a tangible feeling of love and acceptance.

“A sangha is a garden, full of many varieties of trees and flowers. When we can look at ourselves and at others as beautiful, unique flowers and trees we can truly grow to understand and love one another. One flower may bloom early in the spring and another flower may bloom in late summer. One tree may bear many fruits and another tree may offer cool shade. No one plant is greater, or lesser, or the same as any other plant in the garden. Each member of the sangha also has unique gifts to offer to the community.

“We each have areas that need attention as well. When we can appreciate each member’s contribution and see our weaknesses as potential for growth we can learn to live together harmoniously. Our practice is to see that we are a flower or a tree, and we are the whole garden as well, all interconnected.

“Supported by the Sangha Body
My practice flows easier,
Allowing me to swiftly realize
My great determination to love and understand all beings.”

– Thich Nhat Hanh

Important learning happens when spiritual friends form a sangha, committed to “nourishing our practice, deepening our roots, and growing our freedom.” Speaking openly with others weekly allows each of you to gain trust and heal wounds of separation.. Sharing or rotating leadership allows each of you to gain both leadership and teaching experience in facilitating a spiritual group.

  • Opening meditation
  • Short check-in
  • Somatic inquiry into one or more key concepts from the assigned reading
  • Share your insights as to the relevance in your own life.
  • Prepare to facilitate a 20-minute somatic inquiry for our whole cohort Friday January 24th.

Just to let you know: Talia in Spain, Tatiana and Louise in the UK, Fiona in Switzerland, Karen in Michigan, Melea in Kansas, Michelle in Utah, and Cynthia in California. To give you an example of the time differences:

Talia 5 pm
Fiona 4 pm
Tatiana 4 pm
Louise 4 pm
Karen 11 am
Melea 10 am
Michelle 9 am
Cynthia 8 am

Experience the healing process emerging spontaneously out of the field of fundamental consciousness
Develop an unshakeable confidence as a therapeutic presence
and in your capacity to catalyze deep healing and transformation.

Be deeply transformed by the mystery and grace of the Realization Process
Be conscious – be consciousness

Apply nondual realization to personal maturity, psychological healing,
and the release of trauma-based patterns from the body.

Be the RP practitioner, the RP facilitator, the RP teacher – guiding meditations, leading somatic inquiries,
facilitating dialogues, giving short talks, and answering questions in a safe, life-affirming group setting.
Be the student, the client, the process observer, the supervisor, the companion, the ally, the person bearing witness.

Embody your spirituality. Embody nonduality. Embody fundamental consciousness.
Self-organize our time together. I trust you – and I will support you.
Drawing again and again on the gifts of inhabiting your own body, you: can:

Recover sources of strength and enjoyment:
Develop self-love
Restore resilience
Experience self-ownership
Regain agency
Feel grounded, rooted, and settled
Feel safe, open and receptive
Feel appreciation and compassion for yourself and others

Our work together may focus on deep healing from core wounds,
support through challenging times in your current life, and/or
liberation from cultural conditioning related to race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality, and religion.

Preparation Prior to Week 1

… The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.

Whatever you can do, or dream, you can begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.

Living authenticity – experienced as clear, open space permeating our whole body, heart, and mind

Teaching authentically – experienced as a subtle vibratory resonant connection that can reverberate within and between us

  • Speak in a way that allows your insights to penetrate into the hearts of your listeners – so that each of us can attune to you through the resonant connection, and also so that each of us learns something significant about your experiences and your perspective.
  • “Meet the moment,” answer questions – appreciating, normalizing, directing others inward to their own wisdom, offering a direction or suggestion, clarifying, advising, guiding …

Contact matters. From that contact, there’s an experience of resonant connection – you feel that in your own body, and you feel that in the field with others, and then you know we’re in relationship. There’s contact, and then a resonant connection comes in, experienced as “the warm, dynamic response of our heart to the world around us.”

“Love is part of our essential nature, somehow hidden or enfolded within us. Our desire and our efforts to love uncover our mysterious wound of separation from this authentic core of life. For this reason, our relationships can help us realize the spiritual essence of ourselves….

“Although it cannot be detected by the ordinary range of our senses, the subtle essence of our being does become tangible as we attune to it. It becomes an actual experience, a quality of being that is felt in our whole body and that can then be discerned in all of life. As we realize this essence of ourselves, our senses themselves become more subtle and begin to reveal the radiance, fluidity, and a spacious stillness that suffuses the material world. The most radical transformation that occurs with this subtle attunement is that instead of experiencing ourselves as separate from our environment, we find that our own being is continuous with everything around us.”

Judith Blackstone, The Intimate Life

Ananda asked the Buddha, “Is it true, Lord, that noble friends are half of the holy life?”
The Buddha responded, “No, Ananda, noble friends are the whole of the holy life.”

  1. “To love life, and in particular, to love other human beings, is one of the central ideas of every spiritual tradition. It is also one of life’s greatest challenges.”
  2. “The question addressed in this book is: how we can deepen this capacity for contact, how we can become more adept at love.”
  3. “Our relationships can become spiritual pathways; they can help us realize the spiritual essence of ourselves.”
  4. “The realization of this unified spiritual dimension of life transforms all of our relationships.”
  5. “Spiritual realization is not a matter of constructing something new; it is always a clearing away, a letting go of the holding patterns and beliefs that obscure our true nature.”
  6. “The application of fundamental consciousness to psychological and physical healing represents the cutting edge of the human growth movement.”
  7. “One of the main barriers to contact in intimate relationships is the fear that we will become submerged in another person.”
  8. “Spiritual oneness is not a loss of self in the other, not the merging of identities that is so often a problem for people in relationships. It is the unity and continuity of two individual people.”
  9. “In the dimension of our spiritual essence, we grow simultaneously toward wholeness within our own body and oneness with other people.”
  10. “The subtle core of our body is both our deepest connection with ourselves and the basis of our oneness with other people.:
  11. “The Realization Process focuses directly both on awakening spiritual essence in our whole body and on relating with other people while remaining in this essence.”
  12. “This book views the true meaning of spiritual detachment as the ability to allow life to flow without manipulation or defense. This means that we need to be fully open and available in our reception and response to life.”
  13. “Since our defensive strategies and rigidities were formed in relationship to other people, relationships are the ideal context for releasing those defenses.”
  14. “In the dimension of fundamental consciousness, intimate partners begin to know each other, to experience each other, through the whole internal depth of their being.”
  15. “This contact – the ability to feel genuine love for another person, to experience the mental excitement of two minds meeting and the pleasure of unguarded physical sensation – is among the greatest rewards of spiritual awakening.”

 

Be unshakeable … Illuminate life with each breath

Be inspirational … Tend to what’s most alive in each moment

Be transformational … Allow your deepest experience of reality to guide and inspire you

Meeting ID: 831 3162 1105
Passcode: presence