“We always belonged to this mystery, and maybe we can begin to find our way back, even if it means following an almost hidden path.”
I just completed a 60 day course entitled “Harmonizing All with All” conducted by Artie Vipperla, a Harvard trained polymath and Ph.D. psychologist who happens to be a Vietnam buddy of mine. The course consisted of two cycles – the first to present and give people an experience of 30 lessons, and the second cycle with new introductions and guidance for deepening the experience and growing the ability to make these skills and steps a lifelong practice. This course reveals an “almost hidden path on our way back to mystery.”
To be clear upfront, this course is more cosmic than commercial. It’s not a slick class with bells and whistles, but it seems to me that ordinary and traditional approaches for solving personal and world problems are not working too well. Besides, from a personal point of view, I would rather wade in the marginal than the mundane.
In this post, I will summarize the two cycles of lessons, as I understood them, clarify the meaning from each, and provide a brief overview of some compelling ideas that might contribute to self and world healing. Warning: this is not easy reading. Each brief summary is a simple distillation of a lesson that could go much deeper. I understand if this dive is more than you want to take on, but for those who are open to ideas that go beyond the ordinary, you may find real pearls. Hey, I spent 60 days digging for gold and found some mighty nuggets. You may want to spend 30 minutes – or better yet, buy the book and take the course.
Lesson 1: Harmonizing. What if our individual and collective consciousness were in harmony with the Cosmos? What if we awoke each morning and welcomed our breath. Indeed, what if we started each day by welcoming being breathed? There are multiple paths for finding harmony in our lives and in our world: opening to embodying by noticing, feeling, and appreciating; experiencing the differences among doing, allowing, welcoming; seeing breathing as blessing; beginning anew as often as possible each day. The idea is to shift our energies from climbing the ladder in order to dominate others below us to evolving in order to bring people along and create harmony together.
It seems to me that the war in Ukraine highlights the differential effects of dominating vs. harmonizing. Historically, wars have been physical confrontations “won” by superior military capabilities – the best hardware led to “victory.” More recently wars have become intellectual confrontations that pitted economic sanctions and cyber capabilities against each other – the best software “wins.” I believe this current war and future conflicts will be decided by emotional and spiritual factors – What narrative ultimately captures the hearts of people? How does harmonizing appeal more deeply to individual and organizational souls than dominating.
Harmonizing begins with breathing. By welcoming breath, we can not only soothe the wounds that cause us to lash out, but also get into the flow of universal energy and the rhythm of the universe. All of the following lessons can be seen as the “soulware” required to produce peace and harmony in the world.
Lesson 2: You “You-ing” You. There are many ways to to establish more agency in your life. This lesson will help you to tap into ancient spiritual wisdom, to enhance your creativity, and to bring more of yourself to each moment. This practice invites life to enliven you. You will experience what happens when you stop, pause, recover, and reflect. You will get a glimpse into the physics of metaphysics – Einstein’s science of harmonious movement. You will experience soothing, sublime, synchronous, suppleness. If that’s not worth a little time and effort, I’m not sure what is.
Lesson 3: Relating to your baggage. In this lesson, you will explore the sources of your expression. You will dive more deeply into the relationship you have with whatever baggage you are carrying, experience the limits of labels, and begin to notice more precisely how you relate and react to yourself and to others. This lesson will get you started on a journey to tap into your desired energy, to soothe yourself spiritually and be more fully present in each moment. Through a process of patient, gentle, and sensitive synchronicity, you will shift your focus from “fixing” yourself to “freeing” yourself resulting in a vibrancy that shines through any internal or external darkness you may face.
Lesson 4: Living less mechanistically. In this lesson, you will come to a deeper appreciation of what’s going on in your whole body and each of your joints. You will experience a melting down of barriers and a filling up of senses. In addition to noticing more fully how you taste, touch, see, smell, and hear; you will also feel an all-encompassing sense that will move you from mechanistic reductionism to spiritual expansionism. You will feel grounded and boundless at the same time and begin to enhance your creative and healing vibes.
Lesson 5: Finding newness and freshness in each moment. In this lesson, you will begin to appreciate how effortlessly you can clear, cleanse, energize and balance your chakras through a fusion practice that you create on your own. You will experience an expansion of energy levels. You will discover that each moment is timeless. You will shift your attention from noticing all the “that’s” of the world to noticing ‘THIS’ in every new sensation. You will find kindred relationships, appreciate ever-growing fulfillment, and awake like spring does from winter. You may even open up to a process of continuous renewal in, down, and through YOU. THIS is more than an idea, a belief, a faith, an assertion or an intuition – it is the possibility for re-incarnation while still living on earth. In a brief amount of time, you may begin your NEW journey of exponential growth.
Lesson 6: Checking with subtle energy literacy. In this lesson, you will see what’s important to continually remember – to notice, feel, appreciate and enjoy THIS moment with fresh sensibility and tuned in consciousness. You will know when you are noticing when you feel, appreciate and enjoy a tingling sensation that melts your defenses and fills your heart with overflowing vibrancy. You may even appreciate an enlargement of your etheric essence. Yes, this is challenging because you need to open to openness to experience the fullness of the moment. What’s even more challenging is to let go of your scientific, reductionistic conditioning and allow yourself to read energy. My QiGong Master taught me 20 years ago to open and close, to push and pull, to lift chi up and pull chi down. I have experienced the heaviness of a “chi ball” in my hands. I have experienced the warmth of healing energy flowing in, down, and through my body. Now, through this fusion practice, we are being challenged to use our hands to concretize “yes” and “no” as well as “how much” chi energy is flowing through us. If you are like me, you will find it difficult to open to that possibility. Even though I have experienced the sensations and benefits of feeling energy move through my body, I still have trouble believing that I might be capable of sensing more clearly and accurately the “yes’s” and “no’s” in my life. Even though I understand and appreciate that the limits of physical time and space do not apply to energy, I still find this practice challenging. Perhaps the exercises in this lesson will open you up to new possibilities as it did for me.
Lesson 7: Healing underlying trauma. In this lesson, you will address any overbearing symptoms you may have. You will get a glimpse of your ultimate resourcefulness and how unlimited your possibilities might be. Indeed, you will get a better sense of your psychic chops. What Artie introduces here is a revolution in consciousness represented by the shift from over-emphasis on mind/body separation and physical reductionism to empirical immaterialism. Said more simply, here is a way to check out your intuitions. In conjunction with a dear friend of mine, Francesca Giulia, we developed a model to improve intuition through a process we summarized by the acronym NOUR which, in Arabic, means luminous. NOUR stands for Notice, Open, Understand, and Reach Out. You will recognize those themes running through Harmonizing All with All. It’s probably a fair assumption to say we are all looking for ways to be more illuminated and illuminating. For Francesca Giulia and me, the key is to develop informed intuition in which we are able to connect the dots through our various experiences and intellectual pursuits. In this lesson, Artie demonstrates some practical practices that enable us to check how accurate and informed our intuitions really are. In addition, by becoming more literate in subtle energy, we can also check out what is deeply true, what is real love, and what is authentic power. Even further, we can get better at checking out the people we meet, the books we might want to read, and the progress we are making on our own spiritual development. So, check out how well you are checking things out.
Lesson 8: Enhancing your health. In this lesson, you will explore some ways to corroborate science with sensations. What’s critical in this lesson is to decide what’s important for you personally instead of relying on averages or test results. You will find the agency to set standards for yourself and to personalize testing results with your own intuitive hunches. You can decide where you are in relation to optimal health, chronic conditions, inflammation, and nutrition by tapping into higher knowledge. That’s a lot to gain in a short amount of time.
Lesson 9: Extending your psychological understanding through the energy realm. In this lesson, as you notice more precisely your thoughts, feelings, sensations, and behaviors, you will discover your living vibrancy AS YOU instead of IN YOU. You will also realize there are no rights or wrongs to any of these observations. You will deepen your understanding of whatever baggage you are still carrying around WITH YOU. You will appreciate the magic of 7’s as you explore any deeply wounding experiences that occurred in each 7 year segment of your life from teething, to puberty, to majority age, to apprenticeships, to mastery, and to wisdom. You will invite each YOU in a different 7 year segment to speak to YOU now so that you can ground your experience and discover what you are still carrying – maybe needlessly – as you welcome each “old you” into your “new YOU.” This lesson will encourage you to practice what YOU care about, to grow energetically, and to open yourself to higher knowing.
Lesson 10: Connecting. In this lesson, you will get in closer touch with your sources of wisdom, your higher purpose, and your personal values. You will be able to gauge more clearly the impact you are having on creating a culture of healing, awakening, and thriving by asking of, listening to, and checking with higher energies. You will more deeply understand the importance of science vs. belief by staying open to changing conditions and compensating for extraneous variance. You will see harmonizing all with all as a spiritual process that will enable you not only to turn and connect with what’s most important and fulfilling, but also to humbly ask for revelation and ever more discernment. You will experience the intangible and immaterial as well as the physical and intellectual realities of your life. Welcome the shift from a quantum revolution to this quality evolution.
Lesson 11: Inviting suppleness into your energy centers. Just like the anatomy you may have learned in a medical textbook, in this lesson you will learn what anatomy means in energy literacy. You will begin to recover the original fluidity you experienced as a baby and, instead of constantly feeling drained of energy from one source or another, you will start to create energy through effortless movement. You will start by TURNING to your higher purpose which initiates movement to stop or to start any behavior. You will then TUNE into what’s going on inside and outside of YOU. You will increase your awareness of what’s coming in and what’s going out, what’s expanding and what’s contracting, what is opening and what is closing, and how the feminine and masculine are being manifested by YOU. YOU will attend to your attending to heighten awareness; and YOU will become more aware of your awareness which will translate into higher levels of consciousness. In this lesson, you will feel the difference between living in this world as a turtle or as a peacock – the turtle being known for its ability to close, protect, defend, and hunker down; the peacock being known for its ability to open up, flash its colors, and express its beauty and vulnerability. You will experience the benefits of harmonizing all with all in the normal cycle of your day. You may even enter into a state of timelessness and open to eternal moments. It seems to me that all of THIS is a worthwhile purpose for a few minutes of your earth-bound time.
Lesson 12: Enhancing your discerning intelligence. By learning to read more accurately what’s happening in and around you. You will crawl more deeply into the context of revising what has been, altering what will be, and understanding more intrinsically your actions, reactions, and results. The exercises you practice will challenge your coordination and shed light on how well you deal with conflicting thoughts simultaneously. You will struggle with moving your eyes one way and your nose another. Surprisingly, by so doing, you may uncover insights about reconciling opposites more easily. Yes, this lesson will get you out of any box you may be in AND help you avoid boxing altogether. You will be able to check more accurately whether your reading comes from a left or right brain orientation. Reading more discerningly will help you super-cede fear-driven habitual reactions and lead you to more patient, gentle, sensitive and pleasurable experiencing of life. As a result, you will be able to handle all challenges more effortlessly. Whew, all THIS and more in a brief glimpse of what’s possible.
Lesson 13: Energizing and balancing your 4th, 5th and 6th chakras. In the next three lessons, you will explore the possibilities of expanding energies in each Chakra. The 4th Chakra, located at the heart, is all about caring. As Buckminster Fuller would say, 4 represents the simplest fullness of time, space, knowledge and you as well as earth, water, fire, and air. By noticing the energy in the middle of your heart, you will get a deeper sense of how vibrantly you love. The 5th Chakra, located at the solar plexus, is all about growing. When you bring 5 alive, you increase your ability to balance and control. By opening to growth, you not only become more supple, but you also increase your ability to say no. The 6th Chakra, located just below the navel, is all about blooming. By opening the 6th Chakra, you develop your sixth sense or intuition. As you become ever more open in all of these Chakras, you experience an awakening and harmonization. You recycle energy and experience a sense of renewal all through. As part of my morning meditation, I figure 8 through all the Chakras. At the 4th Chakra, I breathe in and say “I care,” I breathe out and say “I welcome being loved.” At the 5th Chakra, I breathe in and say “I grow,” I breathe out and say “I welcome being transformed.” At the 6th Chakra, I breathe in and say “I bloom,” I breathe out and say “I welcome blossoming.” After moving patiently, gently, and slowly through all 12 Chakras, I feel renewed. In just a few minutes, you can too.
Lesson 14: Energizing and balancing your 7th, 8th, and 9th Chakras. In this lesson, you will learn how to dissolve underlying trauma, open spiritual connections, and grow energy. The 7th Chakra, located in the spleen, is all about reaching out and initiating. It’s in the 7th energy center that you initiate cycles of creating, mobilize your resources, and rotate symmetrically. The 8th Chakra, located behind the navel, is all about greeting and accepting. It’s in the 8th energy center that you develop your receptive energy that enables you to accept each cycle of completion. Developing this center helps you open your acceptance of all and everything. The 9th Chakra, located in your pelvic area, is all about joining and communing. It is the Jing of Jing, Chi, Shen where erotic energy is found. Developing this energy center increases your openness to pleasurable exploring which frees all of you to enter fully into connective synchrony – sexual and otherwise. In my morning meditation, as I am figure 8ing through all 12 Chakras, I breathe in and say “reach out; I breathe out and say “welcome warm greetings” at the 7th Chakra. I breathe in and say “greet enthusiastically;” I breathe out and say “welcome loving acceptance” at the 8th Chakra. I breathe in and say “join;” I breathe out and welcome being embraced at the 9th Chakra. In these quick minutes you may begin to recover suppleness. Oh yes.
Lesson 15: Energizing all 12 Chakras. The 10th Chakra, located at the root of the spine, is all about sharing generously. You will tap into your constitutional strength and generative energy. The 11th Chakra, located at the throat, is all about letting your spirit speak expressively. You experience the power of sound and suppleness by manifesting soothing and healing energy. The 12th Chakra, located at the Crown, is all about glowing soulfully. At the crown you experience the full realization of your healing potential in a joyous culmination of all in all. Yes, the crowning experience of energizing all 12 Chakras is radiant enlightenment. At the 10th Chakra, I breathe in and say “share,” I breathe out and say “welcome sharing.” At the 11th Chakra, I breathe in and say “speak out,” I breathe out and say “welcome speaking through me.” At the 12th Chakra, I breathe in and say “glow,” I breathe out and say “welcome enlightenment.”
Lesson 16: Freeing who is calling in YOU. In this lesson, you will find that healing is more than fixing or correcting what issues need to be addressed. You will begin to renew who is uniquely you. You will shift from diagnosing and analyzing to engaging and relating – to you and to others. You will learn five distinct phases of the healing process:
- Listen to hear the story and what the issues may be AND hearing who is speaking.
- Intuit what’s going on beneath the surface by teasing out the experience.
- Bear witness to who is there NOW and who may be wanting to emerge.
- Commune with whomever is speaking and come together as One by synergizing resources.
- Heal who is calling by liberating what may have been stuck in concrete “what’s”, routine ruts, or shrinking guts.
The results? You will shift from “fixing” to “freeing,” from demonizing to harmonizing, from cursing to blessing.
Lesson 17: Intuiting. In previous lessons, you listened carefully to the story – your own and others. In this lesson, you hear more deeply the experiences behind those stories – your own and others. In my experience, responding to feeling and meaning is much more effective than responding to feeling and content. A meaning response captures the experience. A content response summarizes the story. In this lesson, you will acknowledge and accept your old, overused “You’s.” You will recognize who in YOU could use some soothing. You will learn to draw out the experiences that go with your stories – how you navigated the storms, how you hung on to false beliefs and mal-adaptive behaviors that you critically imposed upon yourself or others imposed upon you, and how each moment is still with you. You will discover that when you were subjected to painful, threatening, or distressing experiences, you probably responded in a way that worked for you in the moment and may, in fact, be based on a false belief or perceived mal-adaption. It’s only in retrospect, from the perspective of a judgmental rather than a deeply empathic observer, that the persistent tendencies in the un-soothed YOU result in reactions that needed to be fixed or corrected – which frees you to evolve a YOU that may now be more fitting and livable. You begin to realize, however you were “branded” at particular points of your life, how YOU can now create your own brand. You will hear a poignant story of how Artie became WHO he is today. You will learn how to harmonize all of the YOU’s that YOU made yourself into. Much more than acquiring a technique, you will enter into the blessedness of life by embodying, experiencing, and exuding the joy of YOU in THIS. Most importantly, you will move into who you are as a messenger of peace, love, wisdom, and joy in more powerful ways.
Lesson 18: Witnessing. In lessons 16 and 17, you learned more powerful ways of listening and intuiting. In this lesson, you will realize that you have always been a divine, cosmic messenger capable of freeing yourself and freeing others. By committing to a path that is worth following for all humankind, you will behold the ultimate mysteries of love, justice, and peace. You will come to appreciate the quiet dignity, honor, humility, and grace of being at One with All. You will welcome being welcomed into the wonder of life – witnessing is a concrete expression of multiple sources of inspiration, a quest to provide soothing care to yourself and others, and a way to give and share. In this lesson, you will be touched by Artie’s personal story and life mission. And you will be inspired to witness the wonder of your own story.
Lesson 19: Communing. In lessons 17 and 18, you learned the nuanced ways of intuiting and witnessing. In this lesson, you will read caringly anew who in you has not been witnessed and notice if there is a basis for communing. You will check for any baggage you may be carrying from different phases of your life and let them go. You might hear from who you were: “I never imagined THIS; THIS change may really be possible; it’s ok for me to be carrying this – it’s normal for me.” Ahh, what a relief to feel that who you were is totally accepted and loved by who you are now. Personally, I reached a deeper understanding of what it must feel like to be abandoned and why it would be absolutely “normal” for a person to armor herself as a result of that abandonment. And now – beyond relaxing, beyond any magical formulas, beyond any prescribed mind-set – I can feel the presence of a cosmic connection. I am not only soothed by the acceptance of all of who I was, but I can feel the peace of this communing. Honoring who I was and who I am brings a balance to my being, an uplift to my spirits, and a humility of harmonizing all with all.
Lesson 20: Healing. In this lesson, you will discover the greatest resource you could possibly offer to the world – a harmonized YOU. In lessons 18 and 19, you learned what it meant to witness and commune. You have revisited your story, teased out your experience, witnessed the truth of who you are, communed with old “you’s,” reduced unnecessary baggage you may have been carrying around, and created a new YOU. You will experience the possibilities of a heaIing life for yourself, your family, your community, and for the world. You will see in a new light that we are the cosmos – breathing in cosmic rhythm, moving in harmony, and sensing what is most alive in each moment. You will become more in touch with yourself and begin to appreciate more fully that every moment is new. You may even experience the ecstasy of self-surpassing and hear the calling of a healing life. Your intelligence may morph into wisdom; your care into deeper compassion; your behavior into more generous giving; and your desires into overflowing fulfillment. You may even conclude: “I am a messenger and I am here now fully in this moment.” If that doesn’t stir you to action, what will?
Lesson 21: Going beyond what we have learned as limits. This four part module addresses the potential of sublime relating to health, virtue, forgiveness, and activism. The logical starting point, of course, is with your own health. In this first lesson in the series, you will refine and expand your image of self-care and explore the differences between being responsible (or not) and truly enhancing your health. This lesson challenges you to go beyond conditioned limitations and “last words” in health. The key to experiencing optimal health is to live in the right questions: What’s going on with me – optimally and not? How much of what’s not working so well is due to diet, exercise, genetics, environment, my emotional life, my spiritual life, or the level of meaning and fulfillment in my life? What do I do to keep my health less than optimal? What can I seek that is more than biological? What was it in my life that caused me to shrink physically, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually? How can I begin to view all of what I have been through as fertilizer for my soul? Perhaps the simplest and most soothing place to start is to relate compassionately and sublimely with yourself and to believe that living vibrancy need not be contained. Sound like it’s worth the plunge?
Lesson 22: Impacting virtues. In this lesson, you will explore how the 12 energy centers can impact the virtues of devotion, balance, faithfulness, selflessness, compassion, courtesy, equanimity, and truth. You will discover to what degree you are fulfilling the promise of each energy gifted to you. This lesson will help you harmonize the essentials in sublime expression of your possibilities. Here are some questions that will enable you to check out how well you are optimizing each energy center:
- Turn: How easily can you move away from inertia and build momentum toward your purpose?
- Tune: How aware are you of your awareness?
- Read: How discerning are you in your ability to see infinite context and what is emerging in THIS moment?
- Care: How compassionately do you love and how open are you to being loved into life?
- Grow: How boundless is your transformational aspiration?
- Bloom: How intuitively do you get a sense of all that is?
- Reach: How initiative are you in getting things done?
- Greet: How accepting are you of all that you meet and encounter. How welcoming are you of acceptance?
- Join: How passionately are you embracing opportunities for communing and bonding?
- Share: How generously are you giving in order to fulfill your promise?
- Speak: How well are you bringing new things and ALL into being?
- Glow: How radiantly are you illuminating as you fulfill your destiny? How are you acknowledging your sources of enlightenment?
As you check out each energy center, you can also ask: What’s going on? What’s the cause (physically, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually) of my lack of fulfillment? Why is THIS happening? Who in me is suppressing full expression? As a result, you will venture further down your path of harmonizing, hearing, and healing and you will outgrow this culture of isolation in which we live. Whew!!!
Lesson 23: Forgiving. This lesson is more than learning about letting go, noticing you are over-personalizing or punishing yourself unnecessarily. Yes, you will tune into what’s going on all through you and how you are still triggered by events. It’s all normal and good. But this lesson goes beyond all that to help you reach a state in which you not only more fully heal your wounds but also the wounding. You will realize – Ahaa – Everyone who hurt you hurts. We have all been hurt in one way or another through insults, trivialization, reductions, dismissals, censoring and being forced or expected to “fit in.” In this lesson you will acknowledge who in you was hurt – what was the story, what was the experience, what did you intuit etc. But now you will realize that the ultimate receiving is giving. You will shift from forgiving to helping and healing whatever hurt you. You may say to whatever or whomever wounded you, “I have been touched by you. Let me hear what’s happening with you now.” You will turn toward the woundedness and bring the balm – the ultimate gift you have to give. You will go beyond “bless and release” to “bless the mess and clean it up.” You will forgive whoever hurt you for forgetting who they really are. Blessed be, Amen.
Lesson 24: Activating. In this lesson, you will take on world healing by cultivating the willingness and ability to infuse harmonizing energy into the universe thus addressing the toxic horrors we are facing. You will start by harmonizing yourself – inviting, allowing and welcoming breathing and streaming of energy. You will turn toward a world in stress and pain and bring all energies into play. You will tune into the stuck, numb, fear-driven exploitation and domination that is causing the world’s wounds. You will deeply discern that dark forces have always been timeless partners with light, AND you will further unfold your knowing, flowing, growing, and glowing in ways that will put you in sublime contact with the ultimate sources of healing. You will appreciate anew the profound importance of relating reverently with Nature and with each other. We know that the inner truths of all great disciplines come from dedicated, selfless, secret practices that provide relevant expressions of inspiration. You can now join that pool of prophets. You and your fullness will “bless the mess” big time. We can’t sit back and be above it all. We need to commit to enhancing life and building our capabilities to impact the culture of war plaguing the world. This lesson is one more step on the road to ever more potent and sublime activism.
Lesson 25: Enhancing. In this lesson, you will discover what it means to bring more of you to each moment. You will enhance whatever self-development work you are engaged in by concentrating less on doing a practice, or behavior, or resolution and more on welcoming fresh insights and ideas. Harmonizing is more about “who” than “do.” You will learn to relate instead of label in any moment by dropping preconceptions, opening to whatever reality confronts you, attending fully to who and what is in front of you, seeing your seeing, and feeling your feeling. The result of fully relating will be mutual empowerment and deep love. Your knowing, feeling, acting and desiring will result in flowing, growing, and glowing. As you experience this transformation, you will notice living vibrancy expanding beyond whatever constraints have limited you. As you become more discerning, you will notice how each moment is an opportunity for timeless co-creating. You will begin to see yourself as a cosmic, uniquely valuable messenger. When you are fully there, you will experience nothing less than what is good and true and beautiful. You will not only notice more precisely what is going on in the flow of each moment, you will also grow more powerful in each moment. By harmonizing sublimely in relation to THIS, you will paradoxically find practical applications. You won’t need to force “solutions.” YOU and THIS will become notes in a chord co-creating beautiful, harmonious music. The world could benefit from such sublime harmony at this precipitous time in history.
Lesson 26: Digging deep. In this lesson, you will discover the moments you lived that still live on. You will find that you can’t talk your way out of something that you felt your way into. You will get a deeper look into what you are still carrying by not being nurtured, loved or affirmed at one or multiple stages of your life. This lesson streamlines and revolutionarizes self-development to address long-embedded ways carried from the earliest times of your life. You may have to put on your warrior-sage hat and summon up the guts to dig deeply. You will find that working on “it” or “what” may approximate but doesn’t necessarily heal. You are not an “it.” YOU are YOU. In this lesson, you will witness transformational processing. You will live in the questions:
- How do I feed me?
- How do I nourish my body, mind, heart, and soul?
- How am I substituting for the nourishment I truly desire but have not or am not getting?
You will learn that, even at your performative and diligent best, you can’t be fully you. These substitutes are simply artifacts of a culture that reinforces “fixing it” and “getting things done” vs becoming whole ourselves and healing others. You will crawl into what it felt like to be fixed, changed, or corrected. YOU will relate to YOU and discover who in YOU is nourishing YOU. You will learn to radiate your beaming, caring, glowing tenderness into YOU. You may explore how “fitting in” may have worked for you when you were deprived of nourishment, but is not “fulfilling YOU now.” Most importantly, YOU will experience what it feels like to nourish YOU.
Lesson 27: Helping. In this lesson, you will witness a trained coach working through how best to help a client. Her client is a young man with a history of abuse who can’t feel emotions or sensations. He is angry because he has lost his youth. She asks him to just breathe and be quiet. She suggests some ways for self-soothing and asks him to tell his younger, abused self what he needs to hear. The therapist is terrified because she wants to help but is worried she is not qualified as a certified trauma clinician. Artie masterly coaches the therapist through her dilemma by handing her questions back to her. The lesson here is to not hide beyond some certification or to pretend you are something you are not. The goal is simply to accompany this longing soul on his journey and to share whatever useful knowledge you can. In helping situations like the one presented here – even though in all likelihood, less severe – you can just be present for the other person and invite the “helpee” in this case to lead. You might ask the person, “What is ready to be healed now.” For me, helping can be for better or for worse. The core conditions for helping are genuineness, positive regard, empathy, and specificity. Helping is being fully present in the moment for the person to process whatever trauma or life experience he or she has faced or is facing. Staying empty and hearing deeply is far more valuable than clinically assessing or “treating” the person. Attending, listening, hearing, noticing, and responding are all helpful at any point in a person’s life. Welcoming the other person’s lead and accompanying them on their path is what helping is all about. This lesson will help you be a better helper.
Lesson 28: Dealing with fear. In this lesson, you will witness another trained coach working though how to deal with her fears of rejection. Heidi shares how a part of her resists reaching out because rejection would be too painful. Ring a bell? Offering your love and not having it accepted or embraced can be devastating. When you reach out in hope of some form of reciprocity, you can shrivel up and close down when that offer is dismissed or pushed away by a verbal or non-verbal “I don’t need you” or worse “I don’t want you.” In her case, Heidi recalls never feeling good enough even when was a little child. Now, she denies her own loving capabilities to avoid risking another dismissal. As we are all prone to do, she labeled her condition “fear of rejection.” Artie raised the point that any diagnosis is a noun (for example, OCD or ADHD) – an abstraction that objectifies and distances thus closing you off and removing you from relating. A diagnosis means some “thing” needs to be “fixed.” Artie lovingly asks her:
“Who in you is scared?” Who in you finds this hard?” “Who in you has a history of being rejected or pushed aside?” In response to her recollections about her Mom, Artie gently asks: “How open was your mother to receiving all you have to offer?” How are you still closing down in anticipation of another possible dismissal?” Even in this brief exchange, Heidi visibly brightened and lightened. She could see how, little by little, she could begin to shine the love she has for her spouse, her friends, and her dog on herself. Couldn’t we all benefit from loving ourselves and others less reluctantly and more fully? Very enlightening and empowering.
Lesson 29: Opening to Opening. In this lesson, you are invited to meditate on your boundlessness and to experience how reality opens as you harmonize. As Wittgenstein said, words can’t capture the ephemeral. Such is the case with this lesson. Artie introduces you to the experience of pervasive vibrancy in timeless moments. See what I mean? There’s no way I can capture the essence of this lesson with words, and I don’t want to reduce this experience by distilling it to something that is intellectually digestible. This lesson draws on Goethe, Darwin, Freud, Jung, Steiner, and Einstein. How can a simple paragraph begin to distill the power of all that genius. If you decide to experience this lesson, you will see how life can’t be understood by the naming of parts, but only as an unfolding of life: expanding, contracting, spiraling. You will learn from Steiner that each manifestation contains the whole – we are the cosmos and she is alive. You will learn from Einstein that every quantum point radiates to every point in the universe and that we are all part of a cosmic spirituality. You will see the possibility of opening to opening.
In these troubled days, if you are wondering how any of us can have any impact at all – much less change the world – you will be invited to return to the basics: breathe; bless and cherish your breathing; welcome moving in harmony with the universe; welcome vibrations in, down and through; notice the vibrancy and experience being in the midst of a cosmic energy that radiates inward from a boundless and infinite sphere. Intellectually, you may make the shift from seeing “things” derived from dissection to experiencing the “experience of THIS,” but I can’t distill this one down into some memorable concepts. You’ll have to experience the experience yourself.
Lesson 30: Welcoming. In this lesson, you will see how cosmic evolving can turn into a personal practice. You may discover how the mystical understanding of ancient, sacred texts can be applied in the present ever newly. You will move beyond making these lessons just a head trip or set of beliefs; you will learn how to make THIS a reality. This lesson provides the impetus for making the shift from doing to welcoming; from allowing to opening; indeed, from ordinary functioning to cosmic evolving. Instead of seeing the results of your “doing,” you will begin to appreciate how a welcoming receptivity creates the affect of Ahhh. You will reflect on the consummate communing in the moment after birth when you are held so preciously. You may even welcome yourself into welcoming. You will experience the living vibrancy that comes from being fully expansive, inclusive, and pervasive. You will come home to who you are. You will enter into all of THIS by turning purposefully, tuning consciously, and reading discerningly. This continuous unfolding and cosmic communing with ultimate sources will acquaint all of YOU with all of THIS by expressing your creative potential and radiant love. Toward the end of this lesson, Artie genuinely and generously riffs on each of the 12 steps and implores us to get in touch with our capacity for transformation. He ends these 30 lessons of helping us enhance and advance our practice of realization by blessing the beginning of new possibilities and promise.
So, let me share my experience of taking this course. The 60 lessons deepened my perspective and broadened the possibilities for being helpful. I strengthened my ability to apply the 12 steps in my life. The first cycle gave me a solid introduction to each of the ideas, and the second cycle definitely deepened my understanding. I experienced the benefits of listening, hearing, intuiting, witnessing, communing and healing. The questions re: “Who in you” led me to meaningful exploration of my past and present. I believe I have grown my essence, energized my chakras, and brightened my beam as a result of this 60 day deep-dive. I hope you will also experience some benefits of splashing around in the shallower and safer waters in this post.
I may be piling on by continuing this discourse, but I have a few reflections to share after completing the course. First, the traditions underlying “ordinary” living have not led to a peaceful present or a particularly hopeful future. Many ideas are wrong and many beliefs are unfounded. It seems to me we need to challenge ideas, beliefs, and traditions that limit our possibilities and open up to new ways of thinking, relating, and evolving. Those ways may seem marginal, but they may also lead to the mysterious.
Second, the common prescriptions for faith, hope and love have been convoluted. For me (and Gurdjieff), faith in consciousness is freedom; love of consciousness engenders a more loving world; and placing your hope in consciousness is strength. Consciousness and conscientiousness are the keys. The 60 lessons definitely helped me to become more conscious and conscientious.
Finally, in closing, let me return to the opening: “We always belonged to this mystery, and maybe we can begin to find our way back, even if it means following an almost hidden path.”
Also published on Medium.
Wow! Just wow! Thank you Ricky
Rick and I were yanked during early adulthood from seeming normality and trained then sent where we would have taken a bullet for each other. And then in our growing horror, outrage, and shame at the disgusting travesty of the war we had been thrown into we became in our distinct ways even more fiercely devoted to spending lives as forces for good. And ten years ago Rick put his heart and soul into supporting my efforts in this vein. So here you read a culmination: his unstinting review of the course distilled from my lifework. His words brim with insight, wisdom, and experienced wordsmithing. But in case you missed, sample again and notice whether you get hits of blood and guts intensity of loving solidarity and tireless support. How blessed to have a soul brother of such stature and magnificent gifts.
Eternal loving blessings Rick, to you and this community you have created, nurtured, and serve so thoughtfully and caringly.