SAFE WAYS TO SHARE

How to run harmonious A Course in Miracles study groups and classes.

Let’s start with the obvious: A spirit of cooperation is essential because “Salvation is a collaborative venture.” (T-4.VI.8:2)  Therefore, begin by invoking the Holy Spirit and placing the ACIM class or study group in His Hands. “The Holy Spirit speaks with unmistakable clarity and overwhelming appeal.” (ACIM Preface)

The teacher or facilitator of the group* can make a statement such as, “Holy Spirit, we place ourselves in Your Hands, please guide us.” Another suggestion is that the group can hold hands in a circle and recite a prayer from the Course, for example:

I am not alone, and I would not intrude the past
upon my Guest.
I have invited Him, and He is here.
I need do nothing except not to interfere.

This intention opens the way for loving communication.  The “Guest” refers to the Holy Spirit, Who invites us into the Eternal Present in which we encounter our True Identity.  It is the ego who keeps bouncing between past and future in order to avoid the One Self we really are. In order for us to feel safe, and maintain a beautiful spirit of cooperation, it’s best to share experience rather than state opinions, lecture or pontificate. An ACIM class or study group is not a debating platform. Those of us who choose to practice A Course in Miracles resonate with its teachings. Sincere questions are welcome–argumentative ones are not. Nor is it a place to preach to the converted–quoting the Course at each other is not necessary or loving; usually it is just the ego showing off and taking charge. And please, do not give advice unless it is asked for. Rather than being “truly helpful,” this ego-driven urge to “help” is what I call “horribly helpful” and is rarely welcomed.

Using “I-talk” is the best way to “own our stuff.” Some of you are well-acquainted with “I-talk” and others are not. I-talk is using the first person (me, I, myself) when communicating. Paradoxically, rather than being narcissistic, “keeping it on me” undoes me and results in being more loving and attuned to others.

When responding to another, you can ask, “Do you just need us to listen? Or would you also like feedback?”

Each of you can request specific feedback by letting people know, “Right now I only need sympathy–no opinions.” Or, “Please share similar stories with me, but don’t comment on mine,” etc.  Or you can set up a “No Cross Talk” rule which means that people share and no one else comments on what was said. (This is not ideal in a class or study group, but can be a good experiment just to see what happens and how it feels to practice no cross talk. Out of this experiment may grow a customized approach to your group.)

See if you can express yourself in less words. There is a Buddhist saying, before you speak ask yourself, “Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind?” Remember, less is more.  This is not about repression–far from it.  If something is charged up for you and you can observe that you are triggered with the Holy Spirit, than rather than spewing your projections (like projectile vomiting) onto others, or repressing them (like swallowing your own vomit) you can learn these practical ways of sharing in a way that does no harm, to others and therefore, yourself.

In general, it’s good for all of us to share our experience without pushing it on anyone else. Ways to do this include, “What’s coming up for me is … ” or in response to someone else, “I feel an inner pressure to comfort you (or encourage you, or clarify the teaching for you, etc.). The reason we would choose to describe the pure sensation, for example, “inner pressure,” is to own our experience without interpretation. The inner pressure is yours–it should not necessarily be shared, or taken as spiritual guidance to help another. Just observe your internal experience.  And do  your best to stay in the present moment, rather than getting into lengthy stories about your past (always a telltale sign that the ego has taken over).

The Holy Spirit doesn’t actually tell us what to do in the world–He simply shifts our perception from fear to Love, and the form in which Love is expressed is a symbol, or reflection, of God’s Love. We learn by practicing with each other. It doesn’t matter how the other person reacts or responds. All that matters is that you practice forgiveness by following the Holy Spirit’s guidance, which by definition means that you step back and get out of your own way. This does not result in people walking all over you; to the contrary, your presence will become calm, powerful, impersonal, and full of loving Authority.

You can also offer, “Here’s an experience from my life that I hope offers you comfort.” Or, “Let me know if I can be of help.” But before you go rushing in to offer help (which can often be a codependent reaction) it is much more healing to share pure body sensations. This invites a healthy habit in the group of observing without defining, and opens an inner space for the Holy Spirit to lead.

Last, but not least, protect each other’s privacy by practicing, “What we say here, stays here.” Respecting each other’s confidentiality heals wounds and ultimately results in dissolving the personal story that maintains ego identification.

You must embody what Safe Ways to Share says if you want it to work, just as we must practice A Course in Miracles and not just read it. Interestingly, the definition of “embody” is to be a living demonstration of an idea, quality, or feeling–in this case, forgiveness and its resulting miracles.

To teach is to demonstrate.
There are only two thought systems, and you demonstrate that you believe one or the other is true all the time.
From your demonstration others learn, and so do you. …
You cannot give to someone else, but only to yourself, and this you learn through teaching. (M-Intro.2:1-3;6)

These guidelines are can be used in all your relationships, not just in a group. I highly recommend practicing them with everyone, everyday. Practicing emotionally responsible ways of communicating is a great undoing process. Feel free to ask me questions about this–you can email me at [email protected]

* A class has a teacher who is the leader of that group and is the guide and protector of the group. This teacher should be humble and open to getting out of his/her way and allowing the Holy Spirit to teach the class–this is an ongoing process; the teacher does not have to be “perfect,” just honest, kind, with good boundaries, and hopefully, well-versed in the subject being taught.

A study group has no teacher, but instead is a group of people getting together to discuss a subject, in this case A Course in Miracles. Most study groups have a facilitator–someone who organizes the class schedule, contacts the participants, and facilitates the meeting by providing some guidance (e.g., “Let’s begin by invoking the Holy Spirit.” and “Here are the Safe Ways to Share used by this group.” etc.) without taking on the responsibility of teaching.

Many thanks to the Foundation for Inner Peace who provided the image for “Salvation is a collaborative venture” from their free series, ACIM Weekly Thought and to Harper Wood for her illustration of an ACIM study group.

Frosty the Buddha by Will Johnson

Will Johnson is one of my spiritual teachers, and I love how he uses the body to undo the body.  His wise and witty missive below embodies (forgive the pun) his philosophy and will enliven your practice of the Workbook for Students in A Course in Miracles (ACIM).  Enjoy!

At the recent Urban Retreat in Victoria, which took place in the midst of an unseasonal winter storm (this is coastal British Columbia, after all; it’s not SUPPOSED to be cold and snowy), the image of Frosty the Buddha, the Bodhisattva of Alignment, was born. The aspect of our sitting posture that we first want to tend to when we sit down to meditate is the alignment of the upright spine, just as the Buddha suggests in his earliest instructional texts. Alignment–with its revelation that the gravitational field of the earth functions as a source of support for objects that are primarily aligned around a central, vertical axis–is a great benefactor and promoter of the dharma. It lets us relax and let go.

The first thing to remember about bringing alignment into your meditation posture is that it can’t be imposed from the outside in. It’s far more of an inside job. It needs to be felt into, first through kindling awareness of the sensations and feeling presence of the major segments of the body, and then through allowing these segments to begin spontaneously to self-adjust in relationship to one another. And this is where Frosty the Buddha comes in.

Consider the snowperson: three balls of snow of decreasing size, placed one directly on top of the other. Frosty’s lower body and base is the largest, providing a natural foundation for the upper segments. Frosty’s upper torso is much smaller in comparison, and his/her head is smaller still. And it doesn’t take a Buddha or the proverbial rocket scientist to know what every small child who has ever built a snowperson knows: if Frosty doesn’t want to self-decapitate, or lose the whole of his/her upper body, you better make sure that each of these snowballs is placed precisely one on top of the other. Indeed, Frosty’s very existence professes the wisdom of alignment.

So…, when you go to sit down, the first thing you might want to do is kindle the feeling awareness of the three major segments of the meditational body. Begin by paying attention to your largest foundational base which consists of your legs and pelvis, extending energetically even into your lower abdomen. Bring the sensations in every cell of this lower “snowball” to life (what the great 20th century meditation teacher U Ba Khin called “activating annica,” the bringing to felt awareness of the constantly changing vibratory experience of the body), and then feel this entire segment, as a unified field of sensation, all at once.

Now bring your awareness to your version of Frosty’s second snowball which forms your torso. Give yourself permission to activate the felt awareness of sensations, and then feel your entire torso all at once. And then do the same to your version and experience of Frosty’s head. As you sit in meditation, mindful of the image of the Bodhisattva of Alignment, feel how these three primary segments can be felt to start relating to each other, lining up, one on top of the other, naturally, effortlessly, spontaneously. Long live Frosty!

With your meditating body playing with upright alignment and the ever present dance of balancing that ensues (everything that you feel continues to shift and change from moment to moment), you can truly start to relax, again just like Frosty (s/he also moonlights as the Bodhisattva of Relaxation), no resistance, no holding yourself up or bracing against gravity, just dropping your weight through an aligned body. And, then, in order to stay relaxed, amoeba-like movement can start occurring at every joint of the body, expanding, contracting, in response to breath’s endless wave.

At this point, Frosty, being the eminently wise manifestation that s/he is, realizes that s/he’s done her/his job and that now it’s time for you to move on from his/her static image as you continue on your meditative inquiry and your body keeps relaxing and coming ever more unfrozen, as you begin to soften and melt the tensions in the body and the contractions in the mind, as you keep allowing the current of the life force to animate you through subtle movement. Frosty is, after all, frozen, and the next instructions from these earliest texts of the Buddha point us in the direction of coming alive through our breath and, ultimately, feeling how breath can cause subtle motion throughout the entire length of a deeply relaxed body.

Frosty can’t allow these motions to occur, but you and I can. So, thank you, Frosty, for all your inspiration, your sound advice, your insistence that alignment is a great supporter and propellant of the dharma, your implicit promotion of relaxation, your vision that ultimately we all melt away. And thank you as well for your insight in knowing that it’s now time to summon your good friend, compatriot, and tag-team partner, the Bodhisattva of Resilient Motion, to step up, take over, and be our guide as we continue on our way.

Now who might that Bodhisattva be, and what might s/he look like? Hmmmmm…, well, how about the image of the little Buddha figure I recently saw stuck onto the dashboard of a friend’s car; the neck and head of the Buddha were on a coiled wire so the Buddha’s head was constantly bobbing, moving, really going to town…?

All the best and greetings of the season,
Will (and his good friend Frosty)
www.embodiment.net

The Purpose of the Body

As Course in Miracles students, we are deeply questioning what most people take for granted. Jesus asks us to be very honest in exploring how the ego operates in order to find out who and what we really are.  In that spirit, Webinar #10 is to help you experientially understand the purpose of the body.  We begin by examining the ego’s purpose, in order to awaken your ability to use the body for the Holy Spirit’s Loving purpose of forgiveness and awakening instead.

We all take the cycle of birth and death for granted.  You, me, and everybody else, started off this human life believing that we were born through the body of our mother.  You were labeled with a name, to identify you as a person, and believed you were the physical form called the body.

Beginning in infancy, every body experiences physical pleasure and pain.  The body also experiences emotional and psychological pleasure and pain, which is called “somatizing” (morphing mental states into physical sensations).  Humans continue to be highly motivated by both pleasure and pain into adulthood–and guilt is often associated with both.  Spiritual teachers have referred to the body as the “pain body” and the “time body.”  When you combine pain and time, you get a ticking bomb!  In addition to the angst of our own personal lives, we see explosions of pain, anguish, rage, and terror throughout the world every day.

There’s rarely one among us who escapes the fear of death.  The human race tries to fend off mortality by nurturing roots through a clan, tribe, extended family, ethnic, racial, cultural and/or national  heritage, ownership of property, carrying on the family name through their children, honoring personal achievements by erecting monuments and awarding prizes, through competition and record setting, and even staking a claim to their spot on earth with a tombstone.

“The body is a fence the Son of God imagines he has built, to separate parts of his Self from other parts.” (W-5.1:1)  The ego dreamed up the idea of the body to solidify its concept of itself.  The body seems to prove that we, as people, exist.  The ego makes excellent use of the body as a multi-layered device:

* The ego’s grand plan was to make us Mind-less so we completely forgot our true Identity as a “Oneness joined as One” (T-25.I.7:1) in the formless, loving Mind of God.  Happily, “What is the same can not be different, and what is one can not have separate parts.” (T-25.I.7:7)

* The ego accomplishes this complete forgetting by hiding within the body, which blocks out our awareness of Being One Self in God’s Mind.  Mercifully, “The definition of reality is God’s, not yours.  He created it, and He knows what it is.  You who knew have forgotten, and unless He had given you a way to remember you would have condemned yourself to oblivion.” (T-12.VIII.3:6-8)

*  The brain and sensory organs in the body serve to show us that the physical world is real.  The ego seemingly proves bodies are real through the five senses, but actually the five senses falsely witness to the ego’s own propaganda that it exists.  The brain is the ego’s organ of choice to interpret, judge and perceive.  Jesus explains, “First, it is obvious that decisions are of the mind, not of the body. … The resistance to recognizing this is enormous, because the existence of the world as you perceive it depends on the body being the decision maker.  Terms like ‘instincts,’ ‘reflexes’ and the like represent attempts to endow the body with non-mental motivators. Actually, such terms merely state or describe the problem.  They do not answer it.”  (M-5.II.1:4-9)

The Course teaches us to stop judging, interpreting, and perceiving:  “There is one thing that you have never done; you have not utterly forgotten the body.  It has perhaps faded at times from your sight, but it has not yet completely disappeared.  You are not asked to let this happen for more than an instant, yet it is in this instant that the miracle of Atonement happens.  Afterwards you will see the body again, but never quite the same.  And every instant that you spend without awareness of it gives you a different view of it when you return.”  (T-18.VII.2:1-5)

*  The ego uses the body as a container for its guilt, and projects this guilt onto other people.  “The body is the means by which the ego tries to make the unholy relationship seem real.” (T-20.VII.5:1)  In the Course, Jesus refers to us as “the separated ones” and to our relationships as “special” and “unholy.”  The body is the ego’s symbol of separation.  Only our belief in the body makes it possible to have physical relationships which seem to express love, but actually maintain separate and special interests.  But don’t feel guilty about your relationships!  Jesus tells us, “Your question should not be, ‘How can I see my brother without the body?’ Ask only, ‘Do I really wish to see him sinless?’” (T-20.VII.9:1-2)

When we are willing to see our brother as sinless then perception of the body through eyesight becomes secondary to our ability to see our brothers’ innocence.  “By focusing on the good in him [your brother], the body grows decreasingly persistent in your sight, and will at length be seen as little more than just a shadow circling round the good.” (T-31.VII.3:3)  In that way, we use the body for the Holy Spirit’s purpose as “the means by which God’s Son returns to sanity.” (W-5.4:1)

*  Last but not least, the body, by its inevitable demise, implies, quite convincingly, that we were alive.  Through the cycle of birth and death, the ego makes a case that life is worldly and material, defined within time and space.  We never pause to question birth, but in Reality there are no bodies to be born.  God creates His Creation and there is no place where the Father ends and the Son begins–we are truly a Oneness joined as One.

When we step back and let ourselves be guided by the Holy Spirit, we learn that, “You have the vision that enables you to see the body not.  And as you look upon your brother, you will see an altar to your Father, holy as Heaven, glowing with radiant purity and sparkling with the shining lilies you laid upon it.  What can you value more than this?  Why do you think the body is a better home, a safer shelter for God’s Son?  Why would you rather look on it than on the truth?” (T-20.VIII.4:3-7).

Practice Lesson 223:  God is my life.  I have no life but His.  It begins, “I was mistaken when I thought I lived apart from God, a separate entity that moved in isolation, unattached, and housed within a body.  Now I know my life is God’s, I have no other home, and I do not exist apart from Him.  He has no Thoughts that are not part of me, and I have none but those which are of Him.” If this does not satisfy, or if you’re feeling plagued by a body issue, ask the Holy Spirit to use your body to undo your belief in the body.  You will likely be guided to work with someone who knows how to guide you in observing your physical sensations in order to release them. There are more and more spiritual practitioners (including myself) using many different methods to use our sensory apparatus to dissolve individuality.

If you liked “The Purpose of the Body,” you may also enjoy other essays in my ongoing series, How to Use the Body While You Think It’s You, including, “Body Health Is Not a Measurement of Spiritual Unfolding,” “Death Is Just a Belief,” “How to Take Yourself Less Personally” and “Flossing and Feldenkrais.”   Be sure to watch Webinar #10: The Purpose of the Body on YouTube 🙂  And you might be interested in my Facebook page devoted to body issues: http://facebook.com/acimbodyimage  For private sessions or if you have questions, email miracles (at) amytorresacim (dot) com

Copyright © 2013 Amy Torres.  All rights reserved worldwide.