| |
Sacred Leadership Intensive –
Freeing Ourselves from the Hidden Power of Family,
Community & Personal History
Global Learning available in New York City and on the World Wide Web.
This course is a part of One Spirit’s Wisdom Curriculum, developing Everyday Sages for Contemporary Life. It is a required part of the Sacred (Conscious) Leadership Program and a qualified elective for certificate programs in Sound Values Facilitation, Integral Mentoring & Ministry, and InterSpiritual Counseling.
All of the great spiritual traditions invite us to pay attention to what is before us, to develop our sense of presence, or in the words made famous by Ram Das, to “be here now” But what do these invitations mean, and what gets in the way of our living and leading in the present moment?
We know today that we only become truly human in our relationships with others. No other mammal develops outside the womb to nearly the extent that we do as human beings. The social surround we live in is like the water a fish swims in. We move through the sea of our life with little awareness of the texture, color or clarity of the water that holds all of our thoughts, emotions and activities. Social scientists call this social surround our culture, and we all know that different cultures have different cuisines, mores, taboos and languages. Most of us, however, pay little attention to the automatic assumptions that frequently define the limits of what we can even imagine.
We begin to learn the patterns of our culture – what success looks like, what we should strive for, what is forbidden, what we think about the world outside, what we can or cannot feel, what is beautiful or ugly, how we eat, how we speak to our elders, and even how we experience our bodies – from the moment we emerge from our mother’s body. These cultural patterns are held by our nationalities, ethnicities and religions. But no matter what the source of the various cultural patterns that we hold dear, they are mediated to us through childhood patterns that we literally imbibe from our primary caretakers, generally our family of origin, our parents, and most powerfully our mothers.
Without a high level of care the young child can not survive, and extensive research indicates that without the right kind of care the young child will not develop into a thriving health adult able to creatively engage in social life or intimate relations. Most of us live most of the time in unconscious patterns, functional or dysfunctional, that defined who we were as we grew up. These patterns hold us in their embrace, keeping us repeating the same patterns rooted in a past we only dimly remember.
In stable societies and fixed economies such patterned responses create social cohesion and may well provide a meaningful life for the individual. However, in dynamic environments, where change happens in moments not millennia, the unconscious patterns, shadow aspects and personal projections that keep us tethered to the past and operating on automatic pilot create personal distress and are frequently the source of social decay. To make sense of 21st century life, and to find ways to live together on an increasingly small planet, we must become aware of the patterns that dominate our lives.
In this weekend intensive we will explore the national, ethnic, religious and family patterns that were part of our upbringing. We will explore the degree to which these patterns serve us or limit us, and begin to understand the depth of the unconscious emotional hold they have on us. At the same time we will unearth the many ways that our language and patterns of speech keep us unaware of how our so called objective perceptions are almost always patterned projections. As we unearth layer after layer of unconscious orientation we begin to free ourselves from “the myth of the given”, and the repertoire of potential responses available to us increases dramatically. During this intensive we will gently leave behind some of the patterns that have limited our freedom, kept us attached to a past that no longer serves us and limits our capacity for skillful service or authentic leadership.
To live freshly in the present moment, free to choose the most appropriate or creative response to any given external situation is an extraordinary accomplishment. It is the reason that developing a real sense of presence is a significant spiritual accomplishment and is an important step on the road to authentic freedom and genuine maturity. It is also a vital capacity that many of us are called to develop if we are to create meaningful lives, pass on a healthy world to our children and our grandchildren, and exert creative leadership in all aspects of 21st century life.
Tuition $195
This intensive meets the weekend of Nov. 5th, 6th & 7th, 2010
Register Now
By clicking "Pay Now," you are agreeing to One Spirit Learning Alliance's Event Policies and Procedures, that events may be recorded and released for educational purposes.
|
|
|
