Evolution’s Edge

The Evolution's Edge programs are sourced by our extensive personal experience, the findings of modern psychological and neuro-biological science, and the practical and transformational legacy of all our classical and planetary wisdom traditions, east and west. They are designed to support our personal and collective evolutionary journey through our stress-based and ego-based automatic operating systems to more mature modes of functioning that express the mindful, inclusive, unitive and presence-based nature of our essential energy and consciousness.  These are modes that naturally help us to shift our behaviors from separative to reciprocal, from reactive to responsive, from judgmental to compassionate, from projection to intimacy, and from fixated to free.  They enable us to benefit and bring healing to ourselves, our friends, our families, and our communities.

Over the years we have explored these practices through classes, workshops, educational talks, individual counseling work, and retreats.

Evolution's Edge Programs Encompass

Compassion, Integration, and Healing

Foundations of Authentic Communication

Contemplative Science and Sacred Wisdom

QiGong: Cultivating Transparent Coherence of Body, Mind, and Spirit

Remembering Earth

True Heart/True Mind

Mastering the Reciprocal Field (Corporate/Organizational Training)

Compassion, Integration, and Healing

Healing – becoming whole – is always about a new capacity for integration.  And compassion, in one aspect or another, is what enables integration.  For it allows the disparate parts of ourselves – or of a system – to "come in from the cold," and to be integrated in the light of a new presence. 

As we learn to cultivate a resonance circuit between the heart and the higher brain centers (as our evolution intends), we deepen our capacity for compassionate presence, and for a growing empathy and attunement to ourselves and to others. This compassionate presence allows for a greater degree of integration and healing within our own personal dynamics, and in the dynamics of our interpersonal relationships. Our programs in the area of compassion, integration and healing build systematic capacity and skills in harmonizing and integrating every area of our thinking, feeling and doing.   

Much of our work has creatively evolved from the template offered by the ancient Buddhist practice of tonglen, a meditative practice of compassion and reciprocity that is at the heart of both Buddhist and Christian spirituality.  We have applied the integrative dynamics of tonglen  to a fundamental understanding of how the heart and nervous system flinches, protects, shuts down, and goes unconscious in the face of our own pain or the pain of others; or in the face of perceived threat, overwhelm, otherness or negative projection.  And, conversely, to our conscious human capacity to override fear or negativity, stay present, open the heart, extend ourselves, and embrace all experience in a compassionate and empathetic way.

This is clearly the singularly essential task of our humanity and of this historical moment; and it calls for a consciously supported re-education of the heart and nervous system.  And it is this evolving therapeutic and teaching program of compassionate self-integration -- applied to our emotional life, our developmental roots, and our availability to others -- that has pretty much defined our healing work at The Whole Health Center and continues on in our new programs.

Foundations of Authentic Communication

We define authentic communication as that  communication that is able to arise between people to the extent that each is able to remain in a state of presence.  The state of presence is characterized by a sense of "wholeness" of self, and an availability to our own feelings and perceptions, simultaneously with a simple receptivity and availability to the presence of others, and a capacity to appreciate and support their wholeness and integrity.  "Presence" is our inherent and organic boundary system; and also the foundation for truly authentic and functional communication. 

What we are learning from the emerging fields of neurocardiology and heart energetics is that the electromagnetic field of the heart has a naturally harmonizing function, and that its natural or un-distorted energy is experienced as love and “appreciation.”  What we are learning from our developing brain science is that the prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that mediates nonjudgmental or attuned awareness, as well as the part of the brain capable of attuning with the energy field of the heart. This mutual function is experienced as the faculty of “presence,” an integrated heart-brain faculty which has the characteristics of self-integration, receptive or non-projective awareness, and heart-interest, or appreciation. Its foundation is in the earliest developmental attunement between mother and child, and it may be more consciously developed in maturity as a spiritual faculty.

Presence can be learned, practiced, and taught; and there are easy and systematic ways of helping to awaken, or tease out, our natural capacity for presence from the less conscious domain of reactivity and conditioned response. As we learn to open and attune to the present moment, and relax our mental and emotional reactivity, the cognitive and the affective domains are able to join together in a state of unity that makes possible our optimum healthy functioning in the present, including a authentic mutual communication between people. We teach the foundations and guidelines of attuned and authentic communication as an extension of the practice of presence.  Conversely, the practice of authentic communication contributes to the growth of presence. It is the ideal win-win of human relationships.

QiGong: Cultivating the Coherence of Body, Mind, Spirit, and Vital Energy

Taoism is a naturalistic wisdom tradition in which the profound science of cultivating a healthy body is not separate from the cultivation of the spirit.  We have long put great emphasis on the teaching of the Taoist arts of qigong and taiji for, aside from their pleasurability, they address the nature of health and illness at the deepest level of energetic rejuvenation, relaxed fluency of movement, balancing of all physiological systems, and harmonizing mind and body.

In our understanding, the processes of mind and ego create many sticking points and obscurations in our awareness; and these in turn, encountering the stresses of life, contribute to fixations and incoherence in our bodily function.  We accumulate many negative or separative stories about the nature of our experience,; and these stories, in turn, frequently prejudice and restrict the body’s (and the heart’s) natural processes of balance, cleansing, reintegration, relaxation, and resolution.  Consequently, the body acquires fixations and imbalances in function which cause it to lose coherence with the fluid and transparent energetic, or etheric, grid out of which it arises.  This also contributes to the construction of a non-body-friendly or a non-heart-friendly world.   

As we may experience, the movements of the body lose their natural harmony and coherence and become rigid and fragmented.  Toxicity and imbalances accumulate in our physiology.  The heart loses its natural openness to, and coherence with, the congruent wave fields of being – which would otherwise be experienced as harmony, affirmation, and well-being – and become subject to negative emotional messages.  This negative messaging creates an incoherence in the rhythmic frequency of the heart’s own wave field, compromising the heart’s function of promoting the harmony of the whole body -- and the social body -- and seriously compromising its own health as well. (This is recognized by both traditional Chinese medicine and the modern research field of heart energetics.)  And finally, our awareness is distracted from its own transparent quality as it becomes occupied and identified with the mind’s continual thinking and imaging.

These are the inharmonious patterns of our mind, heart, and body that contribute to illness, and that we are likely to bring to qi gong.  Qi gong, as we work with it, is the very holistic path of practice by which we address the totality of this disharmony and this dysfunction through an integrated approach that engages the body, mind, heart, breath, and movement  – in a way that reverses and rehabilitates the tendency to disharmony and separation; and  which restores our expressive being of coherence, flow and transparency.

First, we cultivate and restore the coherent functioning of body, mind, breath, and heart within our dynamic energetic field.  (This eliminates most of the mental and emotional noise in the system, which is a product of disharmony and lack of flow.)  Then this entire coherent system becomes naturally transparent to the awake, joyful, and infinite nature of being.   This is the profound and embodied spiritual nature of qi gong.

Contemplative Science and Sacred Wisdom

Our many planetary spiritual traditions are repositories of transformational wisdom, and extensive curricula for practice, that ultimately address in great depth all of our contemporary concerns -- psychological, emotional, physical, and developmental.  They are all intercessions, at one level or another, of our true heart and true mind; though they are often reduced to many smaller-minded interpretations by the prevailing ego-consciousness.  We offer a cross-cultural and integrative appreciation of the practical and inspirational wealth of these traditions, looking to them and through them to the deepest levels of universal messaging and application.

Remembering Earth

As we ourselves are evolving life-forms within the realm of the earth, the messages reflected back to us by the forms and processes of the natural world are deep aspects of our own consciousness; our shared consciousness.  Tree, rock, river, and deer are not just objects for our exploitation, but are windows of revelation; part of a living mutuality; the other half of our own souls.  This is a reciprocal relationship that was instinctively recognized by our indigenous cultures, but from which our civilization is now largely divorced, and which would hardly find footing in our rational science (never mind our economics).  But we are alienated and we are ill.  Why do we crush our indigenous roots, and seek to destroy the indigenous roots of others?  Why is the direction of our intellectual culture, our technology and our economics so apparently soulless?  Is it because, for starts, we have left one half of our soul behind?  Our growing alienation from the life of the planet contributes to ecological disaster, to psychological depression, to moral confusion,  and to a ghetto of the imagination.  Hence the essential inclusion in our program of tools for re-awakening our communion and reciprocity with the natural world -- for spiritual integration with the other conscious and living half of our own self.  Our individual health, our planetary health, our souls, our compassion, and our happiness require it.

True Heart, True Mind Intensives

True Heart/True Mind has been our “flagship” retreat for thirty-eight years.  It is a laboratory for the "real-time" implementation and practice of so many of the principles and practices that we have long taught.   It is an otherwise silent retreat in which communication, as well as contemplation, becomes the vehicle for taking us deeply into the mysteries of  self-realization.  We learn to sit with the timeless question “Who Am I?,” not to be answered intellectually,  but to be opened to with deepening contemplative awareness. 

 The True Heart/ True Mind retreat is a highly structured, safe, and supportive setting in which everything you are becomes the object of your simple contemplative investigation into the nature of self and reality, without judgments, comparison or rejection.  We learn to be fully present for our experience while becoming newly aware of the one who is present,  with deepening integration, insight, and sometimes a mind-liberating breakthrough.  And this learning occurs in the context of a  two-person communication process that fosters trust, reciprocity, receptivity, non-judgmental attention, a deepening bonding, and surrender to a truth that lies outside our own mental constructs and projections.  

This demanding and gratifying Intensive process is integrating, revelatory, and often life-changing. It offers a practical introduction to non-dual spirituality and is also a great tonic for anyone’s current spiritual practice. With its equal emphasis on contemplation and communication, it helps us take responsibility for both our inner life and our outer life.  With its emphasis on deepening our intention, our openness, and our honest accountability, it is the foundation of all spiritual growth work.  It has never been more vital or more relevant -- to our current times, or to the needs of each of us to be true to ourselves and true to each other.  We hope to keep this program vital, both in its four-day format, and in an extended format.

Evolution’s Edge Master Training

For those looking to integrate the work thoroughly into their lives, we are designing a long-term training using a curriculum-style approach, with ongoing skill building, one-on-one coaching, retreats, and a community of peers.

Mastering the Reciprocal Field

This series of one day training workshops targets three essential areas of integration, healing, and skill building. Together they contribute to the health, integrity, reciprocity, and effectiveness of our work relationships, of our most personal relationships, and even of our relationship to ourselves. Either we are learning to strengthen the brain circuitry that makes us more conscious, present, and responsive, or we are relying on old circuitry that leaves us more automatic and reactive. "Conscious, present, and responsive" is not only more skillful and effective, it also leads to a more satisfying experience of ourselves. This training is suitable and recommended for community groups, clubs, businesses, schools.