The Blessing Way
Our winter series begins Thursday, January 5 at 7pm
with Paul Weiss
Our word "bless" comes from the Indo-European root bhel, meaning to thrive or to bloom; which in its various journeys through the Latin and the Germanic also gives us the words blossom, blade (as in a blade of grass – bladen, the fruit of the earth), flower and flourish. It is about the natural abundance and affirmation of life. When we bless something, we offer our desire and support that it flower and flourish. We align with the innate abundance of being. As humans, we are consciously capable of that.
When we look at our own lives, we can see how we are also a part of the natural flow and abundance of life, and of the desire of life to come to its own fruition. But we may also see how many of our primary experiences, and our way of processing those experiences, has led to certain self-imposed shut-downs. The innate flourishing, or "Yes" of life within us, is confined by an accumulation of chronic "No's," understandably defensive or self-protecting patterns that result in restricting our affirmation of life, or affirmation of self. This chronic and sometimes subtle restriction of our life energy determines much of our physical imbalances as well as our psychological ills. And, of course, it affects the historical behavior of our species, our relationship to each other and to the planet.
It is a natural evolutionary consequence of our need for survival that we tend to give dominion to our negative interpretations of reality – what could go wrong; what is going wrong – over our more positive impressions. But it is also a necessity of this next more conscious stage of our evolution that we learn to recognize and take responsibility for our chronic and largely unconscious patterns of negativity – which reinforce chronic restrictions on the natural energetic flow of life within and around us. We must learn to exercise our capacity to bless. This is essential now not only to our own well-being, but also to the welfare of our families and communities, the welfare of our collective humanity, and the welfare of our entire ecology.
Hence, this is an issue that pertains to the health and to the full dimension of ourselves as physical, emotional, spiritual, and relational beings. Might it be worthy of addressing together?
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This extensive evening program, running all winter, will explore minutely the roots and the practice of our spiritual and emotional capacity to bless – inwardly and outwardly. And it will explore as well all the subtleties of our chronic No, and those mechanisms of mind and emotion that naturally give rise to them and maintain them; even though it is not what our mind, body, heart, and soul really want. For these shut-downs not only restrict our daily well-being, they also restrict at the spiritual level our natural access to the infinite awareness and infinite dimension of life that is ours.
Our program will offer us both the "big view" and the "intimate view" in the course of our very careful reading and examining together of a contemporary spiritual text, or sutra, of my own composition, and which I have not yet shared out, variously called The Blessing Way Sutra or The Sutra of Yes and No. This poetic text first address the wholeness and perfection of our infinite source and its process of creation; how the natural arising of mind and its confusions turns this creative polarity into the duality of separation and negation, and how the traumas of our earliest experience further set the stage for our chronic self-limiting patterns. It then goes on to address at length the path of love, affirmation, devotion, and self-healing – the path of Yes – that can help lead us out of the fabricated maze of negation and suffering.
This program is intended as a tender, thorough, and provocative look at our human situation and at our ultimate capacity to "thrive" together. And it will be complemented by a Blessing Way retreat, offered here later this winter at The Whole Health Center.
Cost is $145. Or it is free to our members with a $25/month membership