THE ART OF BEING EXPERIENCE

Alan describing The Art of Being

by Alan Lowen, founder (Feb 2009)

The Art of Being is how you live when you are totally present to whatever is happening, in you and in your here and now life.

An Art of Being workshop invites you to celebrate all that it means to be human, to be yourself, to BE! With usually somewhere between ten and forty people participating, all the colours of the human rainbow may find their way into your experience: delight, playfulness, sorrow, fear, loneliness, lust, trust, humour, compassion, beauty, desire, despair, courage, awareness, love, libido…

The question in every moment is simply, how deeply can I allow myself to experience whatever is happening here and now? There is a structure, there are processes and meditations from a vast repertoire that I have created and developed over 3 decades – and a few I have learned from other gifted teachers and guides of the journey into being. Some take you into very personal, even intimate contact with others in the circle. Others guide you deep into your inner life.

All of it you are encouraged to encounter in a spirit of friendliness. This is what makes the journey so enthralling, and surprising. You may come across things you reject, fear, even despise in yourself. They are your own very personal experiences and you are against them. They become your ‘no-go’ areas. This is frequently what causes us to be judgemental of others. We are as unfriendly as we are towards ourselves. Of course we don’t want to know or feel or sense what we dislike. The result is that we only partially experience our life. There are things we see, and there are things we don’t see.

As we come to accept what we have been rejecting in ourselves, we naturally come to celebrate our life. We give more of ourselves, we get more out of life and we cannot be more intelligent or more creative than when we are present in our whole being – in our body, feelings, heart, mind and soul. There is no greater fulfilment and no happier way to live.

This is why in the workshop I'm always going to help you say a friendly hello to whatever may come your way, from the bright and beautiful to the dark and difficult, and whether it originates in you or in others. We need to befriend the darkness in us simply because it is an integral aspect of our nature. Like all that is natural, it only causes trouble when we have a bad relationship with it; and there are certain keys – for example those to do with trust and acceptance - that we may only find in our darkness. Avoiding the dark puts us in the situation of the drunk who is searching for his door key under the bright street light. When asked where he lost it he says, "Over there!" pointing to a dark stretch of the road. "Then why are you looking here?" "Because there's more light here."

Nevertheless, even if I know that you need to go into your dark to find what you are seeking, I won’t force you to go there. If it feels good to do so, I may challenge you at times, just as I will give you a safe harbour if my intuition and experience tell me that is what you need. In any case I will always honour what I regard as your sacred choice to say Yes or No to what the moment brings. Naturally, there are all kinds of blessings and challenges coming from the other people in the circle too. This gives the experience its dynamic colourfulness and its extraordinary potential as a field of learning how to be fully present.

My part is to facilitate the learning, by designing situations in which you can learn and heal, guiding you in meditations that invite spiritual awakening, creating opportunities for to live your wildness and dance like a loon, and bringing my total presence to each and every moment. I do all I can to help you to keep being here, in the fullest sense of the phrase, in all that you are, in all that is, so that you can keep learning to say hello to this ultimately boundless being that you are. I know that in your hello lies your freedom, your healing, your happiness, your self-realization, and above all, your potential opening into the deepest treasures of your being, and of BEING itself. And at the same time, though I lead the workshop with a prayer in my heart and a deep longing for you to discover all that is here for you, I lead it with an equally profound acceptance of how much or how little of yourself you may personally choose to discover and befriend. At the beginning I ask you as a member of the circle to be in it all the way through, both for yourself because all you can walk out on is all you have come looking for, and for everyone else too for reasons to do with fairness, trust and respect. When it comes down to it though, I accept what happens. It keeps me happy and keeps me learning.

I chose long ago to pursue consciousness and love as the essence of being and the meaning of life. I couldn’t have put those words to what I was doing when I embarked on the journey. I just knew I wanted to be whole, healed, fully awake and able to live to my full potential. And where does it all end? It doesn’t. There is no end, no limit, to this mystery of being. One day we become one with our own soul. It happens as a natural consequence of keeping on opening into our being. And we find of course that our soul has all along been one with the eternal spirit, the infinite, the source, God – call it what you will. We just were not awake to the fact. It is the awakening that makes the difference. It feels like the total transformation of our being. We don’t have to change anything in how we live our lives; and we may choose to change everything. The difference is in how present we are to what is happening. When we are so present that our soul and our awareness of spirit are as involved as our body, our nature, our feelings and heart, then our experience is boundless. The strangest thing about our civilization is that rather than this awakening journey being the foundation of our education, it has been largely forgotten and abandoned.

My deepest commitment to anyone who participates in one of my workshops is to be with you in all you have to encounter along the way, with my awareness and my love, with my whole presence! I may or may not like what you say and do. You have my love anyway. I love you because for 37 years this has been my journey. Since the day in my late twenties that I first opened into my whole being, I have trusted the journey, and it has given me a profound love for humanity – yours, mine, everybody’s. Though I have had to break, fall, dissolve and rise countless times, this trust has been my constant companion. I trust the joys and the blessings, and I trust life to confront me with whatever in my being still needs my loving, unconditional acceptance. I know that my responsibility is to be willing to sense, feel, embrace and so befriend all that I experience – just because it is. I know that the things and people I don't like are my teachers. And I know this is so for everybody. We are all being invited, in every situation of our life, to wake up and be here. It is all to bring us into the present. Our presence is who we really are. In it, we are love and awareness happening. A being in love!