Total Presence: the Workshop
© Alan Lowen, founder of The Art of Being®, February 2007

In the lives of all of us, there are certain times when it matters to open ourselves beyond what we have become used to, both within ourselves and in the ways we relate with people and life. If we accept the invitation and allow ourselves into situations and settings that bring about our opening, we discover that the way that we now experience life is in itself fulfilling, and this is regardless of anything we consider as our successes or failures. We aren’t running after success. WE ARE FULFILLED by the life we are living! Interestingly enough, because our approach to life is so engaged and conscious, we are very creative – we bring real presence to whatever we are doing – and as a result we find ourselves anyway being more successful than ever! This isn’t as surprising as it may first seem. The most successful people are not those who are obsessing about success; they are those who are fully engaged and in love with what they are doing, which is how we live everything when we are open and connected to all our inner resources.
What are these inner resources? Our awareness, our passion and longing, our intuitive faculties, our inventiveness and the playfulness in us that seeks for solutions and discoveries, our heartfulness that makes us care about the meaning of what we are doing in our life, and most mysterious of all, our magically unique individuality that has its own songs to sing. Our songs don’t have to make celebrities of us. They don’t have to be heard by the whole world. They may be as simple as surprising our beloved with champagne and roses, or planting a vegetable garden, or making our sales staff’s happiness as important as their results, or bathing naked under a waterfall. We aren’t interested in stardom because we aren’t fixed on the goal or trying to get anywhere. We are in love with the singing! What matters is being present with all our inner senses and sensitivities turned on, and all our personal attributes alive and humming inside us, including some that till now we didn’t even know we possessed.
How does this happen? Because we long for it! Things happen that makes us look at ourselves and the life we are living and long for it all to be different; and we realize that it’s not about changing the outer circumstances. We are ready to meet ourselves.
This in itself is an act of trust; we can have little idea of how profoundly we are going to be changed by the meeting. We just want to give it a try because we’ve more or less tried everything else.
This is why the journey of inner awakening and personal transformation usually doesn’t begin until people are at least in their thirties, and often much later. We need some years of doing our thing in the world before we’re ready to face the fact that there’s more to life than all the goodies it seems to offer. We need time to discover that happiness is not there in the things we are persuaded to buy in order to be happy. We need time to discover that meeting the love of our life doesn’t guarantee “happily ever after”. It’s only when we start to wonder where happiness is really to be found that our personal awakening can happen. Now our real soul-journey can begin! It’s the journey through which we become the one we dream of being, the one whose life – at work, at play, in love and in spirit – fulfils our deepest longings.

© Alan Lowen, February 2007
Total Presence is a workshop, facilitated by Alan Lowen and a small team of assistants, for people who are asking for this journey. It is 12 days long, beginning at 8.00 each morning and ending around 10pm each night. There are 40 participants, 20 men and 20 women. It is a journey into its title!

These extracts from participants’ letters express the essence of what Total Presence offers.
My life has become so much lighter, and so much more beautiful and relaxed than I ever would have dared to imagine it. When I hear from other people around me about all the difficulties they have with their lives, I offer a prayer of gratitude! It was the best decision of my life to participate in your workshops. Gisela-Charlotte
I went home with a never before known strength inside me. Since then my life has changed fundamentally. I gave myself the power to form my life the way I would like it to be from my innermost vision... I have found a great treasure and I’m willing to take care of it for the rest of my life. Stefan
I wanted to thank you... I got to see the part that feels it has no right to live. And I made a deep level choice for life and aliveness. And I got clear of the guilt about ... And I saw what has been stopping me from taking off into ... My God, I cannot believe so many gifts can happen all at once! Gail
Just when I think I have seen it all, I come to one of your workshops and a whole new world opens up to me. Thank you, Alan. Susan
©Alan Lowen, August 2006

Valentine Spirit
© Jan Day, Teacher of The Art of Being®, February 2007

Valentinus was a Christian who’d been sentenced to death by the Romans. A guard, who saw his wisdom, brought his blind 7 year old daughter to Valentine for lessons. They talked of important things and a deep love grew between them. She asked him “Do you think I will ever see?” and he told her “With love in your heart and belief in God, anything is possible.” Her eyesight was restored shortly afterwards. The next day when she came to see him he had already been taken for execution but she found a note that said “Know that I will always love you, you are very dear to me, I will stay unseen by your side and live on in your heart. I believe in you.”
It’s Valentine’s Day as I write this and I recall how touched I was last year when I read this version of the story in a book by Alan Cohen. It wasn’t the Romeo & Juliet romance I’d imagined, but a story of the power of love and encouragement, reminding us how much we can inspire the people around us, how much we give when we cheer them on, believe in them, praise them and see them as unlimited. And we can give this to ourselves as well. Most of us need more of this in our lives, we know the feeling of knowing that it would be good for us to ____ (eat well, exercise, meditate, do yoga etc. fill in your own blank here!). But we don’t find the ways to encourage and support ourselves and so we fail to do the things that would serve our well-being.
It has become clear to me over the past months that I can choose be very creative in how to get my support and my life is a lot more fun when I do that. Appreciating our need for this is a good start. Recently I discovered that even using a DVD for my exercise workout is an enormous help; even if the instructor does say the same thing every day, he's enouraging and I feel as if I’m in a class with 5 other people. Similarly, finding outside consultants to work with in specific areas of expertise has lifted the burden of always trying to do it alone.
I invite you to look at what you need encouragement for and stretch your creative mind to see how you can get it, whether it is a class, a book, or a coach, consultant or some other solution. Look at how encouragement works in your own life. Let the spirit of Valentine inspire you to celebrate and love yourself and the people around you, to open to receive the encouragement you need and to give the light of your own heart to the people around you.
I leave you with this beautiful poem from Hafiz that is one of my favorites:

How did the rose ever open its heart
and give to the world
its beauty?
It felt the encouragement
Of the light upon its being!

With love and aloha, Jan

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