Embodiment Intensive
What is this thing, people ask, this Embodiment Intensive?
In a practical sense, we have meetings and meditations, discussion and reflection, a book and a journal, dietary and lifestyle guideines and personal activities. But that's only the physical layer, part of the container for what may be a profoundly deep transformational experience.
For many, Its a way of dealing with our own pain. A way of restoring health, processing trauma and creating a sense of spaciousness and alignment in life. It can be magical. It can be mundane. It can be hell and it can be heaven. It can and often is even fun. Usually, by the end it’s heaven, but not always. Sometimes the awareness of heaven takes awhile to creep in as we crawl away from the seat of our souls after a great big drink of who we are and how we’ve been behaving, reducing ourselves to fit in, right back into the comfort of sugar and gluten and alcohol. Other times we bound away with a lightness and freedom and radiant health barely imagined that continues on and on. Either way you’re transformed and you can’t go back to what you were. You’ve come a whole trip around the orbit of your being and are that much brighter, more powerful and aware. Even if you try to precisely replicate your previous state and habits it won’t work. You’re different. It’s a one way evolutionary trip to embark on this simultaneously upward and downward spiral of becoming.
Suffering is optional. When we cease enough of the constant pollution of our bodies, minds and spirits, clarity arises. We begin to see how much of our own misery and insanity is self inflicted.
The dietary and lifestyle guidelines are just the beginning, a focal point, a way of disrupting our habitual, unconscious patterning in our lives and nervous systems. In a way, the engine and catalyst of change, catalyst really, the engine is our own lives, the living in our own bodies and lives each moment of each day. For some it will be a deep cleanse, for others a light shifting of diet ad lifestyle with the deeper emphasis on spiritual matters or art or relationships or finance or belief system. In all cases we are fundamentally relating to our selves as an aspect of the source we seek. Transforming the poisons of a life partially lived into the brilliant power that we are and deserve. It is both our privilege and our responsibility to be who we are. There is only one of us and no spares. Each of us is a specific and unique and critical piece of the puzzle of the universe.
It can be a bit like an Ayahuasca journey for some, intensely magical and purgative, but instead of the brew, you have the you. Instead of 8 hours, it’s 21 days of sitting in your own filth, your own light, your own fear and pain and judgement and your own understanding and insight and compassion. This is when we become our own ally. Our own lover and friend and parent and teacher. We are both the beloved and the belover to become love itself.
When we become this for ourselves is when we can truly and authentically share it with others.
You get out of it what you put into it. That’s the nature of alchemy which this certainly and specifically is. Your energy in all forms - attention, sweat, money, focus, inquiry and effort are the fuel for the purification. The fire will burn as hot as you stoke it so we focus on finding our edge and maintaining that. We each have our own gas pedal and with the massive wave of energy provided by the group process we’ll need a very light touch to feel a large effect. We learn how to keep the fires burning as we go about our lives. We learn how to manage the fire and how to burn well while using the light of that fire to illuminate our lives and that of those around us.
The fastest, cleanest and most direct way to clear pain is to sit in it. Experience it directly and own it wholly. When we peel away the layers of numbness from comfort food, alcohol, caffeine, sugar, habitual relationships and hiding the light of our own souls then we can become conscious of the pain we are carrying. The pain becomes it’s own medicine, the awareness is what transmutes it into light. How can we truly witness another’s pain until we can witness our own?
The second hardest thing we can do in life is to sit with the pain of a loved one and merely love them without condition, reservation or judgment. To witness without trying to fix them. To honor their pain with our presence as they struggle to own it, master it and transcend it.
The hardest is to do this with ourselves. That, ultimately is what the Embodiment Intensive is. A commitment to being the love and acceptance that we look elsewhere for, so that we may be that in the world. To be love rather than give love.
The external world is the reflection of the internal. You have to go inside first. When we do this together we have brilliance.
I invite you to join us. http://www.lawrencekampf.com/workshops/
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