Devotion

“Devotion" is an offering that is being held within the structure of an atelier. Atelier is the French word for workshop, in which those in all stages of mastery gather in the same space, honor the same intention, share inspirations, and offer mutual support, cross-pollenate, and co-create.

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Inherent in this course is an invitation for female-bodied beings of all ages and walks of life to gather together in a held, co-creative environment to learn and deepen in personal and communal acts of service which are supported by the emergence of universal heart wisdom teachings.

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Together we are Devotional spiritual artisans, working with our hearts, bodies, and minds to craft the new world, together… We are the artisans, the scientists, the Nobel laureates, the poets, the tradespeople, the mechanics, the farmers and gardeners, the grand mommas, mommas, daughters, and sisters, and our medium is the emergent, unconditioned energy consciousness.

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We are the devoted listeners, the seers, the feelers, the vessels through which the new ways emerge into being.

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We are the blessed, and the blessings.

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Devotion is our moment-to-moment practice, our right-here, right-now refuge where we can develop and cultivate our showing up and turning toward.

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As we support ourselves and one another through our consistency of practice, we naturally deepen in reverence, trust, and loyalty…This is our invitation to unfold into the fullness of our loving hearts, and we may feel the universal heart that is holding us and indeed all beings.

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​Relationship: Series One

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OVERVIEW

On the greatest level, everything is one, and within this oneness, we can bring our view into seeing the component “parts of the whole” (each one wholeness unto itself), and see how they are all interconnected, and relating. Through this viewpoint, we then see that everything is in relationship.. and everything is relationship! As we explore we can ask ourselves, with whom or what are we in relationship? And how are we in relationship? We can play with the paradox of Self not just as God and Nature but also Self relating with God, or relating with nature - and even Self relating with Self…. And as we explore, we do it together… in relationship with each other! Through our inquiry we see where we have become disconnected from our inherent relationship flows.. and we can find out what happens when we come back into right relationship.

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Often relationship flows can be described through two overall channels: that of the transcendent pathway of ego death and truth beyond projection, and that of the embodied pathway in which we include and integrate our day-to-day human experience. This offering is the first of two offerings about relationship: in this series we will be covering the transcendent experience (Self relating with self, God, and nature), and in the series that follows after this we will be covering the embodied, integrated experience (Self relating with self, other individuals, and group). What becomes possible as we enter into right relationship through all of these different channels and pathways of relating, these ways of living and expressing?

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As we embark upon these pathways of exploration, Devotion is always the medium, the orientation, within which we are doing our explorations. We are seeing, discovering, and assimilating while we are held within Devotion, and guided by Devotion.

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DETAILS

1. RELATING WITH OURSELVES

How do we not get lost in thinking about human, and instead actually settle into living from human, and exploring what is human?

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What is the perspective through which we relate with ourselves? Do we look at ourselves as an “it”, through fact-based eyes, foregoing intimacy with ourselves? Do we look at ourselves from the interior, phenomenological view, deeply embedded within ourselves, while missing the perspectives from others’ eyes? How can we unite these perspectives, and more, to create right relationship with ourselves? And how can we set up the healthy frame for our self-connection in a way that is repeatable, so that we can sustain well-being?

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We can become aware of our sensations, thoughts, emotions, and feelings, and we can get that these are parts of ourselves, and not the whole of ourselves, which allows us to be witness to the arising, rather than being fused with the arising. And when we are viewing our parts, we want the quality of our view to be loving: a view that is viewing us through the eyes of well-being, that is gentle and discerning. Met by this view, our parts feel safe, and can metabolize back into the whole.

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As we come into ourselves, we become able to respond to others in a healthy way, capable of showing up for all of the relationships we are in. In this way, we can say that the inward turn into healthy self-relationship becomes the activation of relational response-ability.

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2. RELATING WITH GOD

Through what lens are we viewing God? Through the first person (“I am God”), second person (“the beloved)”, third person relationship (“God is up there in the sky”). Who or what God is depends on our orientation, set up by our social structures, our developmental structures, and our view. How do we want to orient towards God? What is God and Divinity to us? What is it to have faith? The Enlightenment era moved us from organized religion into invention. And in this era of invention we may have lost some of the hallmarks of being human… Gratitude, faith, and belief… Perhaps there is something quintessentially human that is being lost in our technological rush: Have we lost the cultivation of the soft inner essence? And in losing the cultivation, will we lose access to it? If we are not careful we could be conditioned into another type of a species. Instead, what are we interested in conditioning, in preserving, in having right relationship with?

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3. RELATING WITH NATURE
​We thought that we were immune to the ways we have been hurting Mother Earth… we thought that we were so separate from our environment, we objectified everything so much, compartmentalized everything so much, that we didn’t realize that it’s all interwoven. And now we are opening up to complexity, remembering that we are interwoven, that we are emergent and embedded within the environment. We are coming out of a reductionist lens and opening to an emergent lens. Perhaps as we are growing, we titrate between the two.. so at any given moment we can ask ourselves: are we in relationship through the reductionist view, or are we in relationship through the emergent view?
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We recognize that we are not separate - we are woven into the very fabric of earth ourselves. Our senses are woven into the songs of the birds, the breach of the whales, the howl of the wolves, the roar of the lions, the horse running… this is our home. This is how we can know ourselves again. This recognition of home and how we know ourselves is so ordinary and mundane that we often take it for granted and miss it - and yet as we pause and rest in contemplation and curiosity.. the profound to reveals itself from within the mundane, and we deepen into that which is always here.

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We welcome you to deepen with us through these explorations...

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