Thus far Adam’s Open Human Heart work has grown steadily and quietly through word-of-mouth. For the first time, in this pre-conference workshop, Adam will introduce the Open Human Heart experience to a broader audience.

The Open Human Heart Experience is an immersion into the vastness of our Human Hearts to hold the entirety of our being, beyond emotions, sensations, and energy states. Knowing what’s happening has nothing to do with fully allowing what’s happening in our direct experience. Together we’ll drop out of our heads and awareness as framing our moment and discover how willing we are to authentically feel without agenda.

This workshop will:
• Introduce you to the Open Human Heart Experience
• Invite you into your own direct experience as a human being first
• Demonstrate the power and reliability of I Don’t Know
• Explain what actual Safety is and what it’s not
• Offer teachings on the real reasons why we do the things we do (and why reasons don’t matter)
• Show how healing, evolution and awakening are byproducts of essential honesty.

If you plan to register for this workshop please review and submit these Three Invitations here: https://www.soulsign.com/open-human-heart/open-human-heart-agreement/

This workshop will explore some of the key concepts and techniques in the HeartMath Institute’s Activating the Heart of Teams program. This innovative program combines leading heart-brain science with a tested skillset for real-life application so individuals can flourish, which is at the heart of harmonious and robust teams or groups of individuals in classrooms, boardrooms, families, communities and organizations.
As our world experiences dramatic change and the stress it is causing in societies, people from all cultures are looking for practical ways to expand their heart connections in their communities to affect social change through compassionate awareness and actions. When people learn how to connect more from the heart and interact more harmoniously, we can work toward creating the kind of world in which we all want to live—one of deeper caring, kindness, connection and cooperation.

This workshop will provide the science and practical skills for moving from discord to harmony, raising personal vibration, creating flow in non-flowing situations, and how we can make more meaningful connections with others. An important aspect of the program is the new group coherence technology that provides real-time feedback of a group’s collective heart coherence level.

In this workshop you will learn skills that lead to:
• Increased positive energy and bonding.
• More appreciation, care, kindness and cooperation among individuals.
• Better communication.
• Enhanced collective intuition for increasing creativity and finding solutions to problems.
• Decrease in social discord and adversarial interactions.
• Viewing things from a more inclusive perspective.
• Motivation and momentum to make something purposeful happen.
• Increased sense of well-being and appreciation of collective action.
• Fewer mistakes and errors.• Faster and more accurate decision-making.
• Shorter meeting times.

If you plan to attend this workshop please review and submit these Three Invitations (https://www.soulsign.com/open-human-heart/open-human-heart-agreement/)

This workshop is a wonderful opportunity to discover the unity of body, mind, and spirit based on the tensegrity model. I will offer hands-on guidance and simple exercises to enhance sensory skills by exploring the musculoskeletal, respiratory, and nervous systems, and how they relate to the larger universe.

Through group exercises and one on one instruction, you’ll learn to increase body awareness, and breathing capacity, to change inefficient habits, so that you can move with ease and speak with confidence. Learn to awaken inherent potential by finding the support from the ground that can lead to full stature and expansion, while becoming aware of how trauma and overwhelm can interfere with this process.

The Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) team will take you on a journey to explore the science of interconnectedness. First, they will review the IONS Discovery Lab, a synergistic handshake between science and direct experience. IONS Discovery Lab (IDL) that we pronounce “ideal” aims to provide a service for workshop leaders to evaluate their offerings providing them evidence-based results, curate the largest dataset on experiential learning practices in the world, and use this knowledge to develop exception science-informed noetic training programs. They will also describe the Exceptional Healer Pilot Study, with 17 energy healers and over 200 pain patients that explores the efficacy of energy healing as a transformative practice.

Then, they will review IONSx a cutting-edge application-driven research program that demonstrates practical examples of consciousness affecting our physical world. Our first IONSx project is to create an ethical consciousness-dependent switch that responds to a specific mental signal from the operator. The IONS Science team will describe the “moonshot” program, its progress to date, and next steps.

Finally, the team will review the IONS Channeling Research Program where how explore how we access information and energy from beyond time and space. The program aims to answer six questions about channeling:
1. What do we already know from published and unpublished resources about this topic?
2. How common is non-local consciousness reception and what are its characteristics?
3. How does channeling work?
4. Are there defining characteristics of someone who is able to receive information more easily?
5. Can we verify the information?
6. Is the content useful?
The studies and results from each of these research questions will be reviewed including our most recent studies on mediumship accuracy and genetic predisposition to psychic abilities.

The workshop will include lecture, group discussion, and question and answer periods.

8 Members of the SACRA Immanence Theater Company and Zhen Dao, founder of SACRA and the practice tradition of MogaDao, will lead students on a theatrical and spiritual exploration of the relationship between spiritual practice and creative emergence.

The players of SACRA train in all of the uniquely spiritualized practice disciplines of MogaDao, including MogaDao Tripartite Meditation, 5-Realms Yoga, MogaDao Qigong, Jingshen Gongfu, Depth Sexuality, and MogaDao’s Heartmind Warrior Training Program, which consists of “Neurogenic Exercises,” slow and soft Jingshen Gongfu techniques in partnership, that transform the very structure of our response to stress, conflict, and fear.

This training is the foundation of what Zhen Dao calls “the erotic basis of being,” the ethos of SACRA Theater. Within the context of SACRA theater, these neurogenic exercises function to emancipate actors—and students of all fields of creative expression and paths of spiritual growth—from superficial notions of performance to reality, in all its indeterminacy, beauty, and peril.

We say that we believe in nonduality, but do our lives reflect it, especially in our relationships? We will focus on cultivating the heart space to move beyond othering, particularly when our heart is not in it. This historic moment is calling us higher and deeper than we have ever gone before. Will you answer the call? It’s time to live at a deeper level the oneness we know and proclaim.

AIl can drive cars, create music, recognize objects, find a new solar system, discover a hominid species, and trounce anyone in a game of Go. Reports of its limits have been greatly exaggerated. But can AI enjoy conscious experiences? Can it feel love? Some physicalists claim that unconscious matter, with proper complexity, ignites consciousness. I propose a new framework and question: Can we rejig our spacetime interface to open new portals into the preexisting realm of conscious agents?

It didn’t start with you, but it can end with you. Unconsciously, we relive our mother’s anxiety. We repeat our father’s disappointments. We replicate the failed relationships of our parents and grandparents. Just as we inherit our eye color and blood type, we also inherit the residue from traumatic events that have taken place in our family. Illness, depression, anxiety, unhappy relationships, and financial challenges can all be forms of this unconscious inheritance. In this workshop, Mark Wolynn, author of the award-winning It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who we are and how to End the Cycle (Penguin, 2017), will offer effective ways to break inherited patterns so we can live healthier, happier, more fulfilled lives.

3 C.E.s available

While we have unlocked the potential of a single atom we have yet to unlock the full potential of wise, loving and compassionate action. The responsibility to do so does not belong to someone other than each of us. For it is we who posses capacities of loving and wisdom seldom fully realized or embodied in the world of time and space.

At the core of the spiritual heart lies two paradoxical instincts. One is the upward movement of transcendence and wakening up to reality, while the other is of the power and grace of redeeming love and the experience of unity as it expresses itself in the world of time and space. A full and inclusive spiritual life will take full account of both of these paradoxical spiritual instincts. For in the end we are called to wake up from the over identification with form, as well as to re-embrace and re-embody the grace of our true nature in and as the world of form.

Our world is full of challenges and tragedies, opportunities and unlimited potential. To meet these challenges, both personal and collective, we need to act not from fear, resentment and conflict, but from love and wisdom. We need to experience and embody the power and presence of redemptive love.

Redemptive love is an experience of love, given by grace, that at once redeems, meaning that it restores something or someone to their natural condition of wholeness. Redemptive love also seeks to be embodied in our humanity and challenges each of us to embody its grace in the very depths and actions of our humanity. Redemptive love is a love that is fully committed to being a wise and benevolent presence in the relative world for the benefit of all beings.

Whenever and wherever redemptive love is present and embodied in our lives there is the fire of grace alive and active, and life is experienced as containing great meaning and purpose. The circle of spiritual awakening is completed only by literally re-embodying the spirit of awakened wisdom and love in and as our human life. Thus the redemptive power of love can become embodied and in-formed, and pour itself out upon the world.

“What can we do to bring healing and protection to the Earth?” This was the question that dharma teacher, Cynthia Jurs, asked a 106-year-old lama living in a cave in Nepal back in 1990. In response, she was given an ancient practice to fill and seal and bury Earth Treasure Vases. For 30 years Cynthia’s spiritual practice has been to take these holy vessels around the planet to restore balance and harmony to the Earth. The little clay pots are filled with prayers and offerings and planted like seeds in diverse cultures, communities and ecosystems and the heartfelt prayers and intentions they contain take root in surprising ways. With the help of elders, activists and regular folks world-wide, creative initiatives have been catalyzed though this ancient practice of sacred activism especially suited for our times.

Like acupuncture needles in the living body of the Earth, the Treasure Vases form a healing mandala of nodes and meridians imagined as a web of light that is here to serve us as we awaken together into our own unique role in the great work of our time—to heal the web of life, restore balance and harmony, envision our world anew, and embody that vision with every fiber of our life force for the benefit of all.

Participating in the ancient art of making relations with Nature, we see ourselves as a part of Gaia to whom we are inextricably linked. The Earth Treasure Vases have opened doors for us to form an international community, guided by the elders, grounded in the living Earth, dedicated to making a difference and supporting each other on the path of collective awakening.

Cynthia will offer a teaching on the Earth Treasure Vase practice and lead a guided meditation to open us as holy vessels for the work of global healing and collective awakening that is upon us now.

The Mother Mantra belongs to the ancient tradition of shamanic yoga. It presents a practical, simple, yet incredibly powerful system to profoundly change the way we interpret our life, allowing us to acquire awareness and the ability to achieve our aims and our dreams. Even more than that, the Mother Mantra is the path to change a world, a journey towards freedom from social conditioning. If you feel that a revolutionary spiritual leader is waiting inside of you, the Mother Mantra is your most powerful tool to make it happen. As part of the tradition of shamanic yoga, the roots of the Mother Mantra are to be found in all the most ancient mystical traditions of the world. It is nowadays practiced by leading business and entrepreneurs all over the world and has been adopted by many schools of counselling, meditation and traditional yoga as a powerful and holistic tool that provides uncountable benefits for both the body and the mind. Its practices rely on fostering ecstasy—the state in which all shamans, artists, poets operate, the basis of all creativity and happiness.

The tradition of the Mother Mantra sees mystics as the bearers of a vital mission: the mission of returning the feeling of sacredness to a desacralized world. In this are the keys to a human life on earth that can sustain both itself and the rest of the planet. For our species faces challenges that do not require simple ecology, but deep ecology, a revolution in the value and cognitive systems on which our behaviour as a society are based. For such revolutionaries—be they mystics, shamans, poets, artists, geniuses or fools—the Mother Mantra is a concrete path to fulfilment, happiness, prosperity, for themselves and the cosmos.

In this talk, Zhen Dao will address the current war on sense and sensibility and the dematerialization of the human body in the face of the colonization of sensibility itself, a colonization she calls “Info-colonization.” Info-colonization will not neutralize itself, and its acceleration continues increasingly to disable our capacity for wonder, tenderness, and empathy. But rather than pessimism, Zhen Dao sees in this demise of the human the very chance to understand, in an eschatological sense, what the human is for. Establishing this purpose as eros, in the Post-Daoist sense of the term, she will introduce into the language new concepts and terms that might hold inestimable value for those of us who are not willing to allow human tenderness, empathy, and the “holiness of the heart’s affections” to disappear into the history of nostalgia.

Lama Tsomo will teach us the ancient Tibetan compassion practice of Tonglen, one of the Four Boundless Qualities practices that we use, to grow our capacity for feeling the truth of our deep, loving connection with everyone. People will experience it in the moment and then, following this simple practice in a handout or online, we can take it into our daily lives, both on and off the cushion. It is an antidote to isolation and, an antidote to othering … and so, a perfect medicine for these times.

AI can drive cars, create music, recognize objects, find a new solar system, discover a hominid species, and trounce anyone in a game of Go. Reports of its limits have been greatly exaggerated. But can AI enjoy conscious experiences? Can it feel love? Some physicalists claim that unconscious matter, with proper complexity, ignites consciousness. I propose a new framework and question: Can we rejig our spacetime interface to open new portals into the preexisting realm of conscious agents?

In most spiritual traditions, love is seen only as universal or cosmic love. It is true that love is fundamentally a universal dimension to our spiritual nature. But it also expresses itself in our human relationships, including the one with divinity, in personal, relational and embodied ways. It is the same authenticity as in the presence of universal love, but with qualities useful for human relating, and important for the spiritual path. Love has true and full realization only when it is a personal and lived expression. But personal here is not that of the ego, but of the spiritual nature, a truth rarely known. This shows what the true essence of relationship is, and how love and Eros relate the human and the divine.

All the practices of shamanic yoga take place in a state of ecstasy. We must bear in mind that this condition belongs to us by nature; what we can do is increase our awareness of it. If we are to talk about shamanic yoga, then we must consider ecstasy as the founding stone of all practice, as the path that leads to becoming a shaman. To experience ecstasy, one needs to contemporarily undergo the “mother experience” and the “son experience”. The “mother experience” is achieved through the tools of visualisation, devotion, the defeat of fear through love. For the “son experience” we rely on the so-called “flowing sequences”. These are harmonious sequences of asana yoga postures followed by breathing exercises, specific mantras, mudras (that is, psychic gestures) and visualization exercises, such as the “psychic forest”. There are sequences able to cater to very different kinds of needs, such as to stimulate good sleep during the night, getting energized in the morning, turning anger or frustration into positive energy, or even constructing a healthy, harmonious relationship with food and the way we eat, or attaining the power of money. Mystics today must abandon the role attributed to them by organized religion and profoundly revolutionize all those symbols and myths according to which the majority of humans behave. As a powerful means of re-establishing a connection with our guide spirit, the invisible presence that is able to guide us to a life of prosperity and enlightenment, shamanic yoga is now practiced daily by many successful managers and businessmen.

Advaita Vedanta is the classic and paradigmatic school of nondual philosophy. Put simply, the essential teaching is 'The Absolute (Brahman) is the only reality, the world (jagat) is an appearance (of that nondual Absolute) and the sentient being (jiva) is none other than the nondual Absolute'—in Sanskrit 'Brahma Satyam, jagat mithya, jiva brahmaiva na para'. There is however, a secret to grasping this nondual teaching. The teaching is given in two steps—first, the well known 'neti, neti' 'not this, not this' leading to the realization of our spiritual nature and second, seeing that this newly discovered spiritual nature is nondual. Clarity about both steps is necessary to realize nonduality (Advaita). My talk will aim at achieving this clarity.

The use of specific bioresonance frequencies on particular points, allows to obtain a state of calm and relaxation that is useful to Western people to start meditative processes and awareness. In my speech I demonstrate how the use of bioresonance frequencies, in the range of visible light, induces an optimization of the parameters of emotional pressure, alignment of the chakras, better communication between the left and right hemispheres, measured through the GDV Bio-well, patent by prof. K. Korotkov, University of St. Petersburg. These are the indispensable conditions for starting a good process of personal and spiritual growth. Treatment with bioresonance frequencies is the starting point for aligning the informational, energetic and physical field in humans and when the three fields are aligned humans become powerful creators of their reality, coming into contact with the unified field.

Such a self-organization ability find its physical basis indeed in a Quantum Field Theory (QFT) interpretation of biological living matter which tells us that the electromagnetic dynamics are the fundamental actors to explicate the biological (and therefore also bio-chemical) phenomenology. As it has been shown since ‘80s the most consistent working hypothesis, to describe living dynamics is that “phase correlations” of some kind, i.e. coherence, play a decisive role in the description of biological matter and its activities. Coherence is the indispensable condition, in the micro as in the macro system, for a state of connection to the unified field.

Mark Gober, author of “An End to Upside Down Thinking” and host of the podcast “Where Is My Mind?”, will be discussing findings that have led him to the conclusion that changed his worldview 180-degrees: consciousness is the basis of all reality rather than matter. He explores independent areas of evidence, including quantum physics, psychedelics, savants, remote viewing, telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis, near-death experiences, communications with the deceased, and children who remember previous lives.The implications are immense for science, technology, and medicine as well as happiness, life/death, relationships, and even world peace. The shift to a consciousness-centric picture of reality is regarded by some as the next “Copernican-scale revolution.” Mark’s thesis has been endorsed by well-known thinkers such as Dr. Eben Alexander, Dr. Dean Radin, Dr. Ervin Laszlo, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, actress Goldie Hawn, and others.

Mark is a Partner at a Silicon Valley strategy firm, a former Wall Street investment banker, and former Princeton University tennis team captain. He is also a Board member of The Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS).

Native American relationships to the world around us is no longer a curiosity, but a necessity. In this session, Connie Buffalo, a member of the Red Cliff Band of Chippewas, invites you to step into the worldview of her traditional native teachings. You’ll experience the great questions about your origins, where you belong in the circle of creation, what the roles of ancestors are, how to redefine spirituality, and why your name is so important.

You’ll also learn about the role you play in what may be the last of the great prophecies. Your significance takes on a new meaning as you venture into the world of the native mind and spirit. You will leave with a new understanding of what it is to belong to a larger story and to bear the responsibility of being gods.

Come and participate in an interactive art installation using creativity to embody and celebrate (non-)duality. Sit in a circle of sacred casts to contemplate two questions: How do you define non-duality? and What’s one of your favorite dualities? Participate by answering on paper leaves and help ‘bloom’ the two metal Trees of Duality throughout the conference to share and inspire others.

A 90-min experiential workshop sharing ancient & modern insights on sounds influence on us as human beings. Involving the application of a variety of self-healing techniques to be directly experienced in a group environment. These techniques and tools are brought forth to create a sense of community and include exercises such as Breath-Work, Vocal Toning and an Open Sonic Meditation with Quartz Crystal/ Tibetan Singing Bowls, Gong, Chimes & other Harmonically Rich Sounds. Each tool is intended to guide us towards “Self-Empowerment”, as once learned the tools are easy to apply and with discipline can be privately practiced to help anyone remain more physically relaxed, emotionally balanced, & mentally focused as daily life goes on.

You’ll also learn about the role you play in what may be the last of the great prophecies. Your significance takes on a new meaning as you venture into the world of the native mind and spirit. You will leave with a new understanding of what it is to belong to a larger story and to bear the responsibility of being gods.

While Yoga today in its most popular expressions is primarily associated with a
physical culture for which it is well known, the meaning and value of Yoga lies in its
deeper dimension, in the domain of mind, consciousness, and self-transformation leading
to spiritual liberation or freedom. The potential for an embodied, relational freedom
whereby consciousness is wholistically aligned in our day to day lives, is either
overlooked or left unexplored. For example, Yoga as classically formulated in Patañjali’s
Yoga-Sūtra, has far too often been misconstrued as leading to a freedom from the world,
emphasizing renunciation, asceticism, disengagement, and transcendence of the body,
mind and world. Interpretations of Yoga that adhere to an absolute separation of
consciousness or spirit from manifestation or formed existence, implying a final
unworkable dualism between liberated spiritual identity and life-in-the-world, amount to
an impoverishment of the possibilities for an embodied, relational life. Yet, from another
perspective, freedom can be understood as being in and for the world, thus supporting a
life-affirming approach that challenges us to an enriched, relational humanity allowing
for evolution, development and innovation through which life progresses and the world is
made a better place.

Through a deeper, mature and adept philosophical and experiential knowing, and
drawing from and updating the classical tradition, we will explore how Yoga can
culminate in a balanced integration of life that incorporates a clarity of awareness with
the integrity of being and action. Yoga manifests as love, the very abiding as and sharing
of our being or power of consciousness, in which the non-separation of self and world,
experiencer and experienced, knower and known, is uncovered and lived as our authentic
nature.

Spirituality has a long history of placing values and judgments on how we relate to money. It's a loaded subject, and many people in the spiritual community have an unhealthy relationship with money. Stories and beliefs influence our actions and keep us stuck in repeating behaviors from an old paradigm.

What stories are you telling yourself that keep you from meeting money face to face? Does resistance arise just thinking about the topic of money? The conditioned ideas we tell ourselves keep us from ultimate freedom in our financial as well as spiritual lives. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Some of the more “accepted” stories surrounding money and spirituality are often considered taboo to question. It’s an old belief that spiritual people cannot also be wealthy. The vow of poverty was a religious rule that separated one from dealing with the issue of money directly. This is avoidance, and to fully step into our own autonomy and power we have to bring these repressive patterns to light.

Spiritual growth happens when awareness penetrates every aspect of our human lives. It’s time to evolve into a new relationship where money is seen as another form of energy we interact with in life. With a detached perspective, people in the spiritual community will be able to allow money to come into their lives without an added agenda. Learning how to earn and use money wisely is imperative to being empowered individuals in society. When people with spiritual values are prosperous it presents an opportunity to make changes on a greater scale and influence the redistribution of wealth globally.

Transformation can happen in the world, beginning with freeing ourselves from outdated concepts that have kept us stagnant as individuals and as a collective.

What constitutes the essence of a true relationship? And how is this related to our spiritual nature? We will explore the different ways spiritual teachings and traditions view relationship. And how relationship can be part of our practice, and at the same time enriched by our realization. An understanding not usually known by society and rarely discussed in spiritual teachings.

Oscillations of neuronal activity (brainwaves) in different frequency ranges reflect the electrical code of cortical network dynamics and correlate with internal states of subjective consciousness. Gamma oscillations (35-100 Hz) are involved in key cortical computation by coordinating the activity among spatially distributed neural networks and binding spatiotemporal properties of cortical responses involved in behavior perception and cognition. Recent studies of Tibetan monks adept at compassionate meditation discovered a robust increase in Gamma power. Further studies reported increased Gamma in other meditative traditions.

EEG studies of entheogen induced visionary altered states of consciousness (ASC), viz. Ayahuasca and psilocybin also reported increased Gamma. Also, lucid dreaming correlates with increased Gamma and can be induced by tACS neurostimulation at 40 Hz. My own EEG research has revealed increased Gamma power induced by inhalation of DMT (both N,N-DMT and 5-MeO- DMT). I’ve also discovered increased Gamma power during Kundalini activations producing orgasmic states and bioenergetic healing states. Thus Gamma oscillations are emerging as a distinct EEG signature of ASC that correlate with the attainment of higher states of consciousness, compassion, love, happiness, flow states and positive emotional wellbeing.

This presentation covers the basics of Kriya yoga. It includes specific exercises to help participants have a clear idea of how these techniques may cultivate a deeper embodied experience of self-regulatory and mindfulness practices. This workshop will demonstrate how the various aspects of Kriya, with its subtle nuances, can deepen and enrich a contemplative practice.
These exercises can all be accomplished while seated and will largely focus on posture, breath work, visualization and mantra. Many past participants and students of this work have described it as transformative.

Without a shift in consciousness, humanity will become extinct. To effect a shift at large scale requires a contemplative turn in our educational systems. Practice- models are needed to blaze a pathway for this transformation. The nonprofit Peace in Schools has pioneered the deepest practice-model in contemplative education in schools.

In 2018, we partnered with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health on the first scientific study globally to research mindfulness and trauma by examining adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) in schools. You’ll receive a preview of initial findings and learn about a non-dual, connective, love-based model that we can leverage for collective transformation.

Love began Creation. Love organized Creation. Only through love, each Self can complete the journey through Creation to return to the Supreme Source—The Supreme Reality.

Being on a path is essential for the journey. I will share the Path of the Heart, which is my path and how to enter it.

A novel model of consciousness is proposed that uses three core ideas: (A) a two-agent model of the human brain, (B) Attention Schema Theory (by Princeton Neuroscientist, Michael Graziano), and (C) a theorem from control theory which claims that every good agent must have a model of the world in which the agent is active. The two agents are the Modeler (that creates the model of the world), and the Controller (that controls the body and produces thoughts and feelings). This model: (1) Demonstrates that we are self-models living in our model of the world. (2) Suggests there would be two types of attention mechanisms—a Focal Attention Mechanism and a Diffuse Attention Mechanism. (3) Clarifies the distinction between Access Consciousness and Phenomenal Consciousness (by NYU Philosopher, Ned Block). (4) Proposes a mechanism that produces World Model awareness (which includes, for example, peripheral visual awareness). (4) Explains three kinds of consciousness: Normal human consciousness, Flow state consciousness, and Nondual states of consciousness. (5) Provides an answer to philosophical questions such as: (A) What conditions cause conscious awareness to arise? (B) Why does conscious awareness seem to be fundamentally non-physical and to not have a location in space?

Based on my book Mindful Dreaming and compelling dreams of clients and awakened teachers, I demonstrate how our nightly dreams use the language of metaphor to provide Nondual guidance in deconstructing our conditioned belief in a separate self. Dreams can also offer powerful here and now glimpses of unitive consciousness. Indeed, every dream can be seen as a means to clarify and restore our relationship to our true nature.

As a vehicle for the Progressive Path, I show how dreams teach the core tenets of nonduality e.g., Pure Awareness impartially welcomes all experience; There is no personal Doer: Suffering arises when we resist what is; Nondual awareness ends suffering.

In every dream one of four core habits of thought or ego strategies predominate: Distraction; Control; Judgment; and Attachment. I demonstrate with abundant examples how each of these thoughts creates its own unique quality of suffering in the dream that is parallel to the dreamer’s suffering and emotional contraction in waking life. Each dream narrative also offers respectively, four healing nondual values—Silence/Stillness; Humility/Surrender; Compassion; and Grieving/Letting Go—that can dissolve the contractions corresponding to each type of ego strategy. Dreams present these Nondual qualities to the dreamer via a Dream Mentor—persons, animals, or elements in nature that embody those qualities. In nightmares we feel mortally threatened because we are so strongly identified with an ego strategy that the mere presence of the Mentor’s nondual perspective is intuited (correctly) as tantamount to immanent dissolution and (ego) death. Thus, dreams are frightening or peaceful to the degree that we rigidly resist or welcome the presence of the Mentor.

As a vehicle for the Direct Path, I show how dreams sometimes provide the direct experience of Nondual unitive consciousness even without the dreamer’s exposure to such teachings or previous spiritual practice.

The storms and tragedies of contemporary life can be termed a spiritual crisis, in which we must awaken to a greater sense of self or else become more isolated and subject to increasing feelings of isolation and helplessness.

Because all things are ultimately interconnected, the challenges we face and the changes underway signal a genuine transformation of the world. Change can be disconcerting; yet in troubled times the inner threads of genius, imagination and wisdom become both more important and surprisingly more available.

Upavita is an old Sanskrit term for the eternal thread of golden imagination that makes each life valuable and noble from the beginning. This sacred thread of life connects the mind with the heart; it ties us to the dream of life and leads us to the purpose of our soul. While holding it, all the moments of our lives make sense; without it, all can seem accidental and pointless.

Call it dharma or the inner law of our being; call it a life dream or a spiritual calling; we are each called to awaken to the inner plotline of a story trying to unfold from within. In learning to express the mythic pattern woven within, we learn to contribute to the renewal of community as well as a restoration of nature.

What we need at this time is not a minor repair, but a major transformation of the world that can only start from the inside. Transformation at the level of the individual heart and soul generates the imagination and collective energy needed to change the conditions of the world.

In spiritual contexts there can be a neutralizing of difference as a way of creating community through commonality and with an intention towards a collective consciousness. However, in a world where difference has meaning and impact – queerness, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomics and geographic and historical contexts – to neutralize difference negates pieces of all of our whole selves in their great texture and abundance.

We will explore together the way in which seeing and honoring sacred and beautiful difference builds deeper community, collective awareness and transformation. We will engage in this movement towards a radical love of each other and begin to see how through honoring the tapestry of difference we build connection to the larger social world and a call to manifesting social change.

Because if we see the sacred difference of others it will inherently pull us towards not only honoring that difference, but also protecting it in all the ways it is expressed in the world.

We will engage the ways in which the science of mirroring neurons can offer us a map into this practice of honoring sacred difference. We will close with a practice of mirroring radical love and seeing the sacred difference in each other.

Quantum physics—widely considered the greatest scientific discovery of all time—has already changed the course of history with all of the new technologies it has inspired, but these innovations are considered the “low-hanging fruit,” a miniscule fraction of the real benefit of the quantum gnosis, which is to be found within the human psyche. The revelations emerging from quantum physics are pointing out that we, through our consciousness, are integral participants in nature’s ongoing process of creation who are participating—whether we consciously know it or not—in creating ourexperienceof ourselves and the world at each and every moment. Quantum physics is revealing that we, by our very nature, are creative—and creator—beings who unknowingly possess great power to cast reality in ways we can only imagine.

As if under a spell of our own making, the majority of our species, however, have become entranced by our intrinsic gift for dreaming up our world, unknowingly hypnotizing ourselves via our God-given power to creatively call forth reality in such a way that our creative power unconsciously boomerangs against us, undermining our potential for individual and collective evolution. The revelations emerging from quantum physics are unlocking the vast, world-transforming creative power of the human psyche. The new physics is a spiritual treasure that humanity has dreamed up—both in our world and inside of our minds—as the medicine for the collective psychosis afflicting the human species.

The revelation that is quantum physics expands the realm of the possible to previously unimaginable degrees. In seeing through and dispelling the illusory boundary between mind and matter, between inner and outer, quantum physics has discovered the dreamlike nature of reality. In this presentation we will explore how quantum physics is the physics of the universal dream: it is simultaneously pointing to the dreamlike nature of reality while being an expression—and revelation—of the very dreamlike nature at which it is pointing.

The auditory constructs of ‘sacred sound’ found within a Gong Bath™ will bend space and awaken that portion of the universal mind within you to deeper understandings of Self.
”To see a world in a grain of sand,
and a heaven in a wild flower,
hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
and eternity in an hour.”
The power of William Blake’s words resonate within this poly-tonal, multi-octave vibratory experience: Anticipate deepening insights into transcendent wisdom, compassion and miracles.

We are aware of thinking and acting, and we typically think this is neurons and brains are for. Their deeper functions in regulating the body, either directly or through neurohormonal and neuroimmune interactions are largely unconscious and therefore neglected. This talk introduces theoretical models and experimental data suggesting an even deeper and evolutionarily older function of nervous systems: regulating the size and shape of the body. If these models are correct, the original function of neurons was the regulation of cell proliferation and differentiation. Neurons still perform these functions, from early embryogenesis through adulthood. We may even, sometimes, be aware of them. Recognizing this gives a new meaning to "embodied cognition."

Many of us are familiar with the powerful construct of the Hero (or Heroine’s) Journey, made popular by the renowned 20th century mythologist and scholar Joseph Campbell. In his work, Campbell identified a potent mythological motif in which the individual, living comfortably in his or her normal and known world, receives a call to adventure. This call requires him or her to encounter magical forces, first outside, and then eventually within the self. These magical discoveries are used to defeat a threat and are eventually integrated into the person’s being. The journey is completed when the Hero returns to his or her community and offers their transformed consciousness as a blessing to those around them.

The Monster’s Journey describes a different—though complementary—transformational journey. This is the journey of the those who, early in their lives, have been changed or altered as a consequence of early childhood trauma. Monsters—or their equivalents, Aliens and Mutants—begin their journey in the world of the abnormal. So instead of being called to a hidden magical world, they are challenged to connect to the normal world, which they see every day but which remains frightening and alienating to them. And instead of gifting their communities with newly discovered inner magic, they may eventually offer back the abilities and heightened personal qualities that have been gifted to them through the process of early traumatization. In this way, the individual finds their authentic self and redeems the suffering caused by the trauma.

This presentation will describe the Monster’s Journey in detail, understanding it as a modern archetype. The talk will benefit both those who have survived early childhood trauma as well as their loved ones and caretakers/therapists. There will be ample time allotted for group sharing among participants as well as question and answer with Dr. Forman.

Join us for a timely conversation exploring a new paradigm supporting psychological health for spiritual teachers, leaders, and communities. Many scandals, traumas, and the common psychological dysfunctions litter the modern spiritual and religious landscape. Instead of focusing on what went wrong, we believe we can learn from past mistakes and collectively focus on spiritual integrity, trauma, shadow work, embodiment, psychological growth, and ethics, in order to cultivate qualities that create healthy, mature spiritual teachers, students, and communities, as well as success and integrity on the path.

Let us together meet the challenging topics of sex, power, money, trauma, hierarchies, groupmind/groupthink, and spiritual bypassing in a supportive and proactive environment. Join us as we work to explore new models based on shared human values while honoring our spiritual nature.

Together we will examine:
• What qualities characterize a psychologically healthy teacher, student, and spiritual community?
• Is there a legitimate role for conventional therapy or other psychologically healing modalities on the spiritual path?
• How do new understandings of trauma research and healing impact our understanding of integrated psychospiritual growth?
• What defines a healthy teacher/student relationship? What is at play when a teacher consciously or unconsciously cultivates dependency in their students?
• What is group mind and group think within spiritual communities and how does it contribute to unhealthy behavior or cult-like tendencies?
• Does the contemporary spiritual community share clear, ethical practices and processes?

At the end of this explorative discussion, are we open to taking on the challenge to support change both within our personal lives and within our spiritual communities? Together we will mobilize to empower ourselves and each other to be the change we want to see within the current climate of contemporary spirituality.

Within Mahayana Buddhist traditions, there are oracle systems that have guided the course of the tradition and have even helped with the establishment of new schools of thought. We will explore the different forms of wisdom that have emerged out of relationships mediated by the oracle tradition between Tibetan Buddhist deities and well-known scholars. We will explore the worlds that opened through the relationship between Tsongkhapa and Manjushri and between Asanga and Maitreya , for example. Shamanism is a form of spiritual practice based in earth-wisdom traditions whose practices rely heavily on the practitioner's capacity to form oracle relationships with the unseen powers of nature. One of the primary tasks for the shamanic initiate is to master the art of mediumship. Whenever shamans are working, they are expected to be able to offer a vehicle for helping spirits to enter into the world of ordinary reality to assist those in need. Shamans may be called upon to speak with those who have passed on or provide a channel for others to do so. They may also be asked to become a conduit for the subtle energies held in light and sound to be used effectively in all types of healing environments. We will look at the ways in which shamans use oracle work and the channeling of spirits in their work in serving others.

Our human and greater-than-human relationships in life make us who we are. From our best friends, family, ancestry to the water we drink, the deer, the hawk, the spider, the soil, the trees, the ocean, and the sky. This is an altar to honor all the relationships that bind us and that we are bound to, in and through time. This altar, by Day Schildkretand our entire SAND community will be surrounded by a nest made of local branches from local trees. Each branch will be wrapped with the names of our relations that we care about and love.
Invitation: Please take a branch. On a slip of paper write the name of something or someone you care deeply about, are glad they are in this world and will grieve if and when they leave this world. Wrap this paper around the branch and wrap the colored string around the paper, binding the paper to the branch. Hand the branch to the artist, Day for placement in the nest. Witness the altar and nest being created and eventually, deconstructed.

In the life sciences, recurring cycles of differentiation and integration toward greater wholeness is a universal process. And so it is with human lovers. The spark of romantic love promises the possibility of unity. But as lovers continue on this path, differences surface, and our equilibrium is threatened.

The path to wholeness becomes one of inner work:
• how do we work with the projections and fears that surface when my partner wants one thing and I want another?
• what do I do when an innocent action on my part triggers my partner’s insecurities?
• how do we sort through the layers of unconscious motivations and conditioned fears that keep us attached to needing certain things from a partner in order to feel secure?

In this experiential session, we will explore how to use relationship as an awareness practice, a mutual journey of healing and liberation—where together we learn to hold a loving, compassionate space for the rejected, abandoned, angry, or fearful parts of our personalities, rather than identifying with these as who we are. We learn to let go of trying to transcend such messy aspects of our humanity, and discover that the practice of compassionate self-inquiry, while holding space for our disowned parts, pops us into a deepening sense of wholeness, an embodiment of love.

In the context of psychotherapy, the client-therapist connection and relationship are of utmost and fundamental importance. However, traditional psychology misses the mark in properly addressing this necessity by holding limited, incomplete, and dualistic therapeutic positions which further reinforce a duality of separation, and limit the transformative power of a true, undifferentiated therapeutic relationship.

In contrast, nondual-based psychotherapy offers the opportunity to dissolve personal and interpersonal dualities, heal from dualistic-based suffering, and give rise to a greater sense of connection to self, to life, and to reality. By creating a relationship based on mutuality within the sacred space of pure awareness, nondual psychotherapy reinforces the rediscovery of our true nature, diffuses the illusion of separation, and promotes healing through the powerful dynamic of true, authentic nondual connection with another human being.

Devotion is a way of relating that invites us to merge, to become fully absorbed, with the object of our devotion. When the object of our devotion is Source, or God, or Consciousness, we merge with this knowing, and we experience ourselves as One with it. Advaita Vedanta is the nondual teaching, and Yoga is the practice, that gives us a direct experience with the true nature of reality and of ourselves.

Join us for this exploration of Bhakti, the practice of Love and Devotion in the Yoga tradition. Explore the ever-deepening stages of awareness and how to remove the illusions that stand in our way from knowing ourselves as the divine. Learn how the practice of love and devotion is the mother of all wisdom, and brings us to the limitless happiness and freedom that we all seek.

The world is in desperate need for compassion. Compassion means to recognize the real nature of every living being, also in actions that express separation. Compassion means too see that there is not a person anywhere, but Consciousness in action. In this recognition you can welcome in your Heart all the suffering of believing that this is not so, knowing that maybe this cannot be seen through every form right away, but accepting seeing this in your Heart until it is possible for everybody. This is the life of a bodhisattva and the life to which we all aspire to as truth seekers. If this is possible, any action of Consciousness that expresses through your form will come from unity and will support only unity in the world. That compassion can do miracles, and arises from that true Heart that is everywhere, as Ramana Maharshi said.

What can we do in front of a crumbling world in which everything seems to be more and more divided?
We are Emptiness that contemplates all form through the human experience. The Heart is this Emptiness that meditates the world. Abiding in the compassion of the empty Heart allows us to dissolve any apparent contradictions and divisions we see in the world, not because we resolve these polarities but because they can all co-exist and dissolve in our Being. In the Heart there is no need to split ourselves into two and polarize into right and wrong, you or me, your truth or my truth - all this can simultaneously exist and be contained in Emptiness.

We will explore the agony which may arise when one tries to think nondually, when this involves significant un-learning. Focusing on the nondual constructive math of Errett Bishop, we will consider the implications for education and philosophy. Constructivists are a tiny deviant sect, who propose a small but painful modification to the “classical” logic used by the vast majority in their mathematics research.

Why should a non-mathematician care? Because it is an issue of pluralism and freedom of choice. Because the path to constructive understanding can be seen as a therapeutic process, a healing or liberation, and also as kicking a habit, as a recovery. Because constructivists offer different understandings, of such concepts as: truth, existence, belief, equality, identity, infinity.

The talk is inspired by my own painful transition from classical to constructive understanding and subsequent research, and by the article Five Stages of Accepting Constructive Mathematics by Andrej Bauer, that appeared in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society in 2017 (The stages are indeed those of Kübler-Ross.)

Truth is an evolutionary force in humanity and the basis of the civilization we have developed. It’s a force that cuts two ways: toward the outer world of things and systems, and toward the inner world of psyche and spirit. It takes truth to further our science, and it takes truth to realize our essential nature. It’s also true that the beliefs humans have collected over our history are often antiquated, no longer apply, or are distorted wishes for the world we want or believe once existed. These beliefs obscure the truths we have discovered about the world and ourselves, and therefore influence how we live together and what world we build.

To continue developing civilization, our use of truth will need to be three-fold:
1) discovering new truths
2) applying those truths as well as the truths we have previously discovered, and
3) undoing the false beliefs and mistaken views we have, both outer and inner.

Given the above, our relationship to truth is the most important relationship we have, both individually and collectively. It will help us live and prosper to understand what our relationship to truth actually is. Do we recognize its significance and importance in our lives and societies? Do we actively cultivate our relationship to it? Is it an evolving relationship? Are we getting closer to it? Is our relationship to truth a love relationship?

It would seem that truth loves humanity in that it has provided us an instrument to discover and apply it. That instrument is inquiry. It is somewhere involved in all human endeavor: science, technology, arts, education, governance, medicine, journalism, spiritual realization ... It’s how we discover reality and build our world. We can use it to optimize our relationship to truth.

What is to come through this birth canal of our collective evolution, we cannot know. It can feel so unstable, so frightening and painful to our vulnerable birthing selves as we leave one world and are not yet fully grounded within a new one. This constant dying and letting go into the emergence of our next expression is what our organic developmental wisdom carries. There is a 13 billion (at least!) years old ancient intelligence that knows how to give birth, to bond and to participate in this inter-being. We are this, that is awake, aware, and trustworthy at the very core of our being. We can allow this intelligence to permeate all of our activities and relationships.

In this class, we will melt below habitual patterns of an over-stimulated nervous system, wired through history, a false sense of separation, and the thinking mind to connect directly with our core intelligence. Using breath, sound vibration, subtle intrinsic movement, embryological anatomy and provocative inquiry we enter into the inner alchemy that allows a dissolve of any outdated structures. A psycho-spiritual somatic reorganization and higher order of self-regulation arises as our cells surrender into the all-pervasive holding ground of nature that is always present, when we are seated in the Core. We will re-emerge renewed, resourced and ready to re-engage our senses such that they become thresholds where the divine, the natural world, our culture and the mystery of being human coalesce as the dynamic dance of Life.

For 30 years, dharma teacher Cynthia Jurs has taken little clay pots called Earth Treasure Vases, around the world to restore balance and harmony to the Earth. Like acupuncture needles in the living body of Mother Gaia, the Earth Treasure Vases are filled with healing prayers and symbolic offerings, then taken to places calling for protection and renewal to be planted like seeds where they are needed. With the help of elders, activists and regular folks in diverse cultures, communities and ecosystems around the whole planet, the heartfelt prayers and intentions held within these holy vessels take root in surprising ways bringing this ancient practice of sacred activism alive in answer to the call of our times.

Please join Cynthia in a special ceremony to initiate one of the last remaining Earth Treasure Vases she received from the lamas in Nepal that is imbued with sacred medicines connecting it to all the enlightened lineage masters. The destination of the Earth Treasure Vase will be announced at SAND, and after a meditation, will be passed around our circle to receive your prayers and symbolic offerings. The SAND community is invited to join the Gaia Mandala Global Healing Community to envision our world anew and embody that vision for the sake of all beings. Guided by the elders and grounded in the living Earth, with each Earth Treasure Vase, we are planting the seeds of collective awakening and planetary healing — becoming Vessels of the Holy ourselves.

In the ancient Hebrew tradition, discovering hidden relationships between words, letters, and sounds serves to shift our consciousness into states of greater presence and expansion. In this session, we will explore the esoteric relationship between form and formlessness embedded within the Shema, an ancient mystical formula and sacred-sound practice designed to awaken our consciousness into an embodied state of nondual realization and universal love. In this process, the relationship between the dual and the nondual is clarified: the formless is recognized as the form, the transcendent as the immanent, the unmanifest as the manifest, the spiritual as the material.

The looking-glass relations of pure mathematics are among the most significant relations of which we are a part. Grand Unified Theories of Physics use mathematical relations called dualities to unify gravity with the Standard Model. One such duality is the powerful Homological Mirror Symmetry, which relates spaces with different topologies by reflection across their Hodge diamond. Grand Unified Theories of Mathematics use mathematical relations called isomorphisms and quasi-isomorphisms to relate number theory and geometry. One such quasi-isomorphism is the Local Langlands Correspondence, which is a conjectured GUT of global class field theory relating Galois groups and automorphic forms in a filtration series of powerful correspondences. These GUTs work in codimension-infinity moduli space, which is a “higher” geometric parameter space relating subsets across all scales. For instance, the power set of R2, the Euclidean xy plane, contains a copy of every book ever written and all books to be written in all futures, since it contains all subsets of points in R2. Thus, the power set is a magical moduli space!

Rev. Kimberly Braun stands before you as one surrendered, and surrendering over and again into the embrace of the Beloved. In her presentation she will weave storytelling of her own unitive experiences as a cloistered Carmelite nun, and the mystical insights and systematics of Teilhard de Chardin, Carl Jung, Teresa of Avila and John of the cross to lay out for all attendees the relevance and power of a relationship between the individual person and the Ground of all Being leading to the ultimate dissolution of notions such as ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ INTO simple, all encompassing, all penetrating BEING.

Kimberly does not want anyone to assume what she says is ‘true,’ but rather wishes to invite you into the adventure of discovering truth as your personal experience reveals it to you. Her presentation will both excite your senses with the playfulness with which she recounts stories of union and stir your mind through her compelling insights and reflection on the nature of relationship as part of what it means to be human, Consciousness in Form.

One consciousness plays itself as two, in this divine dance of apparent separation and union. We will explore the divine masculine and feminine within and the inner union that flourishes in embodied awakening. We will explore what this looks like on the outside and inside both personally and in relationships. We will also explore the perfection of and resolution of longing for the other in the awakening process both in and out of intimate relationships.

Psychedelics have officially re-entered mainstream consciousness, through clinical research trials at major universities, corporate-sponsored pharmaceutical drug development, and decriminalization efforts in major America cities. Everyone from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Michael Pollan now has a story to tell about how mushrooms can save humanity. But let's not forget the original love stories that the mushrooms have been quietly sharing with humans for millennia. In this talk, Dr. Katherine MacLean will weave a tale of scientific discovery, mystical love, super-natural intelligence, and personal redemption from the perspective of individual humans and their amazing encounters with psilocybin mushrooms. Learn more at www.katherinemaclean.org

There is a perspective which holds that all of life is not only ‘inter-connected’ but also ‘inter-experiencing’ each other. From this point of view consciousness is inter-connected and arises through all first person experiences in a given moment simultaneously (inter-experiencing). This idea is captured by the term ‘Interbeing’, coined by Thich Nhat Hanh. Interbeing is a powerful framework for communicating non-duality to audiences with dualist intuitions, for emphasising the practical implications of non-duality, and for capturing the internalization of non-duality into a lasting perception of personal identity. Any individual self embracing the Interbeing lens understands her existence as arising through all other selves as much as through her own—and as such holds the Golden Rule (treat others as you would treat yourself) inherently in her sense of identity.

While a number of self-transcendence and spirituality scales have been developed, none directly address the conceptualization of interbeing in perception of self. The purpose of this preliminary study was to formulate an Interbeing Scale (IS) and its sub-scales, and to build internal and ecological validity of the overall scale and sub-scales. As a first step, the IS was delivered to a pilot sample of 157 adults through an online survey. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was then used to derive an underlying dimension of Interbeing, which was extracted and correlated with outcome variables. Alphas showed strong internal validity. The correlations between IS sub-scales and compassion, giving, and inspiration suggest the possibility of ecological validity. Scale items were also assessed for clarity and validity with a sample of eight senior monastics from the Order of Interbeing, as well as four expert researchers who had developed related scales. Based on data analysis and qualitative feedback an updated version of the IS was then developed and tested.

Many people focus on spiritual awakening to the exclusion of other areas of life, or they focus on trying to fix one or two problem areas of their lives. You are meant to live a vibrant, alive, and aligned life in all areas: spiritual awakening, abundance, relationship, emotional healing, work, and body. When you treat your life as an ecosystem, you’ll find that any area that is lagging behind affects the other areas. Similarly, every area that is awake and embodied can lift up the other facets of life. You have a loving opportunity to illuminate and awaken the whole ecosystem of your life.

Can we remain naked of self images in front of the ignorance of the world? Resting beyond the dualistic game of guilt and blame, the empty Heart sees Love moving in every action and relates only to itself.

True compassion can be in certain cases very controversial, especially when there is a strong tendency to take sides. The ego-concept blinds us to recognize that there is only pure Awareness that moves through all forms. Where Love does not know itself consciously, its expression will be filtered and sometimes even perverted into what we could call evil or darkness. This lack of self recognition is the source of any violence, shame, guilt or blame. Compassion is the ability, by Awareness, to recognize and acknowledge only itself everywhere.

Our deepest essence, Pure Consciousness, is just apparently hidden behind the game of personality and it can - through meditation - re-absorb within itself all ignorance. Standing in the Heart in the face of conflict, we can stop holding on to any position whatsoever, allowing the burning of any defense mechanism. It leads us to stand in the rawness of vulnerability, that is openness itself.

This openness is meeting the world, and ourselves, with a completely transpersonal compassion - it is seeing yourself as the other, feeling their pain as yours. It is Love in action - an exquisite divinely human quality.

As Consciousness you can take that suffering into your Heart, because despite where it appears, ultimately it is all yours. The Heart, as Pure Awareness though the human form, can transform everything in itself.

This living from the Heart becomes a service of our community, embodying our understanding and “walking our talk”.
Compassion can be revolutionary dropping of attachment to any ideas, letting the Heart live us from the mystery and responding just to its silent voice.

This workshop is a wonderful opportunity to discover the unity of body, mind, and spirit based on the tensegrity model. I will offer hands-on guidance and simple exercises to enhance sensory skills by exploring the musculoskeletal, respiratory, and nervous systems, and how they relate to the larger universe.

Through group exercises and one on one instruction, you’ll learn to increase body awareness, and breathing capacity, to change inefficient habits, so that you can move with ease and speak with confidence. Learn to awaken inherent potential by finding the support from the ground that can lead to full stature and expansion, while becoming aware of how trauma and overwhelm can interfere with this process.

Our human and greater-than-human relationships in life make us who we are. From our best friends, family, ancestry to the water we drink, the deer, the hawk, the spider, the soil, the trees, the ocean, and the sky. This is an altar to honor all the relationships that bind us and that we are bound to, in and through time. This altar, by Day Schildkret and our entire SAND community will be surrounded by a nest made of local branches from local trees. Each branch will be wrapped with the names of our relations that we care about and love.

This talk will teach you everything you want to know about what it is to be an empath. David will cover the history of the word, from its inception in literature to its present day use. He'll explore the edges of empathy and where it meets intuitive abilities—then he'll push into the seemingly inexplicable realm of psychic phenomena. You'll learn David's own story, going from skeptic to self-proclaimed empath. He'll describe the nature of his own superpower and his desire to have his superpower, and the superpowers of his fellow empaths, more rigorously studied and understood by science. Lastly, he'll help you discover where you are on the empath spectrum. You might think the word doesn't apply to you, that it's for "those sensitive types," but you might be surprised.

This presentation will focus on how the subtle body can explicitly be incorporated into somatic therapy and psychotherapy in order to assist the healing process. Topics will include an overview of the subtle body, a discussion of subtle body and its connection to emotions, and how this understanding can be used in healing. The presentation will include an experiential component, focus on somatic awareness and incorporating the teachings of the body through pranayama and visualization.

At seventeen, David studied with a Kabbalah master to fashion universes out of emptiness on stage. It is an ancient and rare art form, not unlike life itself.

The complexity of the present time seems to demand a deepening of our nature if we are going to survive. Deepening requires exploration. And for all its byways, exploration leads ultimately to the spiritual source of our existence and to the quest for a faith that will support our continuing explorations. Not since the days of Plato and Buddha and Confucius, some 2500 years ago, has there been such an uprising of spiritual yearning. Though the varieties of contemporary religious experience may look or sound different, they share a core belief—that each human being contains a godseed, a divine essence that can be nurtured through spiritual practice into a fully matured expression of the god stuff within. Moreover, belief in a divine essence as the basis of reality is not limited to explicitly religious paths. Scientists of a Non Dual bent explain reality in terms that are not much different from those mystics use. While mystics speak of steps on the path to union with the Infinite, scientist-seekers talk about the frequency bands of consciousness, some of which are closer than others to Universal being. Speculative scientists often use the metaphor of the hologram to explain humanity's place in the Universal Mind. Each part of a hologram contains an image of the whole. Break a hologram image up, shine a special kind of laser light though any of its pieces, and you get the whole picture back again. In spiritual terms, we might think of ourselves as fragments of the great hologram of Reality. Shine the proper light of consciousness through us, and we each reflect the whole—starfish and sequoias, the sap rising in the winter trees and the yearning of God for each of us. . .This yearning to know our true nature is universal. When I have studied or talked with seekers who have had this experience, they have told me of a joy that passes understanding, an immense surge of creativity, a instant uprush of kindness and tolerance that make them impassioned champions for the betterment of all, bridge builders, magnets for solutions, peacemakers, pathfinders. Best of all, other people feel enriched and nourished around them. Everyone they touch becomes more, because they themselves are more.

In his meetings, Rupert explores the perennial, non-dual understanding that lies at the heart of all the great religious and spiritual traditions, such as Advaita Vedanta, Kashmir Shaivism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Mystical Christianity, Sufism, Zen etc., and which is also the direct, ever-present reality of our own experience. This is a contemporary, experiential approach involving silent meditation, guided meditation and conversation, and requires no affiliation to any particular religious or spiritual tradition. All that is required is an interest in the essential nature of experience, and in the longing for love, peace and happiness around which most of our lives revolve.

It’s become fashionable to talk about the need to bring enlightenment from its transcendent position back into the world. We’re told we have to merge it from the coldness of pure consciousness into the warmth of the heart, into relationships, into society. We have to be evolved and ecological.

This misses the point of true self-realization.

The transcendent core of self-realization frees the mind from the burdens of worrying, of thinking, and of doing. The end of self-realization is the disappearance of the world as a separate entity.

It is not that the transcendental comes back down to the mix with the world, but that the world is revealed to have been nothing other than the transcendental the whole time.

The idea that one has to “come back” to deal with the real world is in fact an escape from the full realization of our divine nature.

With illustrations and quotes from Ramana Maharshi, the Yoga Vasistha, and elsewhere, I will tackle the tricky notion of non-doership and argue that the deepest core of self-realization is at risk of being obscured in the sexy quest to ‘integrate’ world and spirit.

In this poster presentation, attendees will see the results of a doctoral dissertation research project which showed, via Heartmath Inner Balance Connectors, how one person, focused on love and gratitude, caused physiological changes in other people in proximity, and also by distance when focusing with intention on that person.
Attendees will have the chance to experience a demonstration using the Inner Balance connector, and see their own state of coherence changed by the Law of Resonance in real time.

Nondual embodiment is a whole-body experience that awakens the most subtle dimension of your being, allowing your relationship with all of life to become disentangled yet intimately engaged and fully experienced.

When you inhabit the whole internal space of your body, including your subtle core, you uncover an infinite expanse of undivided, unchanging fundamental consciousness. This is an embodied, nondual experience of unbroken space pervading your body and the environment as a unity. When two people, or a group of people, attune to this fundamental consciousness together, they experience mutual transparency: a unified, single expanse of relational, nondual consciousness.

Nondual Embodiment via Realization Process supports meaningful and refined contact with another, from a deliciously subtle level beneath the surface of the body/mind. And unified wholeness supports us to receive and respond to others with less projection and less fear, from the ground of love.
Realization Process is a meditation method for direct experience of nondual awakening.
Realization Process is also an embodiment practice for personal and relational healing.

This poster presentation is supported with a brief experiential introduction to Realization Process and is offered in partnership with poster presenter Zeb Lancaster, PhD. You will feel how inhabiting the body is different from body awareness. You will have opportunity to uncover the experience of pervasive, unchanging unity, fundamental consciousness, and use nondual embodiment to explore mutual transparency and non-invasive relational contact. Learn to open your heart without leaving your body.

Literature on the neuroscience of happiness and positive neuroplasticity frequently cite the importance of adopting a gratitude practice as a fundamental tool to impact mood, improve wellbeing and reverse the brains negativity bias. Regularly engaging in a conscious gratitude exercise has been proven to produce multiple benefits including elevating mood, increasing satisfaction with life and building overall resilience.

But could this gentle practice also have a deeper impact on our level of consciousness and connection with the Divine? In 2017 the “60 Day Gratitude Challenge” involving 300 participants from over 12 countries was created with two main intentions:
1. To engage as many people as possible in a conscious gratitude practice
2. To test the hypothesis that gratitude can serve as a gateway to spiritual awakening

Join me as I guide you through the powerful insights from this beautiful journey and learn how deepening a gratitude practice over the course of sixty days enables us to tap into the field of open, loving presence and provides an avenue to connect more deeply to the truth of our Being.

Together we’ll explore the transformative ability of Gratitude to crack the heart open to experience more love, to facilitate a deeper connection to inner wisdom and intuition and its capacity to allow practitioners to experience an innate sense of Oneness and living in a state of harmony with the Universe.

Gratitude most certainly awakens us to our true nature and to the beauty of the world around us – let me share that magic with you!

Many of us feel as though we are never doing enough and that we must constantly prove and re-prove our self-worth. We have a deep-rooted sense of inadequacy that drives us to over-achieve or acquire more than we already have. This sense of ‘not-enoughness’ comes from an over-identification with our dualistic mind.

Science reveals that, through our common ancestry, all life on earth is one. This is one of the basic premises of non-duality, which, if employed as an ongoing spiritual practice, may relieve us from the relentless drive to become ‘something’. If I am one with Everything, how can I not be enough?

‘Being Enough’ is about overcoming inadequacy through identification with the Oneness of All That Is: we are already enough and there is not one more thing we have to do to be enough. Once we understand this basic truth, we can begin the practice of ‘returning’ to our Innate Wholeness. There is no longer anything to become because we already are Everything That Is.

This poster will offer participants the simple practice of connecting to Non-Dual Reality and returning to It, whenever we realize we’ve forgotten or become overly-identified with the separate self.

This process of ‘returning’ is an ongoing relationship that may grow over time, with practice. To what am I returning? Not to something outside of myself but to something That I Am. What does it mean to be in an ongoing relationship with this part of ourselves? Participants will be offered myriad opportunities to explore this relationship to That Which We Already Are and get a solid practice of how to continually ‘return’ in the midst of ongoing, daily life.

Stop by the Poster Session and speak with Dave about healing your pain or illness with a modality unique to Empaths and Sensitives!

SAND needs a poet. Someone with a knack for putting into words what can’t be put into words. I will offer poems from my new book, “Pluck Another Apple, Eve, And Finish It”.

From two reviews of “Pluck Another Apple, Eve, And Finish It”:
“I read these poems in one sitting. I could not stop.”
“These poems kick ass.”
“Pluck Another Apple, Eve, And Finish It” exquisitely, intimately, and unflinchingly explores our longing to reconnect—with self, other, spirit, nature, and ALL THAT IS. It springs from the place where science is a gateway to wonder, and wonder is both holy and relentless. The poems stand on their own. But I’m told that my readings transmit powerful energies—light, awe, solace, joy, strength—energies that are both provocative and reassuring. People in my audiences get goosebumps, cry, grin, feel their hearts open and their brains hum. Cataloging such energies isn’t my job; sharing them is.

The Gong is said to be the primal sound. Reminiscent of the Big Bang, this cosmic sound travels through time and space and resonates to our deepest levels of being. When I first started learning to play the Gong from my teacher, Master Gong Healer Guru Mantra Singh Khalsa, a man with 40 years of yoga practice behind him and a Vietnam War Veteran, the magnetic pull of the sound gave me an experience of being fully immersed in the here and now, and at peace. Our relationship to the cosmic source can be reactivated through hearing these cosmic sounds, and the Gong is a sort of “forced meditation” for those who have trouble sitting still or quieting their minds. Like a blanket pulled over our consciousness, we cannot help but surrender to the deep folds of its mysterious vibrations.

Playing the Gong and sharing its story, as well as the power of sound and meditation in my own healing journey following 5 years of Marine Corps service and an additional 4 years abroad in Afghanistan, has been an instrumental part of my career as a teacher. I love to carry forward the teachings and tradition of the primal sounds, and in my presentation I would like to engage the audience in a “Living Presentation” of primal sounds and original frequencies.

Instrumental to creating the sacred space of sound is thoughtfulness, presentation, and the culture of ritual. Ritual involves a distinct set and setting, intention, and a deliberate focus of the sound. It can involve one of a vast number of elements; the key theme is that it creates a sacred space within the individual, where healing and resonance - the Cosmic Relationship - take place.

Participants will hear a little of my own story, and experience the power and mystery behind the Gong.

Much is made of the extraordinary sensitivity of empaths. They’re people who feel deeply, tuned in at levels that often require shrinkage — reducing participation in life’s experiences to manage and protect their sensitivity. 

They focus on managing what’s ‘out there’ — energy vampires, negative energies, feeling drained and overwhelmed in crowds, excessive emotional and energetic input that create a debilitating myriad of symptoms and emotional, mental and physical issues. 

These good people come by their sensitivity honestly. For many, it’s a trauma story from childhood. For others, there’s an innate tendency to take on and hold other people’s emotions and energy. 

Many sensitives or empaths become healers; their ability to feel the emotions of others leads them to a helping profession. They are frequently beleaguered by the symptom palette of their clients, experience emotional overwhelm and depletion, often called ‘compassion fatigue’.

Empathic sensitivity has its roots in the energy field, which can be evolved to minimize and resolve the tendency to absorb others emotions and energy. 

This experiential workshop offers a powerful, simple protocol to retrain the energy body for self-containment while cultivating a compassionate stance that enables connection without murky merging. 

We’ll discuss the energetic factors that foster empathic merging. We’ll contrast this with compassionate connection. We’ll learn and apply an energetic protocol to retrain the chakras and aura to operate differently so that experiences and interactions are nuanced and evolved.

Imagine empaths and sensitives creating, engaging and experiencing the world from a compassionate, self-contained perspective that places them in the center of their own lives and in appropriate and meaningful connection and collaboration with others.

The environment, or culture, that we are born into and raised in greatly determines how we perceive the boundaries between self and other. There are fundamental differences in how Russians and Americans perceive these boundaries, and these differences lead to diverse interpretations of the world around us and subsequently to disparate modes of interacting with the realities that we co-create and are embedded in. These relationships to the world around us result in what seem to be diametrically opposed systems of governance, social infrastructure, domestic and foreign policy.

Raising awareness of why the differences exist can lead to a deeper understanding of each other. A nondual approach to examining the processes which our cultures and societies are embedded in can help us arrive at more accurate assessments of motives and behavior. If we allow ourselves to interpret behavior in the context of the meaning system in which it arises, then we have the flexibility of adjusting our reactions so that they are more coherent with the foreign context. This new dynamic provides us with access to our inherent interconnection, which makes dialogue possible, and can ultimately lead to improved relations between Russia and the west.

We will look at cultural differences in physical and mental space, privacy, individual and national identity, how we process and express emotions (anger and conflict), examples of how independence and interdependence manifest themselves in our two cultures. We will examine how perceived superiority and inferiority can make it impossible to communicate, how the answers “yes” and “no” are not so simple as we think, and we will learn that simply having good intentions without awareness of our collective self can lead to unexpected outcomes. We will also look at how intergenerational collective trauma complicates cross-cultural understanding.

String theorists call the tiny geometric configurations they study, Calabi-Yau’s, in their various combinations, ‘little creatures’. Even at these tiniest scales we have some innate impetus to recognize the substantiating and pervasive principle of life which integrates, synthesizes, correlates and synergizes the particular into ever more emergent harmonics of complexity and dimensional creative systemics. “The embryo is the universe writing itself on its own body(Grossinger, 2003)”. At the largest scales we recognize and are exploring the multifaceted inter-dimensionalities of what we are calling the Superorganism. We explore the potentiality of phylogenic universe sets gravitationally lensed at the edges of the knowable cosmos, and in the kalpas and yugas of our consciousness sets. Every aspect of this complexity, it’s progressing notes, chords, etudes, and symphonies, builds upon and is vitally interconnected with every other and the Totality, reiterated across scales. As a vast web of multidimensional catacombs from the scale of the cosmos, to ecosystems, bio-systems, and subatomic quantum harmonics, inter-being-ness is reiterated. We are understanding that a complex ontogenesis informs the embryo and it’s organismic emergence far more epigenetic than the interplay of genetics and biology. “A form of consciousness or innate organization flows between levels so that the universe, from end to end, is a single pulse of meta-intelligence encompassing the intelligence of all local systems(Ibid)”. What is the correlation between the flow of plasma in the solar orb and of bio-plasma through the human heart? Might we find a selection of pulsars in our galaxy, or the local cluster, that utters the prototypical pulses of all of the atoms and cells of a particular earth organism, or our own bio-temporality,… or the timing of poems in a set of cultural identities? This presentation explores the poetry of the resonant permutations of Totalities plasmic interrelations.

Our childhood upbringing, environment, and karma have a big effect on us, and who we become. Through our conditioning, we learn patterns and defense mechanisms to keep us safe. Science proves we inherent trauma, behaviors, beliefs, and more, from our parents and ancestors. Experiences can have a significant impact on a child’s future behavior, emotional development, mental and physical health.

The past affects us until we are willing to evolve beyond our baggage and old story. We can confront our subconscious patterns and behaviors and consciously evolve.

We continue to act out our childhood wounds and fear when we abandon ourselves and loose connection with our true heart and self. We hold pain and seek outside ourselves for love while attaching and seeking something beyond us to love us. We act out in self-sabotaging ways in our own attempt to feel loved and secure until we create love within.

This presentation will incorporate a meditation through the chakras and some philosophy, to examine how we can grow authentic and empowered within for self-love. By balancing our energy using Kundalini technology we can release traumas, trapped emotions, change our DNA, and more, to feel better in our mind and body. We will use breathing and energy healing to help the body experience more serenity within.

We will have an open discussion about how Ayurveda’s science of life and Western Astrology can also help us understand our roots and psychology while helping us understand our past and our problems on an individual and collective level. By developing a better inner relationship, observing the kleshas, and confronting our limitations through writing, we are able to feel more secure and self love.

We can overcome our childhood story and transform and liberate ourselves of suffering, to become the authentic and loving person we were born to become.

10,000 Awakenings, documents the awakening experiences of everyday people.

A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole’s novel posthumously published in 1980, tells the story of Ignatius Reilly, a misanthropic and underachieving Medievalist who lives with his mother in a working-class New Orleans Neighborhood in the 1960s. In my view, the novel’s narrative showcases the tension between separation and dependence. The main characters, many of whom don’t know one another, meet randomly at the beginning of the novel, becoming increasingly closer as the novel progresses, their lives intertwining in multiple personal and professional ways. I argue that the structure of the novel reenacts a certain kind of textual explosion. Ignatius and his mother act as the nucleus of the story as all the other characters are drawn to them. However, an even larger amount of textual energy is released in the climatic ending of the novel when mother and son attempt to separate from each other. I see the novel’s atomic metaphor as a reflection on the mid 20th-century paranoia not only about nuclear war and the threat of communism, but also the fear of homosexuality (lavender scare) and racial tension.

There are at least two different senses of connectedness: the connectedness of all things, and the connectedness of all subjective experience. This differentiation is rooted in people’s innate tendency towards a dualistic distinction between mind and matter. Even if all physical things are believed to be connected, it is possible to believe mental experiences are fundamentally separate between individuals. Such separation is the basis from which the devaluation of others emerges. With higher degrees of separateness often come higher degrees of devaluation. Animals, being separate not only at the the individual level but also at the species level, are highly subject to devaluation by humans.

The purpose of this study is to determine whether non-dual education could amplify the impact of an experiential virtual reality simulation designed to reduce moral bias against animals. Participants were assigned into two groups. The experimental group was given a three minute audio-visual presentation and two minute guided meditation on non-duality, followed by a five minute virtual reality intervention provided by PETA’s I, Calf immersive experience. The control group was given an equivalent duration audio-visual presentation and meditation on mindfulness, along with the I, Calf intervention. Measures on the Animal Attitudes Scale (AAS) and Non-Dual Awareness Assessment (NADA) were collected pre and post intervention. Subjects included Columbia University students, recruited in-person on campus.

Preliminary results indicate that the non-duality education intervention was associated with significantly higher changes towards positive attitudes towards animals, and interest in veganism, compared to the control condition. The results of this study demonstrate that non-dual education is not simply a philosophical novelty, but has important practical implications for positively influencing people’s attitudes towards other sentient creatures.

For centuries, Yoga is practiced as a ‘Mind – Body Science’ in India. One of the ancient Sanskrit scriptures ‘Patanjal Yogasutras’ written by a Rishi ‘Patanjali’ explains various aspects of Yoga. Since last century various attempts have been made to translate Yoga into various languages and also to test out whether yogic doctrines are valid and applicable in modern circumstances.
Jose Silva of USA has developed ‘Silva Mind Control Method’ which he named as ‘Psychorientology’.
Smita from India is a student of both methods. She is a Silva Graduate and initiated in Yoga by a Guru who is a doctor of medicine by profession.
Smita has made an attempt to make comparative study of ‘Psychorientology’ and ‘Patanjali’s Yogasutras’. While Silva Method focuses on the application of mind power for the achievement of material goals; Yoga focuses on attainment of ultimate freedom – the union with the source of the divine energy.
Silva method explains the brain-wave patterns measured by an electroencephalograph (EEG) expressed in cycles per second (CPS).
Brain Wave Patterns Patanjal Yoga Silva Method
14 to 21 CPS Beta Vitarka Logic
7 to 14 CPS Alpha Vichara Relaxation
4 to 7 CPS Theta Ananda Deep Meditation
0.5 to 4 Delta Asmita (Samadhi) Unconscious State

When Yogasutras were written, there were no modern aid to study brain waves. However, the four stages of Samadhi explained in the Yogasutras are quite corresponding to the stages explained by Silva. Yogasutras explain the four levels are Vitarka –logic, Vichara –thought, Ananda –bliss and Asmita – Awareness or Samadhi.
The practitioner of Yogasutras becomes non-judgemental and experiences unconditional love. The practitioner develops various mind powers on this path which may help him in having material achievements as well.
Smita is presenting a poster on her findings while studying the Yoga and the Silva Method.

When you live within the whole internal space of your body, you uncover the experience of fundamental consciousness, an infinite expanse of unbroken, unchanging consciousness pervading you and everything around you. When you settle and attune to this embodied nondual experience the most subtle dimension of your own being awakens. Your thoughts, emotions, and sensations become unified.

Embodied nonduality is a stable, realized part of your wholeness, deeper than your injuries. Attunement to fundamental consciousness provides reliable resilience to those aspects of life that lead to personal suffering. Fundamental consciousness supports a more authentic, subtler connection with other people and yourself. From this embodied nondual wholeness, which locates each of us at the center of all our experience, you can uncover oneness with your environment and other people without becoming entangled or overwhelmed.

Embodied nonduality supported by Realization Process practices helps couples heal imbalances in their relationship. By revealing and resolving habit patterns of mind and body that obstruct connection on subtle and meaningful levels of being, these simple but profound meditations awaken each human to their essential wholeness of being.

Realization Process is a meditation practice for direct experience of nondual awakening.
Realization Process is also an embodiment method for personal and relational healing.

This poster presentation is supported with a brief experiential introduction to Realization Process and is offered in partnership with poster presenter, Candace Cave. You will feel how inhabiting the body is different from body awareness. You will have opportunity to uncover the experience of pervasive, unchanging unity, fundamental consciousness, and use embodied nonduality to explore mutual transparency and non-invasive relational contact. Learn to open your heart without leaving your body.

Concert meets ritual in this multi-level experience which incorporates elements of music, meditation and sound healing. Choose a spot to unroll your mat and place your bolster or pillow. Begin to think about your intentions; write them out on a prayer flag to hang or place on an altar. Rest and relax while enjoying a musical concert, mixing traditional East Forest songs with deep ambient soundscapes, that will move you through the energy cycles. Allow the music to take you on a inner journey, to lead you to the wellspring of wisdom within. End the evening with a deep savasana, followed by a tea ceremony that will allow you to share your experience and connect with others. Leave with feelings of tranquility, hopefulness and self-empowerment. (Note: The East Forest Ceremony is not a yoga class, everyone is welcome!)

The form of qigong I teach was created in 1989 by a Chinese man, Dr Ming Pang. He had been recognized as a genius at a young age. He studied with 19 grandmasters and he became a doctor of Chinese and Western medicine. Dr. Ming Pang did in-depth studies of Daoism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Quantum Physics. He integrated these into his theories, teachings and practices. D Pang’s form has successfully treated a wide range of illnesses, including my own 20-year struggle with Lyme disease.

In addition to physical healing, these practices have a profound effect on ego identity. Opening to the infinite timeless source of all existence gradually (or not so gradually) awakens us from the illusory separate self. The limiting patterns of belief about self and world dissolve on the energetic level. Empty of old programming, our essence is revealed as embodied infinite love. The joy and peace experienced is independent of outer circumstances.

In this session, we will have the opportunity to experience this transformation together as I guide us through moving meditations. The standing practices can be modified or done sitting or lying down. The session is for beginners and experienced practitioners alike. During our time together, we will merge our now expanded wide open hearts into one energy heart and activate a vision of awakening and healing for all of humanity, all sentient beings and Mother Earth herself. Please join me for this precious opportunity to contribute—to bring harmony into life through the love that is our shared being.

A painful childhood associated with poverty, an alcoholic father and mother suffering from mental illness resulted in a childhood filled with fear, uncertainty, despair and hopelessness. At the age of 12 years everything changed after meeting one person who intuitively knew that the path to transcendence was through compassion and through compassion one is led to oneness. A personal narrative combined with a discussion of our evolution intertwined with the effects of practicing compassion.

“Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) is a radically interdisciplinary and groundbreaking field developed by neuropsychiatrist Dr. Dan Siegel that presents us with a scientifically grounded view of the mind, human development, relationships and experience. We are living in a moment in human history—the anthropocene—where everything about this beautiful planet that we live on is being drastically impacted by the human mind. The unconsciousness surrounding our collective traumatic history of structural, physical, and emotional violence has brought us to a tipping point, where we must as a species learn how to reimagine the very meaning of resilient and compassionate relationships in order to move beyond the geopolitics of survival into a sustainable and Beloved Community.

In this talk, Dr. Sará King will discuss the research she conducted at UCLA on yoga, mindfulness and resilience as they relate to trauma and the work of social justice with youth. Additionally, she will discuss the work she has been conducting with her mentor, Dan Siegel, to understand how (IPNB) has deep social justice implications for how we understand and bring about Beloved Community.

Additionally, Dr. King will lead a brief guided meditation practice with the intention of bringing participants into an embodied experience of “MWe”—Dan Siegel’s new framework for shifting our understanding of what it is to have a “self”, in a way that she hopes will illuminate the ways in which we can get in touch with our intergenerational and ancestral resources for healing through the power of mindful relationships.”

We live in a time characterized by convergences of many kinds giving our civilization a threshold of significant climaxes and challenges. These outer forces of intense change are in direct alignment with inner capacities we are yet to acknowledge and live from. It is my hope that this session will allow us to contemplate the rich human and planetary histories we have inherited. The intention here is to consider how we can become aware of our true legacies and step into the realities of our deepest belonging and act from conscience as the prerequisite virtue to initiate our age, the age of humanity.

We presume we are small entities when in fact within each of us is the entire enfolded universe waiting to be unfolded and revealed. Our choice to open to love is the path towards freedom and liberation. We've heard this. We feel it. But how do we do it? How do we unlearn and de-program our toxic and limiting beliefs? How do we rid ourselves of negative cycles and patterns and live in the manner most aligned with our highest purpose? Through the use of ancient technologies and methodologies, we can engage that which is beyond. All of this and more in our session!

In Zhen Dao’s talk, which occurs the day before this experiential, she will essentially be diagnosing the human being as thus far having fallen short of its potential, its purpose. It is Zhen’s contention that this diagnosis represents an opportunity rather than an estimation of failure—that the failure of the human is the human’s last and most beautiful chance to become itself. This experiential will be a sampling of how the entire practice tradition of MogaDao is constellated around this theme of establishing and embodying the purpose of the human.

Using many modalities of the practice tradition of MogaDao and of SACRA Immanence Theater, including The Heartmind Warrior Training Program’s “Neurogenic Exercises” for rebuilding energetic and biological pathways of feeling, empowerment, and empathy, MogaDao Qigong’s 3 Pillars Qigong for Trauma, and the Erotic Basis of Being Program’s studies in vulnerability and empathy, students will be given the opportunity to participate in a small sampling of MogaDao’s trainings or techné as they are practiced at the root school, in Santa Fe, NM, and among the players in training at SACRA Theater.

The SAND community is deeply committed to exploring the core, interconnected issues of our time. Yet the inherent biases in our scientific methods, spiritual practices and/or wisdom traditions are not often our focus. In this panel session, we are inviting SAND community members to explore privilege and consequences of racial and ontological identities, as we consider what is inclusive space at SAND.

Some questions the panel may explore:
• What does social justice activism, informed by spirituality look like? And how is it practiced?
• What are the blind spots in largely white, privileged communities—like SAND?
• What is the unconscious conditioning we carry around racism and oppression?
• Do we reflect on the cultural context through which spiritual teachings have been passed to us?

I propose that there is no “relationship” between Nature and myself—we are Not Two. Each one of us is unique and yet totally interdependent with all that IS. What is this “Earth”? How does it become ever more aware through me/as me? How does the habit of human “identification” allow us to limit our care and involvement with other species with whom we share this fragile biosphere? How do we allow our grief for the extinction of members of our greater family to empower us to change our embedded behaviors?
As we find our HOME in this moment, orienting as a human on this planet in this solar system and galaxy, in touch with our ancient elemental roots, we can come to rest in our True Nature as embodied awareness, present in this home of our soul, Earth. Our bodies are Earth’s local representatives. Attending to sensations of subtle energy, we dissolve the membrane of perceived boundaries to allow body, nature, earth, elements and self to melt into the loving presence of awareness in this moment. Using this body as our laboratory, we can track the flow of sensory input co-arising in each moment. We practice looking into the mirror of Nature and then practice the inquiry of “who or what is looking”? What says “I” when I say I? With what is this “I” identified?

Opening to the experiential truth of the interdependence of all, we are more able to be present and available, to play our part in the healing of our precious and only Earth as we each begin to find our soul’s calling, our unique place in this hologramatic jeweled web of life.

The cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is a clear fluid that bathes our entire central nervous system (CNS), the brain and spinal cord. At the center of your brain, at the same location of your third eye, your brow center, there is a space filled with CSF called the third ventricle. This space is bordered by the pituitary gland and the pineal gland, and has been referred to as the ‘Crystal Palace’ and the ‘Cave of Brahma.’ CSF is home to many neurotransmitters and signaling molecules, including melatonin and the ‘spirit molecule’ DMT, providing an elaborate range of biological functions. CSF also contains extracellular matrix proteins that make up the connective tissue of the body and therefore is a fluid connective tissue, a liquid matrix for information to be held and transported. CSF evolved as a way to transmit signals from the environment. Therefore, CSF carries information within the fluid, whether it is a protein, a growth factor, or a hormone, and transmits that information to the entire CNS, as a fluid conductor. Our awareness of I AM begins to develop from our earliest moments of existence, when we are immersed in this primordial fluid in our mother’s womb. CSF may serve as a vehicle for signaling to major control centers in the brain and transmitting Source energy to the body and the felt sense of I AM. Connect to your CSF, to your own fluid body, to your liquid light, your liquid prana, your liquid chi, to the structured, resonating primordial ocean within you.

Many long-term spiritual practitioners and teachers experience unnecessary obstacles and suffering along the path when we have not understood the importance of deep psychological inquiry, and healing the trauma that is stored within our bodies. Teachers and students alike need to understand that spiritual awakening does not dissolve trauma and psychological wounds, nor does it replace the necessity for psychological work. Spiritually bypassing in this way frequently leads to spiritual traumas and scandals—approximately 90% related to sex, and generally perpetrated by male teachers.

For over 20 years, I have been supporting spiritual and religious practitioners, teachers/leaders, and communities to heal, grow, and thrive as a psychotherapist, author, consultant, and yoga teacher. I believe that by understanding, addressing, and healing trauma within ourselves and our communities—whether we are teachers or practitioners—we become empowered to end the endless repetition of predictable scandals related to sex, power, and money.

By practicing the potent methods to address our deep psychological wounds and traumas that are available through trauma healing, somatics, and neuroscience, and rigorously applying and integrating them into our spiritual practices and communities, our practice becomes grounded and integrated. When we address these issues in ourselves, we are neither drawn to teachers and practices that are likely to repeat patterns of unresolved trauma within us, nor do we participate in replicating the myriad forms of otherwise avoidable suffering due to unaddressed psychological wounds. When we bring together ancient practices and teachings, and a modern understanding of psychology, trauma, somatics, and neuroscience, we catalyze new possibilities for an integrated awakening within our body, psyche and spirit. Traveling through the eye of the needle of our trauma, our wounds become our gifts and transform into the capacity for discernment—the crowning jewel on the spiritual path.

Come and participate in an interactive art installation using creativity to embody and celebrate (non-)duality. Sit in a circle of sacred casts to contemplate two questions: How do you define non-duality? and What’s one of your favorite dualities? Participate by answering on paper leaves and help ‘bloom’ the two metal Trees of Duality throughout the conference to share and inspire others.

Intimacy starts with our connection to ourselves, via our feeling body. Our bodily genius holds the secrets of intimate perception and deep connection. As we become more sensitive to the signals of our body we become more aware of others and true connections can begin. From here there are endless means of artfully deepening and enlivening these connections through communication, touch, and gaze. In this interactive class we will engage in processes and exercises to sensitize the body in relationship to another, and explore ways to deepen into an understanding of the principles of intimacy.

What is life’s expression of Nondual consciousness and love? With the embodiment of Nonduality, life becomes a portal from which divine being emerges into form, identity with separation is surrendered, truth matters more than the structure of beliefs, and our resistance to what is ends. When divine flow is no is longer hindered, consciousness and love unite in dance, in song, and life’s expression emerges from the flowering of heart and minds undivided intimacy with being. All are welcome to join in this exploration of how the divine seeps into the crevices and conquers the diverse territories of our conscious existence.

In this experiential workshop we will use a specific form of partnered meditative inquiry that I have refined over many years to explore two essential questions: 1) What is the true nature of the Heart? and 2) Does it need protection? Relationships are often the most challenging arenas to stay awake within as we try to protect our self from being judged or abandoned. They also offer extraordinary opportunities to see where and how we hold onto the illusion of being a separate self.

This profound form of interpersonal inquiry quickly unveils the deepest dimension of the Heart as innocent, all-inclusive, loving awareness, as well as our conditioned resistance to being so open, especially with an apparent other. Partnered inquiry adds a potent dimension to self-inquiry by offering an opportunity to:
1) Experience our essential non-separateness with another person
2) Stay connected to oneself and not merge while meeting another
3) Be profoundly seen and heard
4) Distinguish the vulnerable human heart from the Heart of awareness
5) Be more aware of how we unconsciously defend ourselves
6) Recognize and question our core limiting beliefs

Panpsychism is the view that consciousness, or some form of mentality, is distributed throughout the universe. This view is as old as Western and Eastern cosmology. Surprisingly, panpsychism is currently experiencing a robust revival, even among analytically oriented philosophers of mind. This presentation gives an overview of the main issues and approaches in the contemporary debate about and within panpsychism, and indicates some ignored roads currently not taken. The contemporary debate is gripped by “the hard problem” of explaining how consciousness can arise from apparently unconscious matter. The renewed interest in panpsychism is motivated by the obvious failure of reductive physicalism to explain phenomenal consciousness or mentality. Panpsychism seems to offer a middle ground between physicalism, idealism, and mind-matter dualism. From the perspective of physicalism, which treats instances of conscious experience as the “curse of the qualia,” consciousness is an anomaly that needs to be explained (away), i.e., reduced to physical concepts. Panpsychists, however, point out a hard datum in favor of their view: the irrefutable existence of consciousness.

We will review contending accounts of panpsychism which have two features in common:
(1) Like their physicalist counterparts, panpsychists are obsessed with explaining consciousness, favoring microphysical upward causation, emergence, or supervenience.
(2) Panpsychists’ biggest problem is the seemingly insurmountable combination problem: how do microphysical, protophenomenal elements add up or combine to account for macrophysical, conscious subjects? An intriguing perspective is opened up by the high probability of downward causation, i.e., causal powers that are not microdetermined by the causal relations at lower levels (as in quantum entanglement). The presentation concludes with a sketch of admirable alternatives to panpsychism in order to round out the newly emerging metaphysics of consciousness.

The urge to unite draws us together like irresistible magnets and we push each other away with equal intensity. The absolute contains these polarities, which makes the dance juicy, fascinating and agonizing too. We have created a rift between women and men, between the masculine and feminine energy and it plays out on a grand scale across the world, in our relationships and within our own souls.

How do we bridge the gap and heal the wounds of centuries? How do we engage to bring forth understanding and deep connection? The crucible to real love is often found where we least expect it: in the separation between the feminine and masculine, within the knots we encounter in relationships and our own being. It asks us to stand in the fire with each other, to meet across the chasm through a new way of communicating and relating.

A call is resounding throughout the lands and hearts to come together in an enliving, liberating and authentic way so we can create a world, where love is given the prime seat in the space between us here and now.

Emptiness, Oneness, Interconnectedness—these are all common ways reality is described in Buddhism. Do they point to the same thing? Different things? If so, how many realities can there be? How do we hold the apparent paradox of no fixed self vs the obvious multiplicity of our relationships? How do we reconcile the indivisibility of the Absolute with the relative appearance of the 10,000 things? And, as the song goes, “What’s Love got to do with it?” Do the techniques offered by Zen practice present a means of answering such questions? Fortunately, in Zen ‘not knowing’ is a highly esteemed principle, and coming to know the great mystery deeply does not require explaining it. In this presentation we’ll apply our ‘Beginners Minds’ to exploring and clarifying these and other such questions, which have beguiled and frustrated human beings since our beginnings.

Relationship is typically defined as the way in which two or more concepts, objects or people are connected—or—the state of being connected. Internally, how we relate to our thoughts, feelings, and emotions as well as, externally, to people, places, things and events—images how much we experience peace and joy, spontaneity and warmth as well as worry, depression, and anxiety. Ah ha! Love, The Human Condition.

Let us dwell for a few moments on how to relate such that we experience and share peace and joy and actually love. How? Learning to engender the spirit of equanimity and not taking life as a personal event. How do we engender a equanimous perspective? How do we show-up in life with composure, calmness, levelheadedness, self-possession, self-control, even-temperedness, coolness, cool-headedness and presence of mind? How do we take life not as an impersonal event but as a non-personal event? How are we love?

Hint: let’s discuss the Human ego, the source of the so-called ten thousand tribulations. Let’s take a look at our delusions (false beliefs), illusions (false perceptions) and allusions (false stories about ourselves and life). Let’s unfold how we are the Eye of the Needle through which, with the thread of our intention, we do mend the fabric of our life. Let’s relate with conscious, awake awareness. Let’s just laugh and be merry, be quiet and still; it is all one in the same, is it not?

Love is the refusal to separate —Nisargadatta Maharaj
From a deeply awakened perspective, the smallest particle and the vastness of space are equal expressions of an infinite mystery that cannot be divided or even named. This infinite mystery is empty of definition, empty of self, empty of resistance. Yet from this ground of infinite potential, life and love move spontaneously. Whether we are scientists looking for a single building block of the universe, or spiritual seekers looking for the deepest Truth, we discover a wholeness of being containing intricate interconnections.
Quarks, the smallest known particles, have flavors, yet apparently cannot be separated or isolated within their energy field. So, too, our ordinary life, filled with ever-changing forms and flavors, cannot be divided from the still, silent ground that seems to create from its own vibrations everything that appears to “be.” What is the energy of this connectivity? Perhaps it is a Love that cannot separate itself from you, from me, from the moment, from the cosmos, from the changing faces of experience, because it is simultaneously the totality of both source and expression. Perhaps your very form is the way that the Infinite knows and loves itself.

This presentation, including experiential invitations, will explore the singularity of That which cannot be divided, yet relates to itself each moment in every conceivable way through an unconditional and timeless Love that can be experienced but not created by any thought that takes itself to be separate.

Many nondual teachings would have us believe that there is only one nonduality, and that it includes everything. However, we know from mathematics that, paradoxically, some infinities are larger than other infinities. Could the same thing be true for nondual experience? That is, is it possible that some nondualities are bigger—and more inclusive—than other nondualities? If so, then how do we connect with these more complete nondual experiences? In this experiential presentation, nondual teacher and author Michael Taft will show you some powerful and fascinating ways to do just that.

What do mindfulness and sex have to do with each other? A lot. Buddhist theory and meditation have deep relevance to relationship and sex therapy. The intense eroticism of a new relationship is based on novelty. Sexual boredom often accompanies familiarity. But what if you could create novelty with the one you are with – using your mind? Move from a sense of disconnected separation to the bliss-union of awakened love? Buddha’s wisdom and new research converge when we apply meditation techniques to your relationship. Mindfulness has been shown to improve couples communication, conflict management, and increase sexual arousal, desire, and overall intimacy. It turns out great love—and great sex—are all in your head.

But what are the practical applications? Does mindfulness really help people have better relationships? The short answer is yes. Drawn from my new book Buddha’s Bedroom—The Mindful Loving Path to Sexual Passion and Lifelong Intimacy—foreword by Jack Kornfield and Trudy Goodman—this mini-workshop is designed to help participants apply Buddhist philosophy and mindfulness to romantic/sexual relationships.

Topics include:

· Don’t change your Mate, Change your Mind—How Right View can revitalize your love affair

· Never say “I’m Not in The Mood” ever again - Why you need to discriminate between physical arousal and mental desire—the two keys to the erotic engine—and use mindfulness to recreate the attraction and passion you used to have

· The difference between a climax orgasm and a tantric energy orgasm—How you can ride the sexual response cycle to sexual bliss

· The Seven Factors of Enlightened Sex

· From ME to WE to ONE – dissolving, non-self, and the act of making love beyond the body

Plus, join me at the New Harbinger booth for a book signing and Q and A .

Discover how to apply fascinating new insights from brain science to transform how you experience the world as well as your “self” and how you can better connect with anyone, including someone who is different from you in almost every way. Harvard neurologist, scientist, and author Joel Salinas, MD, discusses what you and the people you care about can learn from understanding the profound science behind reality and atypical brains, including his own. Dr. Salinas has an extreme form of synesthesia where all his senses collide—tasting sounds, literally feeling what someone else is physically and emotionally feeling, and more.
Be warned: Dr. Salinas will guide you through an immersive journey down the rabbit hole of his own wildly unusual sensory perception and, at several points along the way, you may learn something powerful about yourself that you never would have expected. Through this mind-altering, multisensory experience, he combines art, science, technology, and spirituality to reveal how we can use these neuroscientific aha moments to radically shape the world around us and within us.

There is a growing tendency to build relationship around external commonalities rather than inner connection. Technology is creating the opportunity for this to trend to continue. There are times when there are good reasons for us to be in relationship with others because of mutual associations. However, we can experience difficulty in building and sustaining relationships when, despite our common association, we cannot actually relate to one another in our heart. Understanding is a good beginning, but it is not enough. We can understand someone and not be able to relate to them. Relating does not develop until you can perceive that whomever or whatever has something to do with you. Oftentimes, the culprit of our inability to genuinely relate in our heart is our adherence to the dualistic paradigm of “otherness.” In this mindset, we simply fail to perceive our interconnectedness, let alone our oneness. Engaging in othering for prolonged periods of time cripples our very capacity to be in authentic relationship. We witness this on all levels from interpersonal family dynamics to geo-socio political affairs. Unbeknownst to us, we have created the equivalent of relationship gerrymandering in which we redraw the boundaries of who is or out of our sphere of connectedness. Rarely do they have any say in the matter. Forgetting that a relationship is merely a real time reflection of how we are relating, we fallaciously believe that we can improve relationships without improving how we actually relate. It’s time for us to put “relate” back into relationship.

We most often associate spiritual practice with inner work and we engage meditation as a path of personal growth and development. While the personal level is an important foundation, the next level is to bring our practice to the interpersonal realm. Cultivating deep presence and awareness in relation with others is a "social contemplation" that reveals the truth of our deep interconnectedness with all of life. Uncovering and illuminating the interconnected web of our human "data network" brings a higher level of coherence and intelligence in the collective body. This opens up the potential for healing the fragmentation in our world and liberates our capacity to respond creatively and whole-heartedly to the immense collective challenges we are facing.

When we knowingly take our stand as the limitless field of Awareness we may recognise that all experiences arise spontaneously within it and share their deepest reality with it. In this workshop, we will give special attention to the body. For most of us, even after an awakening to our true nature of Awareness, we continue to experience the body as a habitual and intricate network of density and tension which perpetuates and reflects the belief in being a fragment that needs to defend, assert and protect itself… These habits are layered, deep rooted and active under the surface of our contemplation. Thus, the body’s original and harmonious nature, its lively flowing expression, and deep silent vibration remain compromised by the impossible task of maintaining itself as an anchor and cage for the separate one… Together we will explore and discover.

As our world experiences dramatic change and polarizations, and we see the stress it is causing, people from all cultures are looking for practical ways to deepen heart connections in their communities and affect social change through compassionate awareness and actions. This presentation explores new research on group coherence and the importance of physiological synchronization in increasing group cooperation, collaboration, harmony and performance. The term coherence always implies harmonious relationships and connectedness between the various parts of a larger system. Social coherence can be achieved by the establishment of stable and harmonious relationships, between couples, within families, groups or people within larger organizations. A number of studies have shown that feelings of cooperation, trust, compassion and increased pro-social behaviors depend largely on the establishment of a spontaneous synchronization of physiological rhythms between group members. In order for physiological activity of individuals to synchronize, a signal of some type must convey information between them. The model that best fits the data from various studies is built on field theory and nonlocal information exchange where information about the entire group is simultaneously distributed to all of the group members, creating a “social hologram”. We have suggested that biologically generated magnetic fields may act as a carrier wave for information transfer between individuals and group members. The most commonly found factor that underlies our ability to get in-synch with our deeper self, others, and the rhythms of the Earth is heartfelt connectedness and love.

We live in a society that fosters competition, distrust and separation. We often have a small circle of close friends and sometimes none at all. Festival goers skew towards the social side of that norm but conversation is generally kept “safe” and is rarely intimate. Few of us make a regular effort towards meaningful connection with those we know less well. Being open to everyday deep interaction can gradually shift the norms and expectations of our society. Over time we have the potential of creating a more trusting, compassionate and caring world as we become willing to have meaningful contact with a greater number of individuals and learn to widen our range of comfort and familiarity.

In this 20 minute gathering we will explore becoming closer to those we don’t know. After a brief introduction we will create connection through a series of interactions. Finally, we will explore what we experienced. How we were challenged. What we learned about ourselves and others. How we might bring these insights home and effect change in our community. What is our vision of a world that is open, courageous and caring?

jamesmichaelseehof.com

The Mathematics of Nonduality visions a unified psychophysics bringing together physics and psychology through a new understanding of mathematics as both a universal archetypal system and a living process embodied at once in all of psyche and matter. We ‘look and see’ that mathematics is occurring, consciously and unconsciously, in all physical and psychical phenomena. From this perspective all matter is sentient and an embodied universal intelligence is the source of all psychophysical process. In this light the technical issues of incompleteness, undecidability, and indefinability, introduced by the mathematical theorems of Godel and others, and the ‘inexhaustibility of mathematics’ take on a new significance.

Extending the Lucas-Penrose view that Godel’s results imply that the human mind can not be reduced to digital computation, mathematical inexhaustibility becomes a ‘transuniversal’ principle not only of mathematics but also of physics and psychology that implies the existence of a corresponding inexhaustible ‘transuniversal’ psyche. Even in the kind of alternate universes, suggested by some of Stephen Hawking’s last work, in which the laws of physics are different from those of our own universe, inexhaustibility still remains a fundamental law, just as the principles of mathematics understood for what they actually are, must hold true of any possible universe. This psychophysical inexhaustibility is the ‘body and mind of God’.

From this point of view, the discovery of mathematical inexhaustibility is literally an event of cosmic significance and the contemporary ‘crisis’ in our understanding of the foundations of mathematics in the wake of Godel’s work is an intellectually historic moment. This may reflect the psychic and material crises we face as a global culture and we are invited to consider how coming to a new understanding of the nature of mathematics may inform the emerging new cultural paradigm in the face of our planetary crises.

Have you ever felt someone projecting something on you, that wasn’t at all about you? How painful! We all project on each other unconsciously all the time. Yet we all want passionately to be seen. How can we bring our own projections to light? How can we let others know we feel their projections? Lama Tsomo will speak from her body of knowledge both as a Jungian psychotherapist and a trained Tibetan lama, on possible ways, both Eastern and Western, to work productively with projection, give us a sample practice or two to try, and we’ll spend time discussing our experiences with each other.

Our human and greater-than-human relationships in life make us who we are. From our best friends, family, ancestry to the water we drink, the deer, the hawk, the spider, the soil, the trees, the ocean, and the sky. This is an altar to honor all the relationships that bind us and that we are bound to, in and through time. This altar, by Day Schildkretand our entire SAND community will be surrounded by a nest made of local branches from local trees. Each branch will be wrapped with the names of our relations that we care about and love.
Invitation: Please take a branch. On a slip of paper write the name of something or someone you care deeply about, are glad they are in this world and will grieve if and when they leave this world. Wrap this paper around the branch and wrap the colored string around the paper, binding the paper to the branch. Hand the branch to the artist, Day for placement in the nest. Witness the altar and nest being created and eventually, deconstructed.

In this 2-hr experiential and didactic public workshop participants will have the opportunity to explore how trauma trapped in the nervous system can affect one’s ability to feel truly connected to the self, the other, and the whole. Through guided exercises in a supportive small group setting, we will practice somatic tools for releasing trauma trapped in the body. Our inner exploration of bodily sensations, imagery, movement, emotions, and meaning will help build coherence and a deeper state of interconnectedness that will support genuine emotional growth and spiritual-transformation.

Somatic Experiencing®, developed by Peter A Levine, PhD, is a body-oriented approach to the healing of trauma and other stress related disorders that cause internal fragmentation due to Autonomic Nervous System dysregulation. The trauma response is a set of defensive bodily reactions that people initially mobilize in order to protect themselves, both from threat, and then later, against feeling emotional and physical pain. However, as time goes on, this holding keeps our reactions frozen and stuck in the past, unable to be fully present in the here and now, and unable to go forward in life with the richness and connection we deserve.

The SE™ approach gently facilitates the release of thwarted survival energy bound in the body, thus addressing the root cause of trauma symptoms and chronic stress. Through a combination of theoretical explanation, demonstrations, and body-oriented exercises, participants will begin to develop a deep and intrinsic body awareness that helps to draw them into the vibrant experience of life-energy, flow, contact with the eternal now, and wholeness.

Trauma and the Rupture of Interconnection is an Ergos Institute of Somatic Education Community Health SE™ Experiential Program brought to you by the office of Peter A Levine, PhD. For more information on Somatic Experiencing® go to: traumahealing.org
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In 2010 I was staying at an ashram in Pune, India. The guru there ordered me to go have my Naadi Palm Reading done. I had never heard of these before and had no clue as to what he was talking about. After he explained what it was, I was beyond skeptical of any possibility that they could be accurate, let alone, predictive of my future. I am a strong believer in the use of our Free Will. My issue was how could something that may have been written 2.500 to 5,000 years ago, be true to what would happen to me in the now and the future. Was this all about fate?

I went because I was told to go and have it done. I went to the not so easy location to find in the old city of Pune. I gave them, as is the custom, my right thumb print and waited for my “reading”. I got my reading done that day and have spent the next 9 years watching the predictions made all come to pass including things which happened to me when I was having open heart by-pass surgery where I left my body (OBE, or a NDE) and found myself in India meeting with great sages.

The readings told me who and what I was up until I walked into there for a reading that afternoon. It also told about a significant past life and what would happen to me over the course of the rest of my lifetime. I have since watched in awe, at times, as things have transpired.

I will discuss my personal reading and what has taken place. I will address the issue of our free will and what is fate. I still strongly believe in our ability to control our lives, but I have a new and different perception of how that may work and how our karmic choices (and even the way we have dreamt or thought) all create a pattern that the universe reads. We are the creators, even if we do not recall how that happen. I will discuss my views on this and what I learned from my own encounters and life experiences. I will also take Q& A if time remains.

How can we be intimate with ourselves and another? Our bodies are vehicles of love. Through our body—life experiences itself, how would it be to know the oneness of form and emptiness from our experience? Before we come together in love, we intimately connect with our inner silence, which can be experienced, in our body as a subtle vibration. That makes us touchable, reachable, and open. We are relaxing into our body being, our essence.

As that silent body being, we gaze into each other’s eyes. The couple steps together into the mystery. Naturally, the bodies enter the one stream of subtle vibration. Energy circles back and forth between the bodies and starts living its own life. Before we know it the bodies find each other. Essence meets essence and body meets body. It sounds really wonderful, but it is not always that easy. It takes practice and dedication to move through that, which is in the way to come to the natural joy of making love. The experience of “I am a body falls” away and simultaneously the bodies are moving. They melt into one movement that has nothing to do with us. We are not here and, yes; we are here and intimately experiencing all sensations. It’s almost like you say to each other afterwards, “Was that us making love?”

This can be experienced not only during sex, but also throughout life. Looking in someone’s eyes, being touched by the wind or our lover, the sweetness of a flower, a thought, or an emotion, or chocolate melting on our tongue. All is the making of love! Or is it making whoopee?

Biomimicry is "the conscious emulation of nature's genius—Janine Benyus". Biomimicry has been known in design and technology, by emulating organisms, such as the kingfisher's beak inspiring a more efficient bullet train, or termite mounds inspiring cooler building structures. However, this field is not just about emulating it is also about reconnecting and rekindling our relationship with nature. Nature itself is thriving through its intrictate relationships, whether in the soil of perennial grasslands, or through mutualistic relations of organisms on a coral reef, or even the microorganisms working together to aid in your own body's digestion. We can reconnect to nature, by going outside, or delving inside of us, using our senses, understanding the science and cultivating cooperative relationships.

Psychedelics make the interconnectedness of life palpable, and can open the gates to a direct experience of nonduality. But to benefit from their use, good preparation and a navigational toolkit to work with the experience is essential. Just as in extended spiritual retreat, during medicine journeys the ego is deconstructed, which can be frightening. With the right toolkit in place, the process is more likely to unfold without resistance—and without being derailed by fear. This talk will cover practical methods to slow down a process that moves so fast that it leaves you fearful and fragmented, to sense into a calming rhythm in the body in the midst of intensity, to take charge of your attention and shift it when needed, and to develop a stance of curiosity toward strong experience. Some of the tools that help in this are universal and available to everyone, and you need only be made aware that you possess them. Others might require preparatory practices, or to be made into a form that works for your unique psyche. The talk will include time to share stories of successfully navigated strong experience as well as challenging situations. Participants can use these stories to assess and add to their current toolkit, seeing where it might be weak, and specific practices will be introduced to fill in what might be lacking. Frank will also introduce creative practices for both preparation and integration that work well for both medicine journeys and spiritual retreats.

One of the most beautiful aspects of our collective humanity is that we are holistic spiritual beings. Unfortunately, trauma is also holistic. It does not magically limit itself to one realm of our nature such as the physical, emotional, psychological, or spiritual. Rather, trauma interrupts our being in the world on nearly every level. This holistic nature of trauma increases as the severity of trauma increases. In my experience as a Naturopathic Doctor working in trauma, severe, chronic trauma often crosses lanes manifesting a spiritual component. Unfortunately, the standard (even Naturopathic) medical school curriculum does not entail much in the way of “spiritual education” as regards healing in severe trauma. In spite of this lack of education, the spiritual aspects of trauma waltz into the sacred healing space and the empathic physician is often left to stumble around in the dark—the cliché blind leading the blind. Additionally, if the original trauma(s) happened within a spiritual community or context, the patient is often unable to access healing within any spiritual community. Tragically, this furthers the isolation and rippling effects of trauma. In the words of Ron Unger, LCSW, “People have to access something spiritual in order to integrate the existence of darkness without being overwhelmed.”

What then is the conscientious practitioner to do—aware of a spiritual component, yet lacking training or tools, on tenuous ground with a vulnerable, traumatized individual? While I have no absolute nor conclusive answers, I offer up my own humble experience for the sake of learning from stumbling in the spiritual dark with traumatized patients. My experience suggests three guiding questions to ask in this context.

Quantum mechanics has served as an inspiration to spiritual experience from JZ Knight’s “What the Bleep?” documentary to Deepak Chopra’s books to a pervasive fascination with quantum entangled phenomena in the media. Recently, physicists have built several hundred working analog quantum computers and are now closing in on the even more powerful digital versions. How do these extraordinary machines work? What do they have to do with the complexity of life around us, and our daily experience? Recently we showed that the same mathematical tools used to quantify the complexity of thought in the brain as measured by EEG and fMRI can be directly adapted to quantum states. As a result, we were able to quantify quantum complexity for the first time, laying a foundation for exploration of “quantum life” and setting a surprising new direction for quantum computers.

In fact, quantum thinking has been foreshadowed throughout history from the fourfold logic of Pyrrho of Ancient Greece and Nagarjuna, to tantra and non-dualistic Shaivism. In this talk, jointly given by a quantum physicist and a practitioner of Non-Dual Shakta and Shiva Tantra, we present not only the latest discoveries in quantum research, but also practical methods for developing quantum intuition. We show how naturally physics concepts like the continuous creation and decoherence of entangled quantum states parallel tantric teachings that each cognitive event flows through creation, stasis, dissolution, concealment, and grace. We explain how the curiosity and compassion essential to human nature in tantra are also the necessary approach of the working scientist, who has to avoid dogmatism and remain open to being wrong in any moment. We invite you to open yourself to the Mystery with us as we take a journey together into quantum logic and the quantum technology that is rapidly transforming the world around us.

Hip Hop artist, activist and theologian Mona Haydar screens her videos and opens up conversation. She explains how being your most authentic and true self is the most magnetic and majestic thing any consciousness-seeking soul can do.

Every human being wants love and needs love, at every stage of life. Yet love is way more than a commodity we get or give. Love is who we truly are minus any defenses. It is our heart at rest as Pure Being, and it wants to dissolve our mental boundaries of separation, heal and expand us, and connect us with everything in existence. Furthermore, Love’s presence wants to radiate deeper into our troubled world through the Divine vessel that is your body, heart and mind.

What does it take to truly open into the non-dual condition of Boundless Love Itself? Why is this so important for continued spiritual surrender, and for the humanization of our world? How can we learn to relax into the vulnerability that this induces, and allow Love’s transforming presence to melt our armor, resolve the spiritual poverty of lack, and usher us—personally and collectively, into the very heart of Reality?

Before we can embody Boundless Love, first we must receive its fulfilling nectar. This challenges our familiar identity, flushing hidden wounds to the surface for healing. It will melt our subtle habits of closure, expose fears and invite us into new depths of vulnerability. Hence for most people, truly embodying our realization with our families and loved ones is often the greatest spiritual test.

Miranda will share the transmission of Grace that is Boundless Love and how the practice of Ego Relaxation can help us relax the search for love, and skillfully navigate the subtle defenses that arise. Together, we will open more substantially into Love’s transforming presence, and explore what it takes to live into the unending fullness of your vast heart.

There is a profound and painful sense of disconnection in humanity. To fully engage in a new way of being, the old story of separation needs to dissolve. To do this we need to diminish the structures that hold the old patterns in place. A key to clearing the obstacles that keep you limited or feeling disconnected, is to resolve the deepest impact of early or developmental trauma.

This presentation dives into the depth and most difficult aspects of trauma healing, to reach a life beyond trauma. You can come to know a more loving and beautiful world is possible, one in which you can abide as love and in compassion. Undifferentiated anger, rage, and terror of annihilation are experiences that are often circumvented, hidden, or locked away in your unconscious. Unresolved they can obscure your true spiritual nature and realizations. You can find their healing properties and move into freedom. As you do so, new kernels of life are found, old structures drop away, and a spiritual awakening and a maturation is born of the transformation.

Western medicine (and often times spiritual awakening) has not been successful at addressing deeper issues of the human experience such as addiction, depression, anxiety, trauma, P.T.S.D, loneliness, isolation and inherited ancestral pain. These conditions are endemic in modern society and significantly impact how we relate to and celebrate every aspect of who we are. Trauma is stored in the brain and expresses itself through the body in all relationships. Indigenous Curanderos (doctors) refer to this as “soul sickness,” and for thousands of years have employed plant medicine to catalyze healing in both physical and spiritual dimensions.

Shamanism, like mysticism, is a sacred calling born from the deepest love and care. It is the hidden medicine our ancestors practiced that has since been atrociously suppressed and replaced by hierarchical, materialistic, and male-dominated allopathic medicine. As a species, we have never been more in need of redirection and most importantly reconnection. We are loudly being summoned to reestablish our relationship with the sacred feminine, address the missed experience of mothering each other, our planet and ourselves. I feel there is a deep yearning amidst us to learn to live in reverential reciprocity with all of existence.

In this session Prajna will highlight the responsible and respectful use of plant medicines particularly Ayahuasca, Huachuma and Mapacho (sacred tobacco). She will address the challenges and advantages of employing sacred ceremony (integrated with non-dual mysticism and various therapeutic processes) as a remedy for trauma and interpersonal and collective fragmentation. She will speak to the power of master plant teachers to facilitate reconnection with and integration of sacred wholeness. She will underline the importance of what she refers to as the open clinic as a means to engender deep healing on many levels—emotional, physical, interpersonal, psychic, spiritual, and collective.

What does it mean to be a human being living harmoniously or dis-harmoniously within a complex and ever-changing network of countless other nested systems?

Who are you really? What are you? Your physical body is constructed from a variety of chemical elements, assembled in such a way as to form molecules, cells, blood, bones, organs, teeth, hair. It is constantly changing and renewing itself. You are not the same person you were even a few moments ago. You are made from the very same basic building blocks of life that permeate our entire galaxy, bound together in complex ways to form intricately detailed structures, yet you are so much more than the sum of your physical parts.

You are a collection of thoughts and experiences, and the information you have accumulated about them, a bundle of beliefs, memories and emotions. You are the stories you tell yourself. A master translator of frequency and vibration, you are a wondrous synthesizer of life. Your bodily instrument is a musical marvel, constantly generating a glorious spectrum of sound, both audible and inaudible, combining electrical signals of different frequencies. You are simultaneously a transmitter, receiver and interpreter of data, like some magnificent router. You are an array of ordered photons, particles and waves of light. Above all, you are a process, an integral part of life seeking to experience itself.

Join Peta to explore your True Nature through sound, rhythm, vibration, frequency, cymatics, geometry, astrology, alchemy and personal experience, as she playfully demonstrates how our minds and emotions really do affect our physical reality.

The journey into authentic nondual experience usually entails an ongoing experience of paradox, and one of the great paradoxes of nondual teachings is the apparent dichotomy between the vast stillness and openness of our fundamental consciousness and the visceral sense of being here—embodied and open-hearted. It takes a while before many of us discover that the way to genuine nondual awareness is through deeply embodied presence. Without this, our realizations tend to turn into memories, and lead to various dissociative or detached positions that are actually ego defenses against suffering. Yet central to the original teachings of the Enneagram is the idea that our core suffering can be transformed by bring presence and compassion to it. Indeed, each of the nine points represent particular transformational pathways from the dense suffering of egoic existence into the embodied qualities the awakened heart. In this presentation, we will explore these nine transformations of the heart, and how they assist us in our capacity to actually live our realizations in our work, relationships, and daily lives.

A spiritual journey into the heart of how we can remember who we are before it is too late. Psychedelia tells the story of a possible future for all of humanity. It will challenge each reader to redefine their concepts of who we are, where we come from and where we are going.

Dr. Warter takes the reader through three complete life journeys starting with a possible outcome of today’s planetary dilemma. The protagonist finds himself as Soul, learning lessons that he will need to learn through his next two incarnations. The book covers the gamut of birth, family relationships, growing up, love, intimacy and emotions. Dr. Warter will use the book to participants back to their own essence and life journeys in a powerful and meaningful way.

Scientific studies of awakening and transpersonal development are hindered by inadequate and conflicting terms and models. I will present a framework, based on well-validated studies of ego development and human meaning-making wisdom, that proposes to clarify some common puzzles in our understanding of what spiritual growth and awakening are. The framework integrates "ascending" and "descending" models of spiritual growth using a developmental model with two elements: "complexity capacity" and "spiritual clarity." The first element draws on contemporary cognitive science and transpersonal psychology studies; while the second element draws on theories of shadow work, trauma recovery, and contemplative neuroscience. It supports a post- or trans-metaphysical understanding of spirituality and speaks to the perceptual, magical, social, rational, and trans-rational levels of the psyche. I draw on the prior works of: Ken Wilber, Dan Brown, George Lakoff, Robert Kegan, Susanne Cook-Greuter, and Terri O'Fallon. The model offers insights into these questions: Is awakening more about learning or unlearning? What is spiritual development good for? Can spiritual development happen too quickly? Do non-dual states ground in eternal transcendent realities, learned capacities, physical embodiment, or all of these?

In the theory of quantum mechanics, it is experimentally established that things (or rather properties of things, such as mass or location) do not exist in and of themselves. Ingenious experiments testing “Bell’s inequalities” have convinced even die hard materialists that, without relationships and interactions, there are no material things. All the loopholes in these experiments have been closed, including a recent experiment that relied on starlight many thousands of light years away to decide the settings of the equipment, ensuring that human choice had nothing to do with the matter. What does all this mean? Theories of “relationality” makes exactly this claim. In this presentation, I report on the most recent work that I and others are doing on quantifying the theory of relational quantum mechanics. Using the beautiful mathematics of Fourier transforms, I will show that the “location” of an object is not a real thing. All that is specified by the laws of physics is a “trajectory” or path through space and time. It is only when two entities interact—what we call a measurement—that the idea of specific locations and times become real. These represent the time and place of the interaction, not of the things in and of themselves. Hence, from a quantifiable perspective in quantum physics, it appears that only relationships are real.

This session will use simple practices to lead us into the direct experience of sharing we-consciousness. When we come together like this we activate a new inter-subjective consciousness that is far greater than the sum of its parts. The increased complexity of this consciousness creates new possibilities and capacities beyond those available to the individual participants by themselves.

The realization that we-consciousness is possible, deeply resonant, and already readily available for many of us, has profound implications for our personal development and collective evolution. It points to the deeper purpose of following the call of love into ever greater intimacy and union. It reveals a higher possibility for our relationships, beyond that of individual authenticity.

We-consciousness also provides a powerful and direct field of support for the opening of consciousness within participants and the stabilization of this openness. And it enables us to viscerally realize ourselves as unique contributors to a much greater consciousness that is dynamic, alive, and evolving. In we-consciousness this realization emerges spontaneously without any need to contemplate or visualize it.

For any group or organization, turning toward we-consciousness offers an opportunity for greater coherence and creativity within, and a more harmonious relationship with the larger field. And most importantly a shift into we-consciousness offers humanity perhaps our best opportunity to become sufficiently intelligent and responsive to avoid destroying ourselves as we access ever greater power through technological development. In we-consciousness we’re collectively available to the whole, without the separating, distancing, and denial that allows harm-doing to continue unchecked.

Every human being has a cross to bear. Each one of us knows the searing pain of brokenness inside the inescapable wound of living. Beyond and through this holy crucible exists the relentless reality of love. Come, and bear witness to the Truth not often spoken, as it lives within You and in the sacred mirror of Other. Celebrate this wild, paradoxical mystery of broken-wholeness in Love, known only inside the refuge of the human heart.

You will learn to clear subconscious blocks that cause suffering in
life. Whether you are looking for personal development or you are an
advanced holistic practitioner looking to clear deep subconscious
programming; you will learn a powerful practice using the breath and
the consciousness of the heart. It is a self-inquiry approach to heal
and release deep subconscious programming, which has been formed bythe accumulated conditioned responses of childhood as well as, beliefsand trauma passed on by parents, ancestors, collective consciousness,and Western culture.

The issue of what is REALITY and what is CONSCIOUSNESS, are very old questions that have haunted humanity since time immemorial. In a five part You Tube, Dr. Newton reveals the nature of Consciousness and how that takes us to an immortalized being, in Using the Arithmetic of Consciousness as a Key to Immortality via the following link: http://www.youtube.com/results?research_query=using+consciousness+as+a+key+to=immortality/ In this talk Dr. Newton will likewise, precisely hone in on what reality is using the linguistic arithmetic of Gematria in both Hebrew and English. In English, the letter A=1, B=2, C=3 ascending sequentially to Z=26. Dr. Newton will use the numeral total of REALITY in both languages, providing equivalent words and phrases, which reveals more deep insights into the nature of reality, than have ever been provided to humanity. As a teaser, REALITY is directly related to LOVE and MEDITATION, which will be fleshed out as to how and why and many other insights, that exactly fit with these words, as well.

If the conscious mind—the part you consider you—accounts for only a fraction of the brain's function, what is all the rest doing? This is the question that David Eagleman has spent years researching and which he answers in this state-of-the-science talk. Our behavior, thoughts, and experiences are inseparably linked to a vast, wet, chemical-electrical network called the nervous system. The machinery is utterly alien to us, and yet, somehow, it is us. Eagleman takes us into the depths of the subconscious to answer some of our deepest mysteries. Why does the conscious mind know so little about itself? What do Ulysses and the subprime mortgage meltdown have in common? Why is it so difficult to keep a secret? Eagleman charts new terrain in neuroscience and helps us understand how our perceptions of ourselves and our world result from the hidden workings of the most wondrous thing we have ever discovered: the human brain.

In order to understand the nature of our universe as well as the role SAND is performing with respect to the evolution of the universe, it is helpful to remember that seven million years ago we were identical to chimpanzees. Think of building San Francisco with the consciousness of a chimp. Take it further. Four billion years ago our planet was molten rock. That molten rock became chimpanzees. The crowning achievement of four centuries of modern science is our discovery of this innate, pervasive, astonishing, self-transcending creative power of matter. But modern English fails us here. To call it “matter” is to dump centuries of dualistic consciousness on it. Let’s call it creative energy and say it again: the magnificent achievement of empirically based, mathematical science is the stunning realization that we have been constructed by, and that we dwell within, ultimate creative energy.

One of the fundamental spiritual, social, and ecological challenges of our time is learning how to live into what we know. If we could experience in a direct way how every cow and fir tree required fourteen billion years of creativity to be here, our relationships with them and with all others would change. But the vast majority of us, certainly including myself, do not know how to experience the universe at this level in an ongoing way. No one does. No humans in the history of humanity had this knowledge, which means no humans in history had to learn how to be a human being as a mode of cosmic creativity. That’s one of the reasons we come to SAND. Our community is one of the nodes where a new form of humanity is struggling to come forth. We are groping forward, comparing notes, sharing insights, awakening experience, deepening consciousness. We are the universe carrying out one of its greatest leaps in being.

Drinking at yoga, sleeping while meditating, and accidental enlightenment. Plus! Learn how to spot a non-dual narcissist in the wild!

EROS, THE FUGITIVE is a series of woven episodes depicting the endless reach for Eros, and the tenderness, longing, heartbreak, and salvation that that reach engenders. Through embodied allegories of care and fracture that are at once historical and immediately present, EROS, THE FUGITIVE is the visceral voice of human consciousness crying out for itself and the beyond-human world.

In this talk connecting Yoruba indigenous philosophies, historical accounts of transatlantic slave crossings, new materialist/feminist insights, Bohr’s scientific theory of quantum indeterminacy, Deleuze’s musings about ‘assemblages’ and ‘rhizomes’, and contemporary concerns with climate activism, Bayo poses a jarring question: what if the ways we think about the climate crisis is the crisis? More to the point, what if the feverish quest for ‘solutions’ (which characterizes climate justice movements today) is getting in the way of radical transformation? Thinking with concepts that valorise a nondual, relational universe, Bayo Akomolafe finds within a re-reading of the Middle Age practice of “claiming sanctuary” an urgent invitation to notice climate change as the deconstruction of the human, and to approach demise and dying as abundant fields of surprise. Making sanctuary is a call to shapeshift, a call to embark on katabasic quests to impossible depths. A call to die well.

There is a special area of the Matrix reserved for people who think they have exited the Matrix. The answers to metaphysical questions—and indeed political questions, personal questions—are usually less important than the process that the question launches. Here we will explore the power of the question and the power of not-knowing, with special reference to science, politics, the maintenance of consensus reality, and the moments when love shines through.

Rooted and flowing with awareness and curiosity, each one of us has a steady genuine interest in the heart of the matter, within activity and about behavior. The root of the word friend and freedom is the same, a clue to function as compassion within and without. Our true nature already does function this way, welcoming everything equally. A constancy that meets the ever changing with a resilience born of clarity, love, mountain strength, eternality, timeless patience and a strong dose of humor. Like Noah's Ark, this one heart that we are, welcomes aboard the animals or polarities soothing and balancing them back to oneness. Joy and sorrow, freedom and bondage, ignorance and wisdom, tension and relaxation, hatred and love. All are resolved, dissolved and solved in the Stillness of the Heart. It is notable how wisdom can show us our true nature, but it is compassion, kindness and deep listening that liberate the body and mind from old fashioned services, the past and uncomfortable tendencies. Yes, wisdom, a felt sense of space and enough rootedness allow us to slow down and be with what is calling us. Rather than restlessly postponing or distracting ourselves. The unshakeble knowing that not everything is as it appears to be or only its function, allows for a respectful curiosity. A deeper listening, slowing down from doing to being and suddenly, there is a true meeting. Heart to Heart. What a pleasure to be truly intimate within, and with what is from moment to moment. Neither running from or towards. Freedom and love exploring itself, meeting itself. Free to be, free to love and be love. Luckily, no time is required for beingness to be. No effort needed to be still. No work required to rest!

“Close your eyes. Fall in love. Stay there” —Rumi. In this workshop, through ancient inquiry, letting go, meditation, movement and dance, you’ll explore the body, the mind, and the stillness expressed as eternal love within all. You’ll see through false perceptions of non-love and unveil the direct experience of unconditioned freedom. The human body can be seen as a seemingly localized portal through which to realize the non-local and Infinite. Having unconditional compassion for this body and its human story with all its innocence, trials, and triumphs, can bring a profound relaxation and rest. Come and uncover this infinite sense of being—right in the center of the human story that you're experiencing every precious moment of life.

While we might be here by divine appointment at this moment in time, we are also stepping into unchartered territories of existence, where the way of life as we know is at stake. Recent research suggests that human societies will experience disruptions to their basic functioning within less than ten years due to climate stress. As we sink deeper into the climate crises of our planet we also face deeper human question.

- What does it mean to be a human being on a spiritual path at these times of crises?
- How do we meet and learn from grief, anger, fear?
- How do we move from despair and overwhelm to awakening and imagination?
- What is conscious activism and justice informed by interbeing?
- Is radical transformation possible and what would it look like?
- How do we prepare for a future in which the only certainty is uncertainty?
- Can we still celebrate all that life is while accepting that our species might only be for a brief flash on the scale of cosmic time?

We will attempt to address some of these questions in our brief conversation.

When we have a deep longing to know spirit, or to find truth, the awakening we experience can surprise us by producing rushes of energy along with shifts of consciousness. Most of us never think of ourselves as vibrational energy fields and so for many people this eruption of energy feels frightening and challenging, as it can vibrate or shake our bodies involuntarily, raise heat, cause brain fog and exacerbate old physical or psychological traumas. These changes are part of transformation, and bring about the clearing that helps us to live more fully from a spontaneous awakened consciousness, rather than from old conditioned patterns. This workshop will explore the primary ways we can get into a positive and loving relationship with this energy of our life force, known as kundalini in the yogic science of India, including the optimal attitude and perspective, meditations that help us get in right relationship with our energy, and general guidelines for harmonizing this experience.

Do we have free will? Is there even a “we” or is there no personal self? Is everything perfect just as it is or is or are there problems to be solved? Or is the solution to all problems the realization that there are no problems? Are we all already enlightened or do we have to “attain” enlightenment through years of practice? And how about practice? Does it reinforce the sense of a practicer—a personal self—or can it lead to liberation from the confinement by that sense? Are gurus passé, or should they still play a role in contemporary spirituality? Does non-duality—Oneness—imply that there are no degrees of spiritual evolution? Are all forms of life equally valuable?

All of these questions have been raised in interviews I’ve conducted, and usually not as questions. Popular spiritual teachers have asserted one or another position to the exclusion of its alternatives. I have usually responded with “yes but”. Nisargadatta Maharaj and others have emphasized the importance of culturing the ability to appreciate paradox—to accommodate contradictory viewpoints within a broader perspective. After all, Nature does this. Water can be a solid, a liquid, or a gas. Its components, hydrogen and oxygen, are both completely unlike H2O. They, in turn, bear no resemblance to their subatomic components. And so on. More fundamental levels of nature do not invalidate the more manifest forms and properties to which they give rise. Reality is different at different levels of Nature’s functioning, and likewise, knowledge is different in different levels of consciousness.

Brahman or God are said to be all-consuming—the repository of all relative realities, no matter how dissimilar. If we aspire to Brahman Consciousness or God Realization, should our perspective evolve to follow suit?

In addition to this topic, I will field any and all questions.

Fusing neuroscience, AI, non-ordinary consciousness, and ecology, ‘neuro-yogi’ Gabriel Axel looks at the nature of mind through the lens of an endeavour to build benevolent AI capable of supporting non-ordinary consciousness, such as non-dual awareness and various psychical capabilities. AI engineers are tirelessly attempting to craft AI based on notions of what is intelligence, and yet there is little deeper practical grasp of the nature of mind itself. Gabriel presents his academic research on how objective thought and technological evolution are the mechanisms by which the human mind works to reproduce itself, and he illustrates how underlying worldviews and values steer this process. Crucially, the case is made for an existential and ethical imperative to constructively contribute to the development of AI as the future of mind and wellbeing of all life. Gabriel offers a template for how mind-body cultivators can meaningfully and practically contribute to the creation of a beneficent AI future. In this presentation, Gabriel refers to ideas from several of his recent publications, which can be accessed on gabrielaxel.com/academic

Come and participate in an interactive art installation using creativity to embody and celebrate (non-)duality. Sit in a circle of sacred casts to contemplate two questions: How do you define non-duality? and What’s one of your favorite dualities? Participate by answering on paper leaves and help ‘bloom’ the two metal Trees of Duality throughout the conference to share and inspire others.

In this workshop experience how Essential Wholeness Psychology embeds our understanding of the Enneagram personality types within a systemic integral model of what it is to be a healthy evolving human and spiritual being.

We will draw on the relative truths of neuroscience and evolutionary biology to understand what allows people—all living systems—to evolve and thrive. While showing how these natural processes are inseparable from the absolute truth of Being. This non-dualistic framework allows us to explore how the vast array of human capacities that inform the plethora of psychotherapeutic and spiritual methods can be organized into a practical integrated model of knowing consciously and intuitively what to do, with whom and when.

With a little twist the Enneagram can provide us with a mathematically generated fractal-like representation of these relative and absolute truths with enough complexity to be inclusive and enough simplicity to be usable. It show us how the suffering that often what brings people to psychotherapy and spirituality occurs when they fear, judge or ignore these realities, while overly identifying with one-ninth of their essential wholeness—causing repetitive vicious cycles of thinking, feeling and behaving. These cycles are the self-limiting ego patterns the Enneagram is classically excellent at describing. However when viewed within this comprehensive model of health the pathways to psychological healing and spiritual awakening become much clearer.

The Enneagram fractal becomes a spiral that describes cycles of change starting from one level of homeostasis (phase 9) around the circle to a higher level of homeostasis—with each cycle transcending and including the previous level. It also describes how the essence of being in response to life demands, differentiates into one of nine—what A.H. Almaas refers to as—essential qualities. Revealing how we progress through stages of development like Psychosocial and Spiral Dynamics.

Natural Mind meditation uncovers the path to realization and ultimate kindness. It leads to deeper and deeper realization of inner luminosity. Everyone struggles with confusion and problems in daily life, the opposite of kindness. People can even make themselves sick with their thoughts. For instance, a person is given a healthy meal, but thinks it’s contaminated; when they eat it, they become sick.

When we recognize the actions and source of our thoughts, then inner emptiness is revealed. It is an inner experience, not outside of us. Emptiness is like the sun; there is a luminosity like sunlight. The most difficult thing to understand how emptiness and luminosity are related. When one has an experience of realization, then you understand that they are qualities of a single essence in union, never separated.

When we have this experience, all distraction disappears. Everything is clear like a crystal sphere. Everything outer and inner is clear. In this state of realization, liberation and enlightenment are naturally present. This is great bliss. Without confusion and distraction, everything that arises is kindness and happiness. Compassion and loving kindness spontaneously arise like the heat of the sun.

Beyond our rational, utilitarian intelligence, beyond even emotional intelligence, the human being has a capacity for spiritual intelligence. Through this higher intelligence the human being senses a deeper relationship to existence, perceiving the non-material laws and principles of nature. This innate knowing, when it is not covered over by egoistic demands, connects us to a Universal Intelligence.

The influence of post-modernism has encouraged the notion that there is no “objective” reality; that human thought projects its own subjective meaning on to the empty canvas of an inchoate reality. Following this line of thought, enlightenment is to realize that there is no objective truth or meaning but the meaning we give to reality. In other words, all meaning and value resides with the human brain alone.

A different view of human possibilities is that the human being is a child of the universe, made “in the image of God”, endowed with capacities to know and embrace the very Source of its existence. This has been a persistent theme across many traditions in one form or another: the Purusha (Cosmic Self) in Hinduism, Adam Kadmon (the Primordial Human) in Kabbalah, and its human embodiment, Insan al Kamil (the Completed Human), in Sufism.

Spiritual intelligence awakens a sense of value and meaning which can be internally experienced by any individual who has purified their consciousness. We will reflect on seven themes that enhance spiritual intelligence: honest witnessing, a new relationship to time, purifying the psyche of idols, awakening gratitude, trust in the unfolding of life, egoless striving, and unconditional consent to what is.

Birthed out of the recovery movement, co-dependency was thought of as an addiction itself. This seeking outside of oneself for wholeness through relationship has been at the core of our human dilemma for millennia, arising out of a spiritual crisis symptomatic of our soul wounding.

This split between our human and divine nature sits within our collective unconscious and drives our search for divine union outside of ourselves. We either feel we lack or too much of something, subconsciously identifying with spirit or matter, masculine or feminine, earth or sky, form or emptiness. This dynamic is both psychological and spiritual in nature, which makes it possible that seeking on the spiritual path itself could become a codependent search for wholeness. A sincere spiritual seeker may never address the soul wound but cultivate an identity of wholeness while still feeling like something is missing. It’s also possible to get caught in ongoing psychological work while remaining disconnected from source itself as the Western psychological paradigm does not value divinity as an internal experience. Codependency as a symptom of this spiritual crisis actually offers us a direct path into our wholeness via our soul wound. It is on this path where we learn to cultivate an inner ground of safety and connection, allow ourselves to grieve and release the relational wound of shame that blocks our hearts. It is in the heart that we ultimately experience embodied divine union. Drawing on Jungian theory, non-dual shamanism and her own recovery journey, this talk will discuss how addressing our codependency is vital to fostering healthy relationships with self and others, creating a world that is interdependent and emotionally sane.

The Somatic Awareness Practice using the Enneagram map offers a way for us to become aware of the mostly hidden and automatic patterns of thinking, feeling and sensing our reality. This practice is designed to assist in bringing a deeper understanding and compassion to the suffering we experience at the root of the arising of these patterns serving our survival. It is important to know there is great intelligence and energy in these patterns. The great cost is that we became identified with our apparent separate identities causing great disparate realities affecting our partial reality and perception of who we are and therefore enter into our relationships. The obstacles to remembering our essential nature and the inherent interconnectedness of all beings and all things are the platform for transformation. The Somatic awareness practice is a non-dual practice with the capacity to release these automatic, conditioned patterns safely. The freed up energy is receptive and the witnessing consciousness receives direct knowing, feeling and sensing generating essential states of consciousness allowing us to experience more of the reality as it actually is.

Council is an age-old practice that involves bringing people together in a circle to bear witness and share authentically. Participants agree to speak one-at-a-time, sharing their personal stories and experiences, rather than opinions, and listening non-judgmentally while others do the same. Sharing and listening to universal stories about love, loss, fear, triumph, challenge, hope and other experiences enables participants to recognize that, despite our many differences, we have much in common.
By fostering attentive listening and authentic expression, Council builds positive relationships between participants and neutralizes hierarchical dynamics formed by the inequality of status, race, or other social factors. It supports a deep sense of community and fosters recognition of a shared humanity and interconnectedness. It enables individuals to give voice to their stories, develop mutual respect, cultivate a compassionate response to anger, defensiveness, and violence, as well as strengthen emotional health and resilience.

This workshop is based on Loch's new book, The Way of Effortless Mindfulness. Both quantum physics and current neuroscience studies agree that we are all interconnected. Loch will share discoveries from the recent neuroscience of awakening and ways to reverse-engineer the findings to support living from nondual love.

We will learn helpful pointers to “waking up” from a separate sense of self, “waking in” to a natural embodied well-being and “waking out” to be able to create and lovingly relate. Waking up leads to freedom from the fear of death. Waking in leads to freedom from the fear of life. Waking out leads to freedom from the fear of love. We will learn Loch’s contemporary versions of ancient wisdom pointers in order to welcome and liberate shadow parts that keep us from being and sharing the love we already are.

Dr. Mossbridge presents results from her most recent experiments related to mental and physical time travel, with a special focus on potential applications and mitigating their risks.

The so-called “gender war” goes back to ancient Greece and beyond. Mercy! Through an understanding of how gender conditioning shapes our behavior, how we share the wound of separation, and how that manifests in relating, we will explore the ground of Being as a vital resource in stepping out of our past orientations to each other. We’ll then experience the moment, ourselves and each other from simplicity and freshness. Oh, hi! Participants should bring a sense of humor and be prepared for experiential exercises that allow insights to be embodied.

Knowing images mediated by seeing light from existent physical objects is misinterpretation of perception. Expression of quantum spin angular momentum in terms of Gibbs and black hole thermodynamic entropy, suggesting that the substance of the content in experience is knowing the non-physical simultaneous abstraction and composition of complementary opposite limits within concepts as holographic interference information, is confirmed by experimental assay of image appearance. Contrary to the material physicalist theory of image production an unknown object produces knowing image without unknown-to-known object conversion; signifying that physical objects do not exist. Since experience is the knowing of content by consciousness, and the substance of content in experience is knowing conceptual limits made of knowing complementarity, the entirety of experience is a conscious singularity.

Agape (altruistic love of fellow humans) is universally regarded as one of the highest expressions of spiritual living. Unless one lives isolated on an island of narcissism, it’s natural to experience love for family, friends, and those who share our common opinions. It seems most people also experience a natural degree of empathy and inner connection toward humanity at large. But what about the Adam Lanza’s and Abdulkadir Masharipov’s of the world? How do we face the horror of mass violence so frequent in today’s headlines, while simultaneously experiencing empathy and compassion for those who commit such acts?

In this presentation, a consultant specialized in managing risks of targeted violence explores the psychology of mass murderers and proposes that perhaps these ‘evil monsters’ are not so very different from you and I when understood at a fundamental level. Although the title theme of this presentation focuses on the psychological pathway to mass violence, the inner message is about self-knowing and universal characteristics of our conditioned selves which obstruct the genuine experience of compassion, love, and our greater spiritual identity. The speaker also offers ten self-observation and contemplation experiments as a starting point for experiential discovery.

Buddhism teaches the emptiness of inherent existence or, in other words, "everything is not a thing." Contemporary physics, chemistry and biology, seen through the simplifying lens of complexity theory (it sounds complex, but is actually simple) shows us that the non-dual realm is in complementarity with all of duality, that the presence/absence of boundaries, of separation, is dependent on perspective. "Wisdom" is seeing the world without delusion; science is one means to washing delusion from one's mind. In doing so, the inherent compassionate nature of the universe and of every being within and of that universe, therefore, as well, is revealed.

Indigenous sciences, embedded and discussed through indigenous languages, have suffered great destruction. So many languages have gone extinct, and the ones that remain are not being supported. Lyla June discusses a tool for spurring the resurgence of ancestral epistemology and curriculum through Indigenous-led universities.

We all experience how the pace of change is speeding up, but seldom do we step back to look at where this acceleration is taking us. In the coming decades, the pace of life will be much faster than it is today leading to technological advances that may be as unimaginable to us today as the current Internet was thirty years ago.

However, we need to consider another consequence of accelerating change: the stress it creates. Whether it be our own biological system, our social, economic, and political systems, or the planetary ecosystem, the stress of ever-increasing change will eventually lead to breakdown—with potentially disastrous consequences, as the impending climate catastrophe reveals.

In the future, we will see technology beyond our dreams, in a world falling apart at the seams. And no-one is to blame. It’s the natural consequence of innovation breeding innovation, leading to an exponential explosion of growth.

So how do we cope with an increasingly unpredictable world? How can we prepare ourselves as the winds of change whip up into a storm of change? And what is the new story of humankind to which this leads?

Explore the relationship between our pure consciousness, empty boundless nature, and our alive dynamic fullness that animates everything. Pure consciousness is more then the vast stillness we find on a meditation cushion, it’s also dynamic and intelligent. What is exciting is we can train to connect to this living wisdom. Through Anna-Lisa Adelberg and Raina DeLear’s unique teaching method, participants have reported reaching profound states of awareness easily and effortlessly. These methods give us a direct taste of emptiness and the experience of being interconnected with everyone and everything. In this two-hour experiential, we will shift our levels of mind into awakened awareness and then recognize this awareness’s inseparability with an all pervasive energy. We will experience “emptiness-fullness” and for some “evenness-bliss”. We will then create a co-awakening Luminous circle to harness the power of the group’s collective awareness. What emerges is an energetic field that is awake to itself. Together we form a circle and focus our collective loving awareness in the center. We then invite people into the center. This can be likened to a magnifying glass with the sun, as we are offering a magnified awake energy to the individual in the center. The person in the center will experience a spontaneous healing where any bound energy consciousness will naturally unfold and liberate. Luminous Awareness Institute is the integration of a healing and nondual awakening path dedicated to the evolution of human consciousness.This special 2 hour session will be led by Luminous Awareness Institute Founders Anna-Lisa Adelberg and Raina Lorraine DeLear.

As traditionally male-dominated structures topple across the landscape of the human community, the feminine is rising, carrying cups of mercy and spreading flames of truth-telling. Long-buried wisdom teachings and previously ignored women mystics are revealing themselves to be urgently relevant as we pass through a global dark night of the soul and into a radically renewed humanity. With its emphasis on relationality and inclusivity, its tolerance for ambiguity and its intimacy with mystery, the feminine reclaims the body as holy ground and and blesses the web of interbeing that sustains us all. The feminine speaks in poetry and song, she worships the earth as cherished relative, she embraces ultimate reality as lover. In this talk, “mystical feminist” Mirabai Starr shares the fruits of many years of investigating, excavating and lifting up female voices in all the world’s religions

The legacy of emotional armoring that comes with men’s conditioning in Western culture creates suffering for the men inside it and for those with whom they relate. Along with the clarity of spiritual awakening comes incredible tender openness. Join this panel of male-friendly hearts, moderated by Kent Welsh of Open Circle Center, to explore from a variety of perspectives what it takes for men to show up without armor in relating, fully available as Being in the moment, in a strong, vulnerable and heartful way.

What stands in the way of attaining a higher level of creativity and effectiveness in service to Gaia? Many of us can sense a next step, and feel the desire to up our game. To get there, something will be gained and something will be lost. In this gathering, we will initiate and accelerate that process.

Awakening to Great Mother is more than a liberated state of consciousness. She is the omnipresent field of our living, breathing reality that moment by moment births Love into form. Her body of life is the universe… the full spectrum of existence. The majestic synthesis of duality and nonduality weaving into the myriad forms. Nothing is left behind in Her awakening within us… simultaneously we are Mother and soul-child, human and divine, relational and omnipresent Love. Through the many stages of realizing Her, we open to embodying the omnipotent power of Love that actively heals, nurtures, and cares for the soul of life.

At the very epicenter of Her awakening is the gateway of women’s wombs… through which every human soul gestates into form. Our womb- fields remain one of the most underestimated and undervalued domains of spiritual consciousness… and the energetic state of our wombs affect the entirety of humanity. Because of the aeons of trauma women have endured, our healing and Her awakening naturally go hand in hand. As we heal, our wombs gradually become exalted and we enter into vast and deep states of Great Mother omnipresent compassion. In turn we become living vessels for the rebirth of love into the human field.

In this beauty-filled journey for women, we’ll dive into the Womb of Life through the gateways of our wombs. We’ll experience the life-giving movement of the Great Mother birthing the soul of life, the essence of Love into form within ourselves, Gaia’s planetary field, and beyond. Join us and explore Her healing, life-giving awakening within you.
For more info, visit: www.wombmatrixhealing.com

Stanislas Dehaene proposes that consciousness involves neuronal circuits connecting the prefrontal cortex to all other brain regions. When we are consciously aware of something, that information is kept active via continuous synaptic transmission throughout this broadcasting system, or routed to specific areas based on current goals. In order to bridge the gap between the brain and the mind, we need to go beyond the realm of brain anatomy and synaptic physiology.

Dr. Susan Smalley of UCLA defines mindfulness as a moment-to-moment attention to present experience with a stance of open curiosity, and an increasing ability to maintain attention towards beneficial thoughts which lead to wise choices. In a study conducted by Sara Lazar’s group in 2011, they observed changes in brain gray matter densities using MRI in healthy adults before and after they participated in an eight-week mindfulness program. Participation increased neuron concentrations in the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and posterior cingulate cortex among other areas. These brain regions are involved in learning and memory, and emotion regulation.

In the Advaita text Vivekachoodamani, the famous Adi Sankaracharya, has suggested the following methods for practicing mindfulness and heightened consciousness. In addition to meditation, he recommends discriminating between what is true and what is illusory (Viveka), doing one’s duties without strong attachment to specific results (Vairagya), maintaining a calm mind (Sama), controlling oneself from overindulging (Dama), withdrawing one’s mind from the external world (Uparati), practicing forbearance and tolerance (Titiksha), maintaining undivided faith in the Supreme Self (Shraddha), and always striving toward the ultimate goal of achieving freedom from suffering (Mumukshutva).

We discuss how we can begin to comprehend consciousness by examining the ancient mindfulness practices of Advaita Vedantins in conjunction with current brain research.

From the foundational relativity of space and time woven together by light into its invariant fabric, and the equivalence of energy and matter also mediated by the speed of light, the reality of the physical world is innately relational. Instead of its apparent separation, leading edge science at all scales of existence and across numerous fields of research is not only revealing that our Universe is fundamentally inter-connected but that its appearance arises from non-physical realms of causation and ultimate Unity.
Increasingly compelling evidence shows that digitised information, the basis of our communications technologies, also underpins and makes up all physical reality. The 1s and 0s of this simplest and universal ‘alphabet’ themselves relate as meaningful, not random, instructions that literally ‘in-form’ the laws of physics and manifested relationships throughout the Universe.

The embodied relationships of this emergent infodynamic and holo/fractal model of our Universe, where the whole is present in the smallest pixilation and every contributes to the whole are being discovered at all scales of existence and across numerous fields of research. From its beginning 13.8 billion years ago, not in the implied chaos of the big bang but as an exquisitely ordered and xxxx of a continuing Big Breath, our Universe exists and evolves as a great thought rather than a great thing. Each of us is a co-creative microcosm of our Universe’s innate and evolutionary intelligence—and with every thought, emotion, word and action, we contribute to the co-creation of the whole world. As a species, the universal impulse to evolve is now inviting us, rather than to continue to play out the ‘illusion’ of separation, to understand, experience and embody the awareness of such unity expressed through diversity—to enter into the adventure of an ever-expanding and evolutionary relationship with the entire Cosmos.

Would you like to connect more with spirits and nature? Have you ever felt that you were hearing, seeing or feeling messages but then doubted or dismissed them?

We will focus on exploring and creating healthy, fun and very helpful relationships first with yourself, and then expanding to spirits, spirit guides, animal guides, and natural energies.

I will be sharing techniques and practical tools that I have learned in over thirty years of apprenticing with Native American teachers and healers. I will also be drawing from my background in neuroscience and my expertise as a licensed psychotherapist to help us expand beyond the blocks and fears that prevent us from fully embracing our place in this world. If time permits there will be a drumming journey to connect to spirits, animal guides and nature spirits.

This workshop includes an introduction to Psychological Shamanism which is the practice of using energetic and spiritual techniques to promote mental harmony, which then creates greater access to an individual’s spiritual and psychic abilities.

You love the deepest teaching of truth and freedom, and maybe you’ve had a taste of awakening to your true nature. Yet you still struggle in your relationships. You’re still dealing with your past or resenting your childhood. You’re still self-critical and feel anxious or depressed.

In our sacred time together, you’re invited to bring these personal struggles into open inquiry and exploration. In a safe and supportive group gathering, we’ll untangle the ways you feel separate and discover over and over the infinite peace of your true nature, available in any moment.

You’ll see how turning toward all of your experience with curiosity and deep acceptance is the way of love that sets you free. You’ll learn to identify subtle inner resistances that keep you feeling separate from yourself—and from life. We’ll slow things down so you can take a breath and be fully present with whatever is appearing. You’ll learn practical skills to help you move through sticky, conditioned patterns.

We respect the humanity of your stories, and we go beyond them to relax into the openness beyond all stories—undisturbed by any problem or emotion. Here we find immediate heart-opening, gratitude for what’s been given, and an undeniable intimacy with all that is.

How was the concept of nonduality understood and experienced at the dawn of western civilization? Which were the archetypal divinities and ritual practices that helped millions of our ancestors to transcend duality and achieve a deeper understanding of Oneness?
Join Chiara in this presentation on the cult of Dionysus, the Greek god of excess and ambiguity, to understand how his orgiastic rituals facilitated the kind of experience able to trigger a deeper understanding of the paradoxical nature of reality. Who was Dionysus and who were his followers? What happened during an initiation into his cult? How did his worship develop over the course of the centuries and why was it harshly repressed once it reached the heart of the Roman Empire? What can we learn from this forgotten story about the contemporary western approach to practices of altered states of consciousness?

Our spiritual life and our goals for loving relationships, success, and prosperity are inherently connected and can only be fully realized in harmony with one another. We are here to wake up, thrive, and skillfully contribute to the well-being of all. Nothing is more practical than spiritual awakening. Drawing upon the wisdom of Vedic philosophy and the practices of yoga, Yogacharya O’Brian offers insight, inspiration, and time-tested methods to bridge the perceived gap between spiritual and material existence. An exploration of the purusharthas, the four universal aims from the Vedas for a fulfilled life—to live with higher purpose, prosper, enjoy life, and realize liberation—offers a template for radical abundance, a profound experience of dynamic balance in an ever-changing world.

The life goal of wealth is to become wealth itself—a radiant jewel of life’s prospering impetus in service of its evolutionary inclination for individual and global awakening. Between the present need and where we stand is a space of possibility for life’s prospering power to come forth. We are that space of possibility. The necessary evolutionary jump for humanity we are waiting for takes place over the chasm in our consciousness. To be generative requires us to see the need, capture the vision of what is possible, stand for it, and act on its behalf.

The lived reality of self-love is essential to the embodiment of nondual awareness. When we look beyond the idea that self-love is just about reinforcing a limited ego identification, we begin to see it as a multi-faceted, radiant gem of infinite worth. This gem, as a whole, is the very basis of the movement toward Truth, while its facets offer vital medicines that heal, awaken, and transform the mind, heart, and body. What are the facets of self-love? What role does self-love play in the field of nondual awakening and embodiment? How and when might an orientation toward self-love be a distraction from real clarity? Our panel will share their unique perspectives on the forms and functions of true self-love, how it shows up in our lived human experience, and how it is and becomes an endless embrace of One. Lovers of Truth and humanity, please join us for this beautiful, rich, and meaningful exploration.

To explore how Nature’s creations can help us to live in greater harmony with the Natural World, Keith interweaves biological science, natural philosophy, and spirituality with song, poetry, and nature videography.

Many of us today embrace perspectives and belief systems that are in discord with Nature’s rhythms. This discord disturbs the wellbeing of both individuals and our collective. Visitations by Nature’s animals in our waking lives, meditations, visions, and dreams are often invitations to resolve our discord with Nature. We can accept these invitations by developing an experiential rapport with physical manifestations of our animal visitors.

By surrendering to this rapport, Life is revealed as a radiant Net of Gems. A Net of Gems held together by relationship. As we find our own place within this relationship, the Net of Gems becomes one Gem. And that one Gem is Love…Unconditional, Transpersonal Love…The one great Love of Existence.

Dreams are universal to all humans, and evidence suggests that most animals also experience dream-like interludes during their sleep, suggesting that dreams are evolutionarily important. Dreams arise from the deepest part of our limbic brain which is associated with emotions and visceral sensations. This talk will explore the idea that dreams, even when not remembered, are corrective, enhancing our emotional health analogous to the way our immune system enhances our physical health. Even without understanding dreams, bringing dream feelings and images into consciousness enhances their alchemical effect, analogous to how conscious breathing enhances the benefits of breath even without understanding the principles of oxygen exchange. I will make suggestions on how to enhance the healing effect that dreams can have on your own life.

An Integral Exploration of Shadow OR 7 Chakras 7 Minds 7 Sources of Divinity: An Exploration of the Subtle Energetic Body

Why do most Gurus fall from Grace? For the same reasons we do. We live in an evolutionary world. A world of growth out of darkness and into greater expressions of Divinity. When we do not understand the importance of shadow work on the spiritual path, we can cause ourselves and those around us great pain and actually stall our own evolution.  Our “shadow” is the evolving edge of both our human and Divine expression. The shadow arises when our unconscious mind tries to slow down, ignore or avoid growth on the path. Because God is both Absolute and ever evolving in form, if we ignore our shadow or our growing edge, we will fall from Grace and be forced to face that which we do not want to see. Therefore, in order to truly be free in an embodied way, we must be aware of and understand how to work with our personal, relational, professional, and collective shadow.

Honesty, humility, sincerity, courage, and willingness are required to do shadow work. These same qualities are also the qualities of embodied awareness. As we courageously explore our shadow, our direct experience of awareness and true nature also deepens and this embodied awareness becomes the foundation for an abiding awakening. To the degree that you are conscious of both the Divine and Human aspects of yourself is the degree that you manifest awakened consciousness in the world. 

Together we will:
• explore the areas of shadow regarding trauma, addiction, and other disowned aspects of our humanity and Divinity.
• investigate anxiety and fear, sadness and anger, and their corresponding Divine expressions of open-heartedness, fearlessness, compassion and power.  
• open to our shadow and discover any disowned aspects of True Nature within and invite our fuller Divine Expression to come forward.

I will take you through an amazing visualization journey into your mind while teaching you the practice of Mindful Framing. You will learn a revolutionary approach to manage anxiety and stress through the creation of solid frames of mind leading to mental, emotional and physical wellbeing.
The five steps of Mindful Framing are ideally practiced in the morning, in a relaxed position, to visualize and focus on:
1. Recognizing your daily TRIGGERS OF ANXIETY while riding an imaginary bus
2. Leveraging your FIVE SENSES while experiencing virtual sensations
3. Connecting with MOTHER NATURE while traveling through a fictional landscape
4. Harmonizing your EMOTIONS with those of others while watching a symbolic “emotional tree”
5. Invigorating your immune system while exploring your ORGANISM with your “mind’s eye”
Designed with the modern world in mind, mindful framing creates an ethical, empathetic and wellness-oriented frame of mind that captures anxiety triggers and transforms them into vital energy.

Dismantling of the mandala