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Thursday April 5, 5pm Pacific: Mystic Tech Live and Free!

Creative license AS Divine license

I will show you mine. Will you show me yours?
Thursday I am going to attempt, drum roll please……a Powerpoint presentation. And, If I got no Powerpoint at least I will point with power to share

  • a recovering workaholic recipe for modern mystics.
  • why divine license authorizes Playing and Resting as key to mysticism.
  • why we need each other to be mystics.

Judy Collins said, “Creativity is a voice that calls us from dreams, that peeks out of the corner of our eyes when we think no one is looking, the longing that breaks our hearts even when we think we should be happiest, and to which we cannot give a name. When I was young, I heard the voice, the ticking, had the dream, but I didn’t know what it was and only felt the pain, the longing that the voice inside brought me.”  Source: Voices (Thanks Anne Sigler)

Speaking of voices, I heard a voice say to me last week: There are 500 human qualities in danger of being lost. I have been thinking about that ever since.

Have you received any messages that have you wondering?
1.  Please join my meeting, Apr 5, 2012 at 5:00 PM PDT. Once on Go2Meeting find instructions on the chat area on the lower right.
Don’t want to fiddle with any of this? Use the phone number only.
https://www3.gotomeeting.com/join/874364334

2.  Use your microphone and speakers (VoIP) – headset is recommended. Turn off other applications.

To call in using your telephone.
Dial +1 (267) 507-0003
Access Code: 874-364-334
Audio PIN: Shown after joining the meeting (you shouldn’t need this)

Meeting ID: 874-364-334

1 Crazy Secret on Zipcast @ 5pm PST today

If you want to go quickly, go alone, if you want to go far, go with a group.           – African parable

Please join my online Zipcast Meeting, Mystic Tech: 1 Crazy Secret, a live visual presentation to see if we can play on the web.

It’s today Tue, Jan 10 2012 at 5:00 PM pst. Password: mystic tech or try http://www.slideshare.net/cynthiawh/meeting

“The Mystic Way: One Thing Not To Integrate,” is a single body wisdom practice that changes the game plan for personal and group life. It shifts how to get to love and is so simple you’ll wonder why it’s been so secret. (Perhaps because the body’s been on the back burner.)

Those who attend the webinar receive a free gift, “The Heart Mic,” a depiction of my favorite way to communicate through time and space.

In 2012 I’m setting off across the landscape of embodied mysticism. My aim is to strengthen the heart of personal and collective mysticism, to sing love into and out of life, practice mercy, and share wisdom, insights and practices.

What is Mystic Tech?  Mystic– one engaged with the Mystery of Life.   Tech– tools to navigate life’s great mysteries.

Where is life taking you? 2012 is a time of great opening. Some of us are artists, activists, spiritual leaders or wanderers. If it is true that the time of the lone wolf is over then how do we move forward as leaders and listeners to life’s mysteries?

Do you seek the “next level” where body wisdom and life deepen further in synchronous, spontaneous, soulful wisdom? Would you like to travel the wisdom path with a few others? Would you like small guide books to help you and others develop efficiency of energy, clarity of vision, and courage to love this new day? Would you like to create, play, and rest more?

If you want to go quickly, go alone, if you want to go far, go with a group.” African parable

The Mystic Tech route offers

  1. Monthly live tutorials
  2. weekly practices on youtube, emails, pdf’s.
  3. bi monthly practice and writing groups
  4. 1 on 1 coaching

Here’s the landscape. At the bottom see how to play.

January: Gather the travelers
Consider your own journey with mystery. Who travels with you? I’ll be signing people up for the blog and sharing on a January 10th zipcast at 5pm pst 1 Crazy Secret That Changes Everything: What Not To Integrate. (let me know in the comments below and I’ll register you and send you the link!)  I’ll be blogging on mystical stuff going on with me as I step into this form of leadership.

February: Moving forward– Claiming How We Know Things
Attune to body wisdom. Attend to time, space, energy, and effort. Claim and share your foundational technologies. Join a small group to meditate, share writing, art and music, and practice each month.

March: Gifted & Sensitive Bodies
Understand and play with energy, yours & others. Appreciate and claim how you get information from others, the planet, the stars. Know your choices as you manage information that isn’t yours.

April: The Healing Ways: Four Paths
Choose the easiest healing routes for different needs. Surgery is rarely the bodywise choice. Learn why play is the best homeopathic remedy. Gather wisdom on suffering.

May and June: Divining Purpose
Gain clarity about day-to-day purpose. Differentiate between the forces of gifts, calls, and inner and outer guidance. Learn about the seasons of purpose. Do you have more than one? Learn why it is perfectly fine not to articulate one’s purpose.

July: High Play
Why Rituals Change the World. Why They Need to be Simple. Five Rituals that I Love.

August: Nature Mystics–The Body and the Tree of Life
Meditations on the world tree, the rivers, fires, and airs in and around your body. Drawing strength, tuning in, and taking wisdom from Earth.

September: Courage to Love–The Book of Initiations
Life initiates us. Those who are fortunate experience highs and lows. Learn how to honor your initiations. What is the difference between healing and getting initiated? What does divine wisdom reveal about your journey. What is easier?

October: Sacred Story Keepers: Why & How to Share Key Stories
What experiences impact us? Are they “ordinary” or extraordinary moments? How might we build our stories back into wisdom sharing?

November: Muses, Hags, Saints, and Wizards: Wisdom Figures
Opening to our guides, seen and unseen. Introduce guides we journey with and who care for us.

December: Mystic Tech Retreat in the Desert

How to participate? Play at the right level for you by registering for any monthly webinar offered throughout the year or becoming a pioneering member of Mystic Tech with the right amount of connection for you.

I’ll sign you up and walk with you as a

Mystic Tech Member: $15/month: Tools, Tutorials, Insights Giving you
• Monthly live topic webinar and recording
• Guide Books, noticing practice, youtubes, and a song to open the heart.

Body and Soul Member: $49/month Full participation includes personal coaching giving you
• Personal Coaching via email, Skype, or in person (Normally $85 per session).
• Access your primary movement pattern in a FEBI session.
• Reserved room @ Dec. 2012 New Mexico retreat!
• Small group coaching through monthly phone calls and online sharing.
• Monthly live topic webinar and recording
• Guide Books, noticing practices, youtubes, and a song to open the heart.
• A writing & art community to welcome mysteries of the heart through free writing, poetry, photography, images, and prose.

Art and Wisdom Members: $29/month giving you
• Small group coaching through monthly phone calls and online sharing.
• Monthly live topic webinar and recording.
• Guide Books, noticing practices, youtubes, and a song to open the heart.
• A writing & art community to welcome mysteries of the heart through free writing, poetry, photography, images, and prose.

SPECIAL DEALS!
Join by January 25t and get my early bird tool,“Meet the Mystics In and Around U: Five far out minutes  to mystify you.”

Interested in the early December retreat? Save money by paying over time. Add $20 a month to any membership level to get the December retreat tuition at a reduced rate: $240/normally $300. (Does not include room and board.) Voila! Your tuition is paid off by the time December rolls around.

How to Register. Mystic Tech is a project of Body Wisdom, Inc.  Call in your registration to 510-465-2797 at 2273 Telegraph Ave. Oakland, CA 94612. or email info@interplay.org.

I will guarantee you a refund or change of level at any time. Contact me at Cynthia@interplay.org with any questions or if I can make someone more clear.

Need more embodied connection?
Come play wherever I am (I’ll keep you posted). I have a limited number of Skype or in person appts. each month. Make an appt. at cynthia@interplay.org.

Anyone can attend the December 2012 Mystic Tech retreat. Let me know if you are interested.

Thank heaven for being the mystic you are!

Related articles

Salvation: How shall I know what to do?

Panjab Hills, Bilaspur. Opaque watercolor and ...
Image via Wikipedia

Sleeping on an air bed in Santa Cruz, I awoke from a dream. I saw a piece of paper and on it was my “soul contract.” It said something like “Share Somatic Wisdom.”Soul Contract is not language I use, but  I remembered that Carolyn Myss wrote a book called Soul Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential. The dream reassured me that I am on the right path.

A current challenge is that I’ve learned to manifest, draw some people and produce events. Yet, if I do too much I

  • overwork and loose grace.
  • discount my family.
  • hog leadership and hinder Collective Growth
  • make poor decisions (article on Decision Fatigue John Tierney)
  • rely on will instead of higher power (Synchronous, Magical Love).

As a Mystic my relationship with GREAT LOVE guides my life. Lately, operating by will with financial insecurity and “pictures in my head” about what to do literally stopped working.

I had to admit this and grieve.

Today I read the secret at the end of the Bhagavad Gita, a holy work with which I have almost no familiarity. HOORAY!   Krishna says to Arjuna

Hear further My supreme word, most secret of all. Thou art dearly loved by me; therefore shall I disclose (this secret) for thy Good.

Fix they mind upon Me, Devote thyself to Me.
Make every action a sacrifice (a holy act) to Me,
hold thyself as nothing before Me.
You shall come to Me truly,
I promise, for you are dear to Me.

Abandon all dharmas,
Take refuge in Me alone.
I shall liberate you from all sins,
Do not grieve.                                     Gita 18.64, 65, 66

Do not grieve!?!

September of 2010 I entered a “GREAT PRUNING.” In a dream I saw the Tree of Life growing out of the world and felt shock to see ALL of its branches cut off, leaving only the trunk!

The dream was prophetic. Life started lopping at my attachments: airplane engine failure over the Pacific, my mother’s personality taken by Alzheimer’s, Dad’s heart surgeries, dead hard drive (knowledge and information), salary reduction (financial security) and odd things like the breaking the zipper on my luggage.

Out of that season grew this blog, Mystic Tech as I also realized that I must prepare to let go of InterPlay roles. Guidance turned me back toward spiritual leadership. My calendar emptied. Circumstances slowed me down.

There are new lessons. I began to make amends to myself for OVER giving. For months my third chakra has complained with an ache. Real rest requires deep change, beyond trying to find balance. Thomas Merton said,

Some of us need to discover that we will not begin to live more fully until we have the courage to do and see and taste and experience much less than usual…And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act he can perform.

How will I know what to do if I don’t MAKE IT HAPPEN? What is the difference between my will and my heart? You’d think an improvisational expert would know the answer to this, yet I am humbled by fear and anxiety. InterPlay creates space for the heart, but it is up to me to engage it.

As a woman I am glad for a strong will, taking responsibility for the power to create, and dancing the path of mutuality, collaboration and self-awareness.

I am grateful that I do sense that I am loved, both by myself and something greater. If I listen to the Beloved, will I know what to do next?

Things I can practice.

  • I will not fill my calendar. I will wait. I will rest.
  • I will open to and love the Beloved.
  • I will engage my heart to understand what I am to do.

I could be a beloved bit of nothing. I could take little moments and make a holy offering from a place of rest. I could wait and listen with my heart. I could be the one I am waiting for…

Ahhhh–that feels better.

No longer refusing shame

fluir en  vol ( tornare ) - To flow in flight ...
Image by all-i-oli ( Jordi@photos ) via Flickr

I recently wrote about having dysthymia, a mild form of depression and InterPlay as medicinal in that regard. I’ve felt unexplainably crappy and needed to evaluate where I needed support. Two specific  ideas popped up

  • Move Your Muscles
  • Paint

I hate to exercise but enjoy moving. On the weekend I moved living room furniture and cleaned my deck. Monday I danced with Wint It! That helped!

Then, I dropped in at Chris Zydell’s Wild Heart Painting studio, where I’d gone last winter in the midst of a big pruning of attachments to mom, safety, and income. Four sessions of “process painting” offered insights, emotional connections, and a ritualized container to update my view of who I am. As a visual thinker this was powerful.

In the studio this week after a brief check in with Chris and the other painters, I selected a palette of black and gold and green and began painting images of my guiding metaphors. As I painted a black hole arose in the corner, a dark moody fish diving among life’s darker truths. I honestly feel fond of this ability.

At bedtime I reached for The Biology of Transcendence by Joseph Chilton Pearce, a master teacher and proponent of play, nurture, transcendence, and evolution, stuff I root for. I forgot how much I underlined in his book.

In the AM I picked it up again and read that fear and anxiety necessarily prune our brain back toward basic survival thinking when the times are too difficult to allow us to evolve. On the other hand did I, by painting, allow my brain  to evolve rather than stay back in the survival mode.

I fear the shame of failing at my dreams and yet I dream big, ridiculously counter cultural dreams, like “lets get dance and the protestant work ethic together” and lets put the body back in wisdom.

I deny shame. I must have an inner Atilla the Hun against anything that impedes my relationship with the divine, creativity or nurture. It’s outright refusal. But this refusal has become a problem. I expend psychic energy that I need to create. What if I could loosen my grip on refusing shame?

I tried it out. My legs, achey from climbing steep hills of effort, felt a tingling flow of energy. Wow. Have I been fighting shame for eons?

Fear of Shame

i have refused
your cold wand, hot pyre, wax heart
your giant loppers and wet blankets smothering dreams
i have refused
your roadside spit, office glare, juried sentencing heart turned sideways, arms crossed.
But today shame is no bastard,
she’s a birthchild along with fatigue, frustration, hate,
mine to care for and hold lightly.
I relax and feel free.

“Mystic or Mistake?” A Mystic’s Code of Practice

How brilliant when a friend teaching mindfulness to a room of four to eighty-year olds asked of them three things: “1- stop when I ring the bell, 2- bring your willingness to play, and 3- take care of your own body.”

What great advice to attune to the mysteries of life! Stopping gives time to notice and begin to believe our experience. Believing what we notice is the heart of it all!

Willingness to play and enter the moment requires our choice to step over resistance to a bigger reality, to open filters, and engage with curiosity.

To take care of myself is to operate within my personal power to shape creative contributions, play for the heck of it, and rest. Learning to be me might be my biggest influence on the world.

Many of us pray to a mysterious Source, personalizing it to make the relationship more manageable. I don’t doubt that we encounter unusual energy, voices, presences, visions, dreams, coincidental events, or inner senses. We have thousands of names and stories for otherworldly experiences.  Yet who gets coached on how to nurture and respond to spirit interactions? What school does a young mystic attend? Sunday School? Temple? No school? Is there an adept mystic in the house who is out of the closet and grounded?

No wonder Harry Potter is so popular. Mystery Schools fascinate us.

Fearful of blundering forth into uncharted fields, we discount our awe-filled moments as mistakes, keep them secret, and suspect other people’s mystery encounters as errors in judgment. What if we are sitting on a gold mine of technology for healing and creating the life we want? More and more of us realize that this is the case.

When I started seriously exploring the mystical territories in seminary I felt like I had to sneak around. Was the Spirit world dangerous, taboo, ridiculous, too powerful, unpredictable? Mystery needn’t be ominous, in control, or the opposite of sanity. Hadn’t I already been awakened by wonderful, unbidden (?) experiences. Didn’t holy books speak freely of such encounters?

My own ancestor, Hiram Wentworth,  appeared in a Kansas newspaper at age 80 for his ability to heal people a thousand miles away. Medium Edgar Cayce. a devout, popular Sunday school teacher shared the same mainstream denomination that ordained me. Apparently, they gave him the boot for being too controversial. Or was he ahead of his time?

As a dancer in church, I began to learn to animate a larger field and how to access “the Big Body.” The arts gave me core practices that taught me the difference between performing and being performed, how to begin and end a “higher moment,” the necessity of outside eyes, and how to stop and see. Eventually, it was the Berkeley Psychic Institute that gave me tools to manage my sensitivity. I learned that I could drop cosmologies and focus on tools for managing energetic fields in and around me.

It is ironic that in the 21st century, a time of great sophistication, many collectively subscribe to being mystical dummies. We rely on machines to connect while on every continent teachers offer technologies for communicating on the big web. The teachings of the east, including those used by Jesus, arise from practiced wisdom.

Wouldn’t a basic “How to book,” and a kind teacher be a blessing? Perhaps we need a driver’s manual for moving onto  greater high ways. What are the rules of the road?

When I finally understood about sending and receiving information from something greater, something I occasionally did, I took delight in the following smart, caring instructions about communications coming from any “higher source.” (Channeled by Lee Carroll)

i.                There will be useful information for everyone.

ii.              The message should be uplifting.

iii.             Spirit (God) will never, ever send a message that asks you to give up your free will.

iv.             Spirit will never give you a message —ever—that asks you to violate the integrity of what you believe.

v.              Spirit will never represent itself as being the only source.

vi.             Watch for the fact that the information is normally new information.

vii.           Watch for the fact that the information should have spiritual solutions presented.

Smart Mystics navigate reality without forfeiting any part, keep their wits as well as losing them, and forego balance long enough to get to higher or more interesting ground. How? Mystery is close to home. It’s experienced directly as body wisdom, communications felt in muscles, breath, sensations, images and thoughts when we slow down enough to let the information communicate. Even ascetics who negate the body, do so by narrowly focusing on specific channels of physical communication.

Meanwhile, artists, children, and others open up to sensations and let their imagination resonate to energetic forms, fields, and patterns. The gifted catch and build on imaginal processes as they create unique dialogues with the subtlest of perceptions and projections. In visionary states, they follow sensory cues, receive directions and interpret information into words, dances, music, art and just being. Sometimes they share their encounters with others.

Baseline for Relating to Mystery

I believe that varied “energy forms” carry a wide range of intent, some profoundly benevolent, some self-interested. In the same way that I need to choose my friends I need to be selective about the intimacy of my spiritual encounters.

I believe that Creation is bent on giving us unique, full lives through a magnificent mechanism called free will. Everything plays, (even elements that behave in instinctual ways).

I believe that freedom is fundamental to the Universal design and that destructive and evil choices are inherent parts of the web of energy. Accepting this, I gratefully plug-in to generativity.

I believe that Creation is pervasively, qualitatively founded in Unconditional Regard, manifesting as peace, joy, and serenity and that we know this secret even when we forget or pretend we don’t know it.

I believe that freedom to play, live, and meet the Unknown is a joy, privilege, and adventure. It isn’t easy, but it feels alive, even when we endure oppression. Claiming such fundamental freedom may tire us out but won’t disappoint us.

Based on Creation’s generous freedom, this is my mystic code of practice.

1) Living life is mystery enough. A mystical practice needn’t subvert ordinary experience if a person is enjoying a good life.

2) Free will is a rock bottom value. The Divine does not ask us to disappear or give up. Instead, love needs our get-up-and-go to co-create and play.

3) Love, the golden rule, applies equally to people and to “higher authorities,” voices, and inner pulls.”  If love is lacking, question it. I am as important as an angel, book, or niggle.

4) When opening to voices, images, intuitions, senses, and presences, I expect respect from all forms of energy I receive, including any that might overwhelm or trouble me.

5) Being human is about limits. Divinity is endless. Embodying both, only I can claim humanity as my condition and priority. On the earth, I am not endless, nor required to act like it.

6) When mysticism is triggered by trauma, accident, spontaneous awakening, or affliction I can shut down until I have healthy supervision and support.

7) Living with mystical reality requires extra time, energy, tools and support. I can negotiate when to invest these resources.

8)  Mystical gifts can trouble others and me until the best practices for me are in place.

9) Only by relaxing into humility can I continuously refine skills to work with Great Things.

10) If called to a higher purpose, I am free to negotiate about how, what and when to participate. If unable to comply, Love remains.

11) Anyone desiring divine contact need only “ask and it shall be given.” Just prepare for it to show up in surprising forms.

12) Since I am not separate from God, I do not need to add, carry or hold any more divine energy, people, or beings inside me. Instead I prefer that my highest good gently communicate with me in a manner other than possession.

13) I am free to protect myself from any higher power.

14) As the above is true, it is also true for anyone who might mistake me as a higher power. I seek to be a companion and playmate only.

As a playful, sensitive person, I enjoy demystifying mysticism to uncover easy practices for inviting, managing, and sorting through the challenge and awe of relating to the big, dynamic field at play all around. And, my initiations into mystery come at the right speed for my bodyspirit, even though I’ll confess that my hair did turn white at age 35. (See Chasing the Dance of Life)

What beliefs and values do you have for your mystical life? Leave a comment.

Instructions to resurrect a peace

I am giving time each week to build a path for my heartwork, to express my “oh-my goddess” gene. I spent the morning crafting this poem. Editing is a lot like conscious choice. I mull, sense, listen, align, ask again, know what i know, and let making lead me somewhere new. Here it is.

Is it too simple?

Why do we forget to dance, to

move in mystery, tell stories, rally and sing,

to let laughter, tears, friendship

spring up and shock us.

Peace villages pop

whenever the green hums or a drum

that no dying drugs can ever replace calls up

a promised land of visible joy and truth

and life dances full-out.

Please play hard

in deep dream and dirt to

forge the electric bonds to heal, survive,

transcend, leave legacies, and gift

the children their soul power.

Pay honor. Dance to

free the heart words to spill forth,

sing songs in suffering and celebration and

when love’s truth forgets you,

invoke your bodyways.

Don’t stop there.

InterPlay with Grand Mystery as you

embrace wild grace on her human scale.

Watch doors and windows fly open

See the battered dance again.

Too simple?

Leap dead doubt, despair.

This Body wants to resurrect.

We’ve done it before.

We can play again.

 

-Cynthia Winton-Henry