Advanced Manifestation Retreat this Friday-Sunday

Our annual Advanced Manifestation Gathering is coming up quickly — November 20-22nd at Ananda Ashram in Monroe, New York. In response to prevailing sentiment last year, we are extending the workshop an extra day; so it will be Friday evening, Saturday, and Sunday.

For the past number of years we have met every autumn at this magical place to become more clear, empowered, and focused, as well as to connect with others who have a resonant sense of purpose. Our goal is to get a clear vision of the coming year, develop a workable action plan with the aid of feedback from others, and to consciously connect with the deep archetypal currents of energy that are underpinning our individual lives.

I will be introducing a body/mind interactive sequence in which traditional Yoga and Qi Gong exercises can be consciously integrated into our “Life Alignment Project,” and will develop new and effective community practices for the coming year. The extra night will allow for more in depth dreaming, and dream vision work, opening us to further hear the voices of our unconscious and of our inner guidance.

The cost of the workshop is $295, the extra day included – there are no fees for this day except for the rental of space and, meals, and bedrooms at Ananda. As in there past, there are discounts for couples; and if there is demand for it, we will organize child care at Ananda. To insure your inclusion in the annual retreat, send a $50 deposit and an email saying “Yes Ananda” to info@rickjarow.com. Availability is on a first come, first served basis, and spaces are limited.

There are incredibly strong forces around us at this moment, coming from all conceivable directions. If there was ever a time to take a stand for our truth, our humanity, and our soul’s purpose – it is now. Working in community greatly amplifies our power and allows us to overcome the forces of inertia and distraction which try to rule our daily lives. Let us be together again in ever increasing intention and abundance, and let us brainstorm to create forms of working together that will support us through the times to come.

Yours in Peace,

Rick

Q:  What is covered at this retreat?

I could give you a rundown (focus, intention, accomplishment, community building, envisioning, empowerment, etc.), but none of this is conveys what really goes on at the Ananda retreat. In fact, I am tempted to restate the question as “What is uncovered,” for the “real work” here is to trust the process of collective awareness to manifest our true agendas.It is the collective energy of the group that constellates the workshop. Tuning in to the “spirit of the collective” allows the issues that are truly important to surface. By meditating, focusing, inquiring, and paying attention together, an alchemical process is created that allows each of us to crystallize what we have to do and how we can go about doing it at this moment in our lives. The vision is to lay foundations for an emerging culture; that means each of us working to live the most clear, authentic, and compassionate lives that we can.

 

RJ

Guide to Life Purpose

Friends~

Rick’s publisher, Sounds True, has launched a new series of online interactive guides with various life themes, including Life Purpose, which features Rick’s Anticareer and Abundance material quite prominently.

To explore this promising new resource, browse to: http://www.soundstrue.com/guide/lifepurpose/

~W

 

 

An Hour with Rick & Tami

Sounds True’s founder and guiding light, Tami Simon, interviews Rick Jarow on her latest podcast. Hear this conversation between colleagues whose journey has been intertwined for years via their respective work they love:

http://www.soundstrue.com/podcast/?p=1234

Transcript of this interview also available.

The Life We Want to Lead

The video linked below on mortgage foreclosure practices challenges any reductive or ego-centered notion of Creating the Work You Love.

It is quite possible that the same people who press for foreclosures that can ruin other peoples’ lives, go to church, give money to charity, and attend local school board meetings. They just have agreed to see “work” in a similar way that our industrial culture has agreed to see the use of animals as a food source: as something “out there,” as an object separate from “me and my intimates,” as an arena where exploitation and slaughter do not count. After all, “that’s why they call it work.”

The effort to develop “Right Livelihood” needs to be integrated with the effort to develop a just and sustainable culture. Placing work in the realm of “war” and “hunting” is one strategy that may have its place, but it is not the only way to envision working. The same mortgage brokerage and broker my dedicate their work energy toward the mission of keeping people in their homes. There is just not that much reward for it apparently, but you do have to look at yourself in the mirror every day. The very foundation of Abundance is your conscience. If your heart cannot get on board with what you are doing, get out before your wings atrophy, before you accept defeat in the form of mere comfort. I ask the brokerages, “Is this the best you can do?” Creating the Work You Love might be more aptly phrased, live and work your conscience. The stakes are too high for anything else.

http://www.consumerwarningnetwork.com/2008/07/02/mortgage-servicers-secret/

Some Inconvenient Truths about Creating the Work You Love

Creating the Work You Love is really not about work, per se. It is about your life. Work is one arena where the principles of alignment and manifestation come into process. Complaints about “the job,” “the boss,” about “there not being anything that catches your passion,” or about the “evils of the economy,” (etc.) are basically disempowering. No one owes you anything! No one owes you a job, or food, or health care, for that matter.

Loving your work is not a right, it is a challenge; you have choices and every choice, like every thought creates the next moment, which translates into the environment you live in. No one will give you “Right Livelihood,” you have to take it! You take it with the burning fire of your will, with the determination to live your ideal, with the resolve to pull yourself up and out of wage slavery and do something with your precious life that is authentic and meaningful for you, and that can be communicated to others.

It may take all your strength of character to leave behind the distractions offered by the commercial media, to let go of the seductive illusions of more money or “success.” But this strength is the voice of your Spirit to be who you are. Such strength of character knows what success is for you; knows where to uncover the peace in your heart, and knows that having the space and time to share your being with others, to be creative, to love the flowers, and to move into the ever present bliss of creative flow is worth infinitely more than anything offered by the scarcity-driven, machine laden, always –in- a- hurry to get somewhere, facsimile world. As Mary Oliver puts it in her poem, The Journey, “One day, you finally knew what you had to do, and began…”

In peace and freedom,

Rick Jarow

= THIS WEEKEND =

Learn how to develop your authentic vocation and discover the art and science of creating abundance in every area of your life. I’m offering the last two entry-level workshops of the year at the Open Center in New York City this weekend, on October 3 and 4, 2009: “Creating the Work You Love,” on Saturday, October 3, and “The Practice of Abundance,” on Sunday, October 4.

“Creating the Work You Love” reveals how to open the doors of inspiration, transform your desires into action, and find the motivation and discipline to develop your authentic vocation.

“The Practice of Abundance” focuses on how to manifest your dreams and intuitions in the physical world, and get the money, time, support, and resources to do what you want to do.

Both workshops are highly experiential and show you how to connect to your fundamental sense of well-being and live in a conscious flow with the powers of creation. Registration is $120 for members of the Open Center and $130 for non-members.

For more information on these workshops and to register, go to: http://www.opencenter.org/ or call the Open Center at 212.219.2527.

Workshops Oct 3,4 at Open Center, NYC

Rick will be leading his two most popular workshops at the NY Open Center (in their new space) the weekend of Oct 2-4.

For info please see their website:

http://www.opencenter.org/creating-the-work-you-love/

and

http://www.opencenter.org/the-practice-of-abundance/

Rick on Talk Shoe

Rick gave a juicy interview on Talk Shoe’s Conscious Living program today (9/9/09) — to listen go to:

www.talkshoe.com

The ID number of the show is 11638; you can search this number at the site, should the above direct link fail you.

What is Abundance?

Before we begin to discuss Abundance, let us be clear about what Abundance is not. Abundance is not the result of a Faustian pact to achieve personal greatness. Such quests are, in fact, often motivated by feelings of inadequacy. Abundance is not about running around and trying to score as many points as possible before the game ends. It is not a race to see how much you can get done in a week, or in an ambitious five year plan. Abundance is neither about the accumulation of goods; nor is it the unrealistic renunciation of material comforts. Abundance is not about finding a way to merely become comfortable- a safe way to stay lukewarm.

In essence, true abundance is freedom. It is fundamental well-being, a fulfillment that is not dependent upon exterior conditions. Abundance is learning to trust in life. It is reality lived fully-being conscious, present, and whole. Therefore, the quality of your attention is the genuine measure of abundance and it is your greatest capital asset in any situation.

What we come to understand and affirm is that even through the most difficult circumstances of life, abundant beauty and richness may be found. It is our faith in the goodness and wisdom of things that allows us to work our way through life’s darkest moments. In this way, Abundance is also faith in the basic goodness of life. It is saying “yes” to all that we can know of life-including the suffering that surrounds us. It is also saying “yes” to that which we do not know, to open and accept the unknown with grace. A sense of Abundance gives us the freedom to participate fully in or lives by doing what we can to assist others. If we do not ourselves feel rich, how can we give to others what has been given to us? In this way, Abundance becomes the rainbow shining through the storm, the promise of our divine destiny.

Before we can begin to explore our potentials for Abundance, we must answer a fundamental question. “Why do anything?” Why bother even getting up in the morning? Or as my son used to say to me when I would ask him to make his bed, “Why should I make my bed if it’s just going to get unmade again?” In short, we are asked to confront the issue of desire, its reality, its fulfillment, and its frustration in the face of an impermanent world.

Some time ago, I was pushing my daughter on the swings in a park by the river at twilight. As I looked past the river toward the mountains in the lower Catskills, the river and the mountains suddenly transformed into the Ganges flowing down from the Himalayas. At the same time, I remained conscious that I was by the Hudson riverbank while pushing my daughter on the swing. I knew that before my daughter was born, I had lived by the Ganges in Rishikesh, and I sensed that a time would come when I would return there. Perhaps I would wonder if any of this had actually happened, and yet it was happening. In that moment, I experienced an overwhelming and powerful opening into the great gift of being in front of the river and pushing my daughter on the swings, because I knew it would not last forever. It was something akin to what the Japanese call mono no aware, the deep sadness of life that opens into an appreciation of the beauty and love in a fragile and impermanent moment. The sadness of that moment was that someday my daughter would be too big for me to push on the swings, and that some day- all too soon- there would be no more swings and no more playground and we would both be in other places. But it was this fact that made the moment all the more precious, that touched me so deeply, that filled me with wonder and gratitude at having been brought together with my daughter for this awesome moment! The Abundance here is not so much a question of creating one’s destiny as it is about opening to one’s destiny, to the fullness and grace of every situation.

Abundance moves us to open to the wisdom and destiny of our desire, it creates an alignment that allows circumstances to come into existence and allows us to release them when it is time to let go. The practice of Abundance is one of opening up to the preciousness of every moment and responding to it creatively, in this way it may be thought of as a compliment to mindfulness. We know that the bed will become unmade. We know that someday we will eventually die, but in this moment we are asked to participate fully in the process of creation.

Such full, participatory living can lift us out of the dilemma of Sisyphus who endlessly pushes the rock up the hill, only to have it roll down again. The practice of abundance will allow us to take whatever situations we have been given, imbibe them fully by releasing habitual judgments about their value, and then make the best design we can out of them as an offering and appreciation for being fully alive.

Such work of Abundance is greater than the personal question of who we are and what we want to do. In order to accomplish anything, we need to be in living exchange with others, as clearly as we are dependent on so many people when we sit down to a meal – including the farmers, cooks, and the servers. Our exchange with others is crucial to our life’s work and this sense of sharing, of giving and receiving is one of the fundamental reasons for our desire to manifest in this world. By becoming conscious of the relational aspects of manifestation, we go beyond egocentric desire and experience the desire to increase our possibilities for love and for awakening the experience of joy in our connection with others. Hence, Abundance is found here and now, in our daily doings. When we honor the details of the life we have been given, we discover mines full of the most precious materials, the divine substance that is revealed through the sharing of our being with everything and everyone.

~Excerpt from Alchemy of Abundance by Rick Jarow

Lest We Forget

Rick passes this along from Wm Blake’s satire,

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could percieve.

And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity;

Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood;

Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.

And at length they pronounc’d that the Gods had order’d such things.

Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.

Our Inherent Hunger

“The touch and contact with all of life,
the full freedom of non-separation,
the completeness of full relationship with everything and everyone,
and the radiance of compassionate ecstasy
is what we are inherently hungry for.”

~ Rick Jarow, Ph.D.