Earthing - Spiritual Practices for Life on Earth
A day long retreat with Alan Levin. LMFT
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Time: 10 AM - 5 PM
Holos Institute
5463 College Ave., Oakland, CA
Registration fee: $90 Register with Paypal
6 ceus for MFTs and LCSWs
This experiential retreat will weave together the understandings and practices of mindfulness meditation, agni yoga and shamanism. Earthing is a way of experiencing the love, joy, wisdom and peace of your essential nature, in your body, mind and all your relations - a way of experiencing the light of your spirit in your life on Earth.
Spiritual teachings often place a primary focus on the experience of the infinite and formless essential nature. However, we live in physical bodies and have minds whose nature it is to be in relationship. The Earthing workshop is designed to support, encourage and empower you to develop a spiritual practice with a strong focus on the well-being of your body/mind and the family of living beings that comprise our home on Earth. This practice moves you towards a more sustained awareness of the Spirit within all that is, and at the same time a more conscious, respectful, and compassionate way of relating to whatever and whoever you meet in life.
We will focus experientially with three primary lineages of spiritual understanding, weaving them into an integrated practice.
~ Mindfulness is the meditative process that opens you to the pure field of awareness. In practicing mindfulness, you learn to have relaxed and focused attention, release judgements and reactivity, and open to compassionate allowance or acceptance of what is.
In this process, you cultivate witness consciousness, releasing your hold on the contents or ʻthingsʼ of experience. You expand your sense of self, your sense of identity, and move towards inclusion or union with all that is.~ Agni Yoga is the lineage of yoga in which you experience the union of body, mind and soul through accessing and channeling light-fire energy, life-energy from sources within your deepest nature. You explore the inner energy anatomy of your body/mind and learn ways to heal, balance, align and integrate all aspects of your Self.
In this work, we recognize that Beingness continually emanates energy (chi, life-energy, light-fire energy) which takes form in an infinite variety of ways as thoughts, feelings and physical forms which are progressively denser manifestations of energy. As we are each involved with a particular mind and body (usually identified as ʻmeʼ or ʻIʼ) we have the ability, however limited, to choose the direction of our own mind/body energy. We practice methods of consciously choosing to focus with and channel healing and creative energies for the benefit of ourselves and others. I am indebted to my teacher of Agni Yoga, Russell Schofield, who coined the term “Earthing” to describe this process.~ Shamanism honors the intelligence and consciousness within everyone and everything: humans, animals, plants, minerals and spirit beings. In shamanic practices, you journey into states of consciousness where the potential exists to develop respectful relationships and communicate with any and all beings in the web of life.
You open to the possibility of experiencing non-human and non- physical beings (or spirits) as agents of healing and guidance for your life. The approach we use here is to see what we discover, through our own experience, when we respectfully open to the perspectives of thousands of years of indigenous teachings and cast attention in the directions they point.
Bio:
Alan Levin has been studying and teaching the integration of psychological growth and spiritual practice for over 40 years. He is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in New York and California and works with individuals, couples and groups.
He has been teaching Agni Yoga meditation and inner work for several decades and has integrated these teachings with the practices of mindfulness and the shamanic journey. He founded Holos Institute in the mid-Eightees after a vision quest experience in the Southern California desert. He currently resides in the Hudson Valley of New York and works with his wife through Sacred River Healing.
Earthing is the integration of his life study and teaching. He works with individuals (Skype sessions available) and groups through workshops and year-long experiential seminars.
Please see www.SacredRiverHealing.org for more information.