Integral Meditation
A 5-Day Retreat with Zen teacher
Diane Musho Hamilton Sensei
Friday 5 – Wednesday 10 Sept 2008

This five day retreat gives you space and time to explore the depths of your Big Mind and Big Heart through an Integrally-framed range of meditative, psychodynamic and body practices.

Diane Musho Hamilton Sensei is the dharma successor of American Zen Master Genpo Roshi, and is his first successor in the Big Mind lineage. Diane's program will lead you through Zen meditative practices, psychodynamic shadow work, and the Big Mind process. The retreat will also include bodywork and energetic practices to provide you with a rounded transformative experience that engages the full depths of your self through mind, body, spirit and shadow.

Big Mind is the name given, by Genpo Roshi, to a straightforward and effective method of self investigation designed to give you an experience of your unconditioned nature. This process is a new synthesis of methods from western psychology and the non-dual wisdom traditions which successfully navigate core aspects of your psyche to reveal the compassionate nature of your heart and to cultivate a better understanding of the limitless wisdom and presence of your mind.

Diane is a truly impressive teacher who uniquely holds status as a Zen sensei, Big Mind process facilitator andas a key teacher with Ken Wilber's Integral Institute. She is also a professional mediator, group facilitator, and trainer in conflict resolution. With a demanding international teaching schedule, this retreat presents a rare opportunity to study and practice with Diane on her first teaching visit to Australasia.

Venue: Brahma Kumaris Centre, Wilton
Dates: Fri 5 – Wed 10 Sep
Cost: $750 - includes accomodation and food;
scholarship places available on application

Places limited – for more information or to reserve a place, email: integralcentre@gmail.com

Visit and retreat sponsored by The Integral Centre, Sydney (Australia)

my pod 'the masculine and feminine faces of the divine' has been lying fallow for some time.. the combination of a recentflurry of dicussion on the topic of Integral woman and the feminine around the zaadz traps .. combined with rich threads of private conversations with the very fabulous, Vanessa Fisher has convinced me that it was time to re-boot the pod, with Vanessa as a new co-administrator. If you are interested in exploring gender & the issues of masculine & feminine, in the broad context of Integral thought, please join us: www.pods.zaadz.com/divinefaces

Six months to go until my thesis is submitted... For anyone interested - I thought I'd post my just revised abstract. IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE HEROINE: TOWARDS AN INTEGRAL FEMINIST SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY Sarah Nicholson In the mythic system of representation the hero’s journey stands as a symbol for the question ‘Who am I?‘; echoing the human journey of spiritual inquiry. Decoding the mythic journey Joseph Campbell writes that the hero may equally be man or woman. But, just as across the disciplines of philosophy and religion the human agent has been unmasked as male, at central point of the mythic journey woman as hero disappears and in her place we find only Woman. A symbol for the male hero Woman represents by turns the blissful possibilities of transcendent union and the horror of recourse to immanent oneness. Unrecognised as a full subject in her own right, undifferentiated from Woman, the female hero remains without an adequately articulated journey. In a spiritual and philosophical sense, the question of Woman has consistently stood in front of the question ‘Who Am I?’ for women. A definition of Woman, crafted by and for woman herself, has undergone ongoing permutation in response to the emergence of new waves of feminist thought. Underpinned by a philosophy of non dualism, I propose that it is possible to define Woman with reference to both social function and spiritual affect, through plotting the multiple perspectives of feminism within the quadrants of Integral theory. Taking up both the impetus of Goddess feminism’s recharting of prehistory and Wilber’s evolutionary philosophy of consciousness, I examine the changing dimensions of hero, man and woman, against the backdrop of the unfurling stages of human history, and in so doing, plot the dimensions of a female spiritual genealogy. Feminist philosopher Irigaray has written that women need a divine horizon, a figure of female divinity who stands as an ideal for woman’s becoming. As a model for the figuration of a transpersonal archetype for women I look to Adult Developmental theory, which suggests that the pathway of ego development leads towards a culminative Unitive stage. This stage reflects the highest values and developmental possibilities of becoming, with a specifically transpersonal orientation in action-logics. Defined in her own name, plotted against the evolutionary developments of history and combined with a genealogy of the female wisdom tradition, I propose that a gender specific pathway of development towards the transpersonal archetype of the Unitive offers the possibility of rendering a truly ‘living’ or ‘neoperennial’ mythology of the journey of woman as hero. __________________________ Also, my article "Towards Integral Feminism" can be found in Toward Integral in AQAL journal 2006 vol 2, pp297-319 here: http://aqaljournal.integralinstitute.org/public/Issues.aspx

I read a version of this story over the weekend. Its simple but it really resonated with me.. as the primary message that stabilised in me during the OpenDharma retreat I did in India was the sense of not knowing what was next on the path but knowing that there was always a surprise in store ...

The Lost Horse - Chinese Folktale.

There was a farmer who lived on the northern frontier of China.
One day, for no reason, his horse ran away to the nomads across the border. Everyone tried to console him, but his father said, "What makes you so sure this isn't a blessing?"

Some months later his horse returned, bringing a splendid nomad stallion. Everyone congratulated him, but his father said, "What makes you so sure this isn't a disaster?"

Their household was richer by a fine horse, which his son loved to ride. One day he fell and broke his hip. Everyone tried to console him, but his father said, "What makes you so sure this isn't a blessing?"

A year later the nomads came in force across the border, and every able-bodied man was conscripted into battle. Only the man's son was left in the village because of his broken bones.

Blessing turns to disaster, and disaster to blessing: good luck, bad luck, who knows?

I have a love-hate relationship with India: both delighted by the colour, the madness, the ramshackle vidbrancy and spice.. and horrified by the sanitation, the abject poverty at each corner, the attention of the men.

In India nothing is as expected. The tide is always turning.

Pondicherry. The ocean is wide and flat across the promenade. A statue of Ghandi stoops.. to gather salt? I am reminded of the tsunami that hit here as I watch the few fishing boats and imagine the water drawing back.. to rush forward and swallow everything in its wake. Coming in by bus I passed more than one Tsunami construction project.. they seemed community developments - schools, housing perhaps to replace the palm leaf building in the rural fields. Buildings that reminded me of writing about a walking adventure I had in rural Bodh Gaya, in Bihar then the poorest state in India (ten years ago), where we passed through villages with exquisitely formed "mud huts by monet".

You can not escape the poverty. Emerging from three days shelter at the serene crysalis that is the Krishmurti Centre in Chennai : six acres of carefully tended trees and gardens, white washed buildings and silence. Indeed an oasis. The reality of India was the shock I expected it to be. Beggars descend on me like vultures. Old women show me their sores, disfigured men walk on all fours like monkeys or show me missing fingers or limbs, children sleep on the pavement. My heart reels in horror. Saying goodbaye at Redfern station Andy instructed me not to give money to the beggars, as I recounted my first day in Calcutta, years ago. Even after months of living amongst the modest means of Thailand and Laos, I was so appalled by women and children living in dirt on the street that I let one shrewd beggar woman show me to the bank. I flinch. My head divorces my heart.

Pondicherry is an old french colonial town .. some streets are beautiful, wide, colonial and rich. But it is crazy in town at the moment. Every room in town is full, mostly indian tourists, here for New Year holidays. Though neither virginal, pregnant or with husband, in this overcrowded town, I feel much like I have been allocated the stable room, but I have taken heart from Sri Aurobindo's reimagining of his prison cell as ashram (more on this below).

There are pockets of shade and quiet from the insanity of the street. The Sri Aurobindo Ashram almost made me weep with respite at its cool, daisy filled courtyard. I have a wonderful article at home that talks about consumption - about the feeling that one simply interacts by buying one's way around. It is in many ways hard to avoid .. and the lasso of desire has been firmly around my wallet in the last few days in an exotic frenzy. But I am certainly not here so much to spend as to learn.. and you might indulge me a little as I share.

Both Krishnamurti and Sri Aurobindo were English educated Indians. Krishnamurti's story is quite incredible. He was spotted by one of the head members of the Theosophical Society on a beach in Chennai (Madras) when a child and proclaimed to be "the vehicle into which the Lord Maitreya, the "World Teacher"" would incarnate. He was whisked off to England, educated into Theosophy's esoteric (astral) teachings and had a series of intense mystical experiences. He later publically disbanded the group the Order of the Star which had formed as his disciples, returned all assets to its donors and renounced all formal religious paths and teachings. But he did go on as a worldcentric teacher to talk and teach across the globe (including visiting Sydney a number of times) advocating self directed inquiry and observation of being... and to establish schools and education centres across the globe.

Roughly contemporary, and just a few hours down the road, Sri Aurobindo came from a wealthy Indian family who sent him to England to be educated (Hmm, a pattern) where he was a Cambridge scholar. He returned to India and was jailed for a year for sedition as a prime instigator in India's nationalist movement. While in jail he practiced yoga and studied the Bhagavad Gita.. and had an ecstatic experience in which he saw his cell as ashram, guards as gurus and fellow prisoners as manifestations of Krishna. After release he came to Pondicherry and devoted himself entirely to his spiritual practice.. was joined French woman Mira Alfassa (the Mother) who had also been an esoteric practitioner (more patterns).. and the ashram grew up around them. Aurobindo was a prolific writer (the full volumes of his writing is enormous). He was a poet and he even wrote books about art.. The Mother established Auroville, a big international community close to Pondicherry which was regenerated from deforested land - its been planted with over two million trees and has a wide coterie of renewable energy sources... In town are signs saying look after the birds, plant trees, conserve water. things meet.

Dearest Franics,

Before the ephemora of email, before text: there was paper and there was pen. There was  the physicality of the page, the epistle, the envelope : the letter.

this is a blank page    this, a pen    this, a pale freckled hand
scribbles, loops and curves,    curls, lines and circles   sliding from my pen
I conjure up from whiteness     through the roundness of letters    ink shapes of meaning

This week my mother stumbled on a box well hidden in the attic. It was labelled Sarah Photos and held all the photos from Europe, and my mad early nineties youth, that I had been missing. 

But more intimately, it had big bundles of forgotten letters; letters from years across oceans, letters from prison, letters from old lovers. Lovers who had called me lover, who discussed literature and philosophy and politics and told me stories and wrote me poems, who argued with me and sent me love. 

I was struck by all of this  history of mine, by the things that I did not remember about my life, about my relationships with these beautiful people. I was struck painfully by all the love and by all the blundering ignorance of my youth. And  I was struck by how much it reminded me about myself, how much it allowed me to gather up my past, to welcome it back to my heart, to look at the path it has led me on, to let it go.

should i punctuate  with "at this moment in time", "this single eternity" ?
in order to excuse any possible future or this particular past

This year I erased all of the emails I had accumulated from an aborted love affair whichI was having much too hard a time moving on from. It was really hard pressing Delete, and for a good reason, I realise now. More than just historical artefacts, they were pieces of myself.

And so, to you, beautiful Francis.  These letters particularly made me remember you.   In the chaos of movement that was both of our lives, I lost you.  I had no address for you, no number. I have searched for you over the years. I Googled you.  I even searched under your alias. I have started poems to you.  On reading your letter, the feeling of the loss of your friendship in my life was particuarly keen.   Perhaps this letter is the antidote to that unfinished poem; as a thank you and goodbye.

night then
and I am left to strain at the white drift
to catch at those last traces of your hands ink

night then
and I conjure you
to speak
one last time
with the brief brilliance of your words

in the wake of you.

Nothing is wasted. though sometimes things seem wrong. i wonder. when we are all so beautiful that none of us are happy. our world is in flames. under our feet. there are dangerous people in the corridors. we fight.

and we wander these paths with regrets on our lips. i wonder. when was i happy? but. it all cycles through. the worst of it.

we are beautiful creatures. even perhaps, or particularly, because we are asleep. just now. sleeping.

i want to sweep all of us up in the arc of my love. i will.

now is the time.

i whisper to you. awake, beautiful.

"A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

 Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History"

I came upon this quote again recently which I  recorded back at the beginning of my Phd research.  I was a retro-romantic, Kali Yoga sorta girl back then. These days I'm more of an 'ups and downs of evolutionary process' sort.

Still, some days I take leave to ponder his point. .. as the "o fuk" storm of past karmic events blows us along into the future .. on the tough days, that is. personally as well as universally.

on the good days, its all about standing right on the cusp of the waves of unfurling possibility.
breathing it in. and out.

such being the ups and downs of progress.

the other evening i revisited Sofia Coppola's Lost In Translation .. and was struck once again, on this second viewing, by what a beautiful mediation it is on alienation and love. 

The film catches its mains Bill Murray and Scarlet Johannsen inside of a web of meaning; cultural codes that they don't have the key for,  woven around them in a palpable sense of alienation.   Yet within the dislocation of this frame Scarlet Johanssen's character chances upon moments of intensity and beauty; moments of depth which  (temporarily) sear through  the gap, requiring no translation.  And then there are moments of human connection, of warmth, empathy, simpatico .. the radiant joy of randomly finding someone who truly and  unexpectedly brightens the way on our path.

Watching the film  illuminated something that I've been musing over : a  shared characteristic in some of my  favourite musicians - Joni Mitchell, Beth Orton, Nick Drake.  The rawness of their music holds out beauty wrapped in melancholy, a sense of the intertwining of pleasure and pain, of both the gap between them and the continual and constant relationship of the two. And I read in Lost in Translation an echo of the intimate nature of that relationship : the inseparability of melancholy and joy. And I see something there about  confronting the gap between our self and our world,  the yearning to make that connection, to understand and be understood.  And the tenderness of the very fact of the randomness of the manifest beauties and multiple losses that texture our lives...

this meditation on the karma of money arrived in my inbox courtesy of a Vipassana teacher I have sat with on retreat  a few times, Christopher Titmus.
Its an interesting reminder...

WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR MONEY?

We have the unfortunate karma to have been reborn as consumers. A tiny privileged minority, often in the entertainment and sports world, have daily three very bad karmas to deal with – namely to be rich, famous and desirable. Money is the key to the doorway into the kingdom of heaven for the consumer although it is a short lived heaven, often leaving in its wake disappointment, frustration and disillusionment. So what are we doing with our money? Exploration of our relationship to money is an ethical practice (Pali: Sila), an act of virtue, a precept for training and is as significant as any of the Five Precepts (not killing, not stealing, not engaging in sexual abuse, not lying, nor abusing alcohol or drugs) or we could see money as an integral aspect of Right Livelihood, and/or the second precept?] Here are a few areas for inquiry about money. In these and other areas we can all make the effort to take conscious steps, as part of our Dharma practice, to use our power power as consumers to make a difference to our world. We must also be willing to challenge the corrupt system of government and corporate power that casts its dark, controlling shadow over our lives.

BANKS and SAVINGS: Check out banks with an ethical policy and insist on ethical investments wherever you are placing extra money. Visit www.triodos.co.uk and www.co-operativebank.co.uk.

BUY ORGANIC FOOD. You will pay more for organic food than food grown with chemicals or genetically modified food but the gap is getting smaller and smaller. Sometimes the difference is negligible. Support small shops as much as possible. At the same time, notice: where is your food coming from? Aren’t organic vegetables flown half-way round the world also damaging to the environment? Visit www.soilassociation.org.uk

MARKETS: Shop in local markets as much as possible. Enjoy the friendly atmosphere, locally made or locally grown food, great bargains, largely free from unnecessary packaging, and numerous items for sale recycled from previous owners.

SHOPPING: Be well informed about ethical companies. Make a list of multi-national companies to avoid – Nike, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Nestles are among the world’s largest and least conscious multi-nationals. That’s the tip of the iceberg. www.foe.co.uk

FAIRTRADE: More and more consumers buy Fairtrade products to support the poor in other parts of the world, as well as to purchase fine food. www.fairtrade.org.uk

CHARITY SHOPS: Support good causes, your purchases contribute to making things last. Explore also used book shops, second hand furniture shops, local recycling centres, car boot sales and classified advertisements in local issues for a bargain.

CLEAN ELECTRICITY: Choose a supplier who supports renewable energy and only use lights and heating in occupied rooms and offices. Examples are: www.good-energy.co.uk and www.ecotricity.co.uk.

TRAVEL: Use a bus, train or bicycle as much as possible. Avoid driving your car to the shops. Take a backpack, shopping bags or suitcase bag on wheels to collect your groceries and other items instead of adding to the demand for plastic bags. Walk and stay fit. Regard carrying of groceries as exercise.Car pool. For example: . www.caresharedevon.com. For information on sustainable transport. www.sustrans.org.uk If you fly give £5 (€7.50) for every four hours of flying to cover carbon costs by planting trees. www.treesforlife.org.uk Forests. The sites for USA are www.amfor.org or www.americanforests.org.

MAY ALL BEINGS LIVE A CONSCIOUS LIFE

Christopher Titmus
www.insightmeditation.org