The Seminar

It's been a year and a half since I first did The Seminar. Only a year and a half? I can hardly believe it. Seems like much longer ago than that. In any case, rather unexpectedly I am now reviewing The Seminar in Denver this coming Wednesday. I'm grateful to be able to attend and both nervous and excited to dive into the work.

I had been scheduled to staff The Seminar with my community in San Francisco. Then Mary's mom had a fall in Maine where she lives and Mary needed to go there to help her get home and get settled. Turned out she was being released the day The Seminar began in SF and Mary wouldn't be home until the afternoon of the second to last day. This basically hosed my staffing plans. I rescheduled my flights for early December, trusted in God's plan for me and hunkered down with Fiona.

We were having a ball. Then one night I get a txt to get on a conference call with Maha (the leader of the Denver community and a group I belong to called the Second Generation), my spiritual master Kalindi and the rest of the Second Generation group. On the call Maha tells us that Kalindi wants as many of us as possible to review The Seminar that's about to happen in Denver. I immediately have resistance, and go into all the reasons I *can't* do it. At a certain point on the call two things happened. Thing the first, before asking us to respond, Maha says something to the effect of "This is your spiritual master calling for you to come to the Seminar, who of you will come". Which is pretty heavy, and I think started off a minor panic attack for me. Thing the second, I tell Maha I can staff as much as possible, and she responds "Kalindi wants to know why you aren't going to review". Now what happened next is what has been very interesting for me to observe and become aware of. I panicked. I could feel the part of me that wanted to say "I will". Except I didn't. I went into a bunch of explanation about caring for Fiona and not being able to take the time. Some of which was accurate, because the truth is I won't make commitments like that without setting it up with Mary first. And I could have said that. And I didn't.

Well it ate away at me. And by the end of the next day I knew I needed to do whatever was necessary to see if I could actually do it. At the very least I had to follow my desire to review. I set about handling the logistics of registering and got in touch with Mary and we started our own process with it. For us, the whole process has been very deep, sometimes painful, and again an opportunity for us to reveal more and get more exposed with one another, which has led to our being more related. Not necessarily more comfortable, definitely more related. More on that in subsequent posts.

What this process has had me really looking at is my relationship with Kalindi. How much am I ready to give over my will? How willing am I to follow her guidance? When she makes a request like this one, because she knows something special needs to happen, and will happen in this Seminar, am I willing to do what she asks? I am already on a Path on which I have agreed to follow her basic guidance, which I do to the best of my ability. And with this experience I am seeing my devotion is deeper than that.

What that will mean for me going forward I do not know. I am still a devoted husband and father, and how I balance my time with Mary and Fiona and on this Path will continue to be my work. I know if I could make a living for my family doing this work and contributing in the ways I can to the Mission I would. However, that's not possible currently, so I continue to love my work outside of the Mission. The work/spiritual balance is definitely another post topic so again, more on that later. For now, I will continue to go deeper into myself, and get myself out of my own way, so more pure love can come through me and flow to those I love and care for.

I wanted to close with a few words about what I want in this Seminar. More post topics surfacing, so I'll touch on the key points, all of which will likely become posts in and of themselves. I have a lot of of blogging to do... I have become aware recently of how I hold myself back in certain areas because of a fear I have of being perceived as arrogant or egotistical. I want to stop. I can now see how it's my ego that's stopping me, and my desire is to walk away from those limits. My other main focus is this notion of 'doing it right'. I can get caught very easily in a pattern of trying to do things right. This is a trap, and keeps me from focusing on actually doing whatever it is I'm trying to do right. A friend said to me the other day, "It's not about doing it right, it's about doing the work". She didn't know how perfect a statement that was for me. And she was so right.

In filling out my application and doing the looking at what I want in this Seminar I became aware of something. When I did my first Seminar, I thought I had taken leaps and bounds, and the feeling I have now is that those were baby steps. Now I'm ready to run.