Each of Us Free To Offer Our Unique MAP Pathwork School Vision
Coffee Time Sunday, January 6, 2013
Pat: I’m noticing that I am learning not so much for the sake of doing something from my learning but for the sake of living my life more fully. Gary: Perhaps “Free” learning – not in a “right” or “wrong” framework where I “better learn it and get it right on the test,” or “to teach it to someone else,” but rather unfettered learning where I can learn or read something for the sheer joy and inspiration the learning brings me. Here it does not matter what others think about what inspires me, what resonates with me. Pat: Maybe this unfettered learning comes when we are more aligned with our inner essence rather than aligned with external authority or religious or cultural norms. This is more about an acorn growing into an oak tree. Wow! Do I, as an acorn, get to say “Yes!” to my own inner acorn voice – the seed-voice of my acorn, a voice that was pushed down, held down my entire life? The disempowered one now gets to come forth!
Gary: Very well said. And that is what I felt in your powerful email to your spiritual group yesterday – what you wrote was the unfettered voice of Pat Peterson. For me, perhaps Moira, in my session on Thursday, was coaching me on my vision for MAP Pathwork School, encouraging me to make it more truly MY vision rather than trying to make it fit other peoples’ visions of just what Pathwork is that we are teaching.
With this freedom to have MY vision, however, I notice that I have a surprising core struggle. Just what is MY Vision for the MAP Pathwork School? This question brings up fear, fear that I am so inept: “How could I not know my own vision for the MAP Pathwork School!” How could I not know clearly what in Pathwork engages MY SOUL and could be incorporated into my vision of the school, and what does not? Can I be faithful to MY VOICE as it relates to Pathwork when I do not even know what my voice wants to say? This is such a familiar place – drawn to learn and implement the visions or knowledge of others, or of the culture, or of a spiritual path like Pathwork, but not being able to identify and value a vision that might come from within my own Soul.
Pat: Perhaps this matter goes back to your Enneagram THREEness that cycled through you for most of your life and made you into a performer-doer on the basis of external factors and cultural/religious norms. Perhaps now what you are experiencing is that a change has occurred in your inner landscape, in your consciousness. Perhaps that inner change has been the work of Pathwork that has gone on within you and perhaps that new emerging inner landscape does not have to fit some outside framework. This is unlike your unhealed THREEness that encouraged your external manifestation to fit a cultural or religious norm of some kind.
Pat: There is still a “doing something” that creates a new outer something. But this new something has to come from the inside and manifest first inside your Soul. There it incubates. Do not rush to external manifestation. The external manifestation will come organically in its own time at its own pace.
Consider the recording of the Pathwork Lectures – you needed those recordings to take in the Guide’s wisdom. Creating these recordings was grace working from inside of you and manifesting outside. Your relationship with that wisdom from the Guide went to a different level in you. This isn’t like reading the bible, taking in rules and dogma, but rather is allowing the Guide’s wisdom to change your inner landscape. That change is so important. We can’t even know how important that is. If we were scientist and someone wanted to fund us, and all we needed was this research – finding wholeness, finding healing – what a life that would be. The delightful paradox: “Our inner work is for the whole, but can only be done in the particular of who we are as individual personalities on this planet.”
Gary: I sense that early on I read the bible the same way read the Pathwork Lectures today – and that my early bible reading, too, transformed my inner landscape. Concerning playing our own unique roles, Moira keeps saying we each have a particular aspect of duality that we are intended to resolve for the benefit of the whole. And she shares with me her being encouraged by my faithfulness to my search for Truth — somehow this is related to my unique task. But here I have to be careful not to fall into being overly trapped by her framework either. Or even overly trapped by the Pathwork framework. This can be the “Tar-Baby” syndrome: Pathwork is a tool for freedom, but I can get trapped as Br’er Rabbit did with the Tar Baby: if I “punch it” and “engage it too aggressively,” then I get more deeply trapped in the unfreedom of “right” and “wrong” thinking regarding the Truths contained in Pathwork. These resources for freedom — such as the bible and the Pathwork Lectures — can be solidified into rigid dogma and thereby defeat the very freedom they were intended to give me. I need to be clear as to what nurtures me and then be free to manifest my life from a free place where I can be nurtured anew daily rather than trapped in some rigid or dogmatic way as Br’er Rabbit was with the Tar Baby.
And what does nourish my life on a regular basis?
1) Recording and listening to the Pathwork Lectures – I can spend hours working them through and then listening to them over and over, letting the Guide’s wisdom flow into my being at many levels on a fresh basis each day. There are beautiful points of resonance and awakenings of my Soul in response to this material.
2) Linking up with you, Pat – where we can have daily coffee time and develop our “sacred marriage” in the dimensions of physical, sexual, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual intercourse under the loving and talented tutelage of Sage Walker and Anthony Wilson.
3) Helper Sessions with Moira Shaw – opening to such wise and loving support and encouragement – pondering our sessions, writing them out.
4) Pathwork buddy Jenny Zia and our Pathwork three-person-group with Mary Stokes where we can regularly share our lives from a Pathwork perspective.
5) The Graduate Program with Erena Bramos – being with fellow Pathworkers under the loving, humble, and skillful tutelage of Erena.
6) My daily meditation practice and daily review
7) Psycho-somatic sessions with Ed Gutfreund as he guides me in matters of sensations and feelings in my body.
8] Writing up my blog entries and maintaining my website as a Pathwork Resource site.
Pat: There is a lot of richness here! The manifesting of Source is right here right now – sitting and sharing while sipping our coffee. The dynamic energetic images of Alex Grey come to mind. This is how life works. None of it is solid. Life is always changing. Gary: Yes, the Guide speaks often of the Life Stream. Life is change. Truth is change, a flowing, manifesting anew in each moment. Pat: Let’s try that on!
Gary: Let’s be in the natural evolution of our being and our environment – no pressure to make things a certain way. Some things grow, some things die away – practicing the wisdom of Gamaliel (Acts 5:34-39): If something is not of God, it shall die away over time. If something is of God, who would want to stop it or who could stop it – to stop it would be fighting against God. I am reminded of Karen’s multifaceted Helper Crystal – each crystal (Helper) in the cluster being represented – none bigger nor brighter than any other.
But being crystals in that cluster, each of us must be faithful to what is alive in us. What in us that is of God will manifest, what is not of God will fall away through our own personal work of purification and transformation. There is no need to force anything forward by any one of us, and no need to stubbornly hold on to something that is not of God and wants to fall off as each of us as crystals in the cluster is purified and transformed. So with my MAP School Vision: What is of God can be built upon, but what is not can be dropped off in a process of purification and transformation — natural evolution. There is a certain sense of freedom in this – the unfettered freedom to be me and to allow my/our vision for the MAP School to evolve and manifest naturally over time, by the Grace of God!
Shared in love, Gary