Awakening, What is that?

Why “Coming to Centre” ?

During Sounding Bowl courses, people have profound experiences.

I first ran a short course in understanding Sounding Bowls during the Sound Healer’s gathering at Hawkwood College in 2009. To everyone’s surprise, the sign-up for that course was so great that the big-name speakers had to be put into smaller rooms to accommodate all those who wanted to understand more deeply what they were seeing and hearing at the little stall where I was showing the Sounding Bowls.

Some who did that two-hour session with me had never played a musical instrument before. Some there were pioneers of sound healing in their own right. What burst through in that session from the Spirit that forms Sounding Bowls allowed both to have profound experiences. In more than one instance, these were life-changing.

Hawkwood pioneered Sounding Bowls’ day-courses for years, till I moved them into the Studio in Devon. Profound experiences became a feature of these. Coming to learn about sound-healing and the Bowls, people would find deep and beautiful aspects of their Selves opening up. Abilities and experiences they had given up hoping for would come into the light. Sounds would echo on in them for days, weeks or even months, music would come into lives previously silent. Understanding and belief would rise up where hope had been before.

When Spirit calls, it is good to answer. The question of Who we are and how we access Awakening became the central question of a range of 2-day courses that Wilhelmina, my partner, and I now began to run at Hawkwood. These spread to an offering in France and in Pennsylvania with the pioneering Sound Healer, founder of 9Ways academy, Mitch Nur.

The biggest question, of all of life, for Everyone, is: How does my inner life relate to the world around me?

Science and Religion, once shorn of their power/money corruption, seek this same question. Religion starts inside: How do I find God? and moves into the world: How do we create a life of Love? Science starts outside: How does the world function? and moves inside with: What is Truth?

Awakening for the individual, and humanity as a whole, comes when we bring the inner and the outer into balance and harmony. Those of us who walk the path of love and truth do so as much for the world as for ourselves.

The world wants relationship with us. Everything wants our attention, from the button on your shirt and the pavement you walk on, up to the people you live and work with, everything wants your attention. Inwardly also, the thoughts and feelings pouring through your mind and heart want your attention. This is where meditation comes in. Setting time aside in your life where your only task is directing your attention, brings both life and peace to the thousand other demands.

The ancient divisions into mineral/inanimate, plant/life, animal/active and human/creative are also degrees of interest and difficulty in relationship. Each level of being seeks, more actively than the previous, to engage your whole being and reveal its own being to you. Finding and holding your centre becomes a necessity if we are to allow each of these to speak in and to us.

As we come closer to finding our centre, the centre in each being around us becomes more transparent, lighting up in us that experience: “I am That” The more we discover who we are, the more we realize how little is actually “me.” The “I” of the entire cosmos pours through us. We are, in one sense the Eye of the cosmos seeing itself poured out into Being around us. “I am that, this I am.”

We meet this, more strongly than anywhere else, in the human beings around us. Whatever else we achieve in life the joy and satisfaction, as well as the pain and sorrow come in our relationships. The Path of Awakening reflects this too. The Eastern path of Retreat-into-Silence, and the western the path of Magic and Manifestation are balanced by the Central Way of Meeting. Kundalini takes your life-force into the head, Manifestation requires your Will in your hands and feet, Meeting another human being awakens the heart.

Sounding Bowls balance the circle and the straight line. Harmony arises in the middle. Awakening occurs when we bring our intention and our experience into conversation with each other. I should not have been surprised that profound experiences began when people really met Sounding Bowls. The reality of meeting built a decade of courses.

During lockdown a new peace entered the world. Hidden away from the world, millions experienced a new dawn. The deep questions of life surfaced from the rush, and asked again: What is it you really came here for?

In the studio, under the permission for mental-health support, little groups met to share this question, facing into this coal-face of human development: How do “I” meet another “I”? The deep-magic of true-meeting occurred.

Outside my window butterflies are dancing, apples hang golden, chickens cluck in the sun, delighted in their own existence. My best answer is to offer a new course, supporting a meeting between your own “I” and the “I” of the All, as we perceive it in this person in front of us. This is the Royal Way. This is where your own delight in the fruitfulness of Being Alive can find feed your Awakening.

Coming to Centre combines everything I have learnt from all my previous courses. Combining the circle-work of Being with other human souls, with the ‘tuned string’ of meditations and exercises, the ‘Intentionality’ of directed focus on Awakening with the open heart of discovering what that truly looks like.

Time is short. Events are moving fast. Course starts September 24/25 and runs for 3 full terms.

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