Chris Howard

So . . . I was listening to the radio in April – KPFK –The Aware Show, which is sometimes interesting and sometimes incredibly annoying (all that new age guff!) I was listening to someone talking about his problem with The Secret – how it got people stuck in the idea that they were to blame for their misfortune. Indeed The Secret embodies assumptions of privilege that make most of my friends avoid it like the plague.

(Actually, there are some valuable suppositions in the movie, such as that very Buddhist understanding that we create the world through our thinking, and that how we do so is very much dependent on emotional states. Unfortunately, they are couched in assumptions of privilege and entitlement that obscure the complexity of our collective circumstance – Empire and global destruction . . . but I digress)

So . . . this person, who turns out to be a man named Chris Howard, begins to speak of how, if he were to talk to someone at Darfur or to someone who had been badly abused as a child, and if he got the chance to bring up the subject, he would ask, “If you could imagine that there was a positive lesson that you could carry with you from this what would it be?”

So my partner and I decided to go to the free three day workshop being offered in LA. “We need a kick in the butt,” she said.

We were reluctant participants, kicking and screaming from the start. “By a show of hands who would like more money in their lives?” Twelve hundred people put up their hands. Oh Lord! I'm way too cool for this! Then in the breaks there was dancing in the aisles. Oh No! I’m a Buddhist teacher I just don’t do this kind of stuff! It took us a day and a half to stop whining and to decide we were actually learning a lot, and to admit that Chris Howard is actually a brilliant teacher. So we decided to fly up to San José to take the workshop again the following month; and not to waste the first half of it complaining!

At that second workshop we danced in the aisles a lot, and signed up for a full program of training with the Chris Howard folks. In the process we spent more money than we though we had. And that was okay. It was a breakthrough to take care of ourselves in this way.

It is the end of June and I have now just finished three weeks of the training. What I am learning is astonishing and delightful. My work as a life coach is utterly transformed and rejuvenated. I am revising everything I am doing, not only as a coach, but as a Buddhist teacher, as a facilitator of change, as an activist, as a human-being. . . .

The website doesn't really convey the spirit of this work. Regardless, I must say, I do trust the integrity of this company Chris Howard Seminars

Image of Darfur at top of page from
shalomrav.wordpress.com/category/darfur/

Rhythms laid down before human memory

What enters the conscious mind is such a small part of our life. We draw from depths that are hidden to us, depths we feed and that feed us; disturb or are disturbed by us; depths that allow us to connect to life, or cut us off from life.

Most of what we are is determined by elements within ourselves that we have been unconscious of. Yet the invitation is always there to open, to trust, to soar.

So it is with the wild world that surrounds us. We imagined it was subdued by the twentieth century, yet it remains, in the movement of the wind, in the eye of bird, and always in our own hearts, and in the hearts of those we meet

And our hearts still beats with a rhythm that was laid down before human memory. Through this continuing emergency of wars and global devastations there is a natural capacity for healing and self-remembering that draws us home to those ancient roots, a power and wisdom that we know in our bones.

The Buddha spoke of it, and pointed the way, though it is not exclusively Buddhist in nature. That rhythm is still open to us. Perhaps now, more than ever before, there is a calling to come home to that rhythm, to come home to more than who we have been.