The Art of Being® Training

Led by Alan Lowen, founder of The Art of Being®

Begins Fri 13 May 2011 at Waldhaus Zentrum, Switzerland
(24 days spread over 18 months)


When you are looking for a new direction, when you seek deeper fulfillment in your life, when it's time to put it all together and find your own real meaning and purpose, when you find yourself longing to live what you've been missing, when you want to turn your vision into reality, when a voice inside you is telling you that there must be more than this to life, when you find yourself wishing for more celebration, light, playfulness, creativity, tenderness, wildness, beauty, sensitivity, wisdom, affection, contact, love, intimacy, consciousness and spiritual connection in your life, then it makes sense that you're here, reading about the new 18-month, 4-part Art of Being® Training!

It's an experiential Training in which you get to open and explore the most essential and defining themes of your life, not to know more, but in order to become more of your own being. The 4 Circles of the Training inspire ever-deepening transformations and self-realization. Moreover, to be in the Training is to be in a profoundly engaging relationship with all the other participants. They become close friends and companions who touch, inspire, challenge, invite, support and move you as you do them. The training group becomes an intimately bonded family-community in which the quality of personal connection and communication makes it possible for participants to discover the deepest trust, and great enjoyment, in living and expressing themselves. The training has several purposes:
  • to offer a deep education in living and practising the art of being
  • to help you discover and develop your own particular gifts and talents
  • to awaken the spiritual dimension and integrate spiritual consciousness with ordinary daily life
  • to provide a foundation for people who may wish to become Art of Being® teachers
During the training there will be 4 sessions of 6 days with Alan. These are known as The 4 Circles. The Training begins on the outermost circle, and each session moves inwards to the next circle, on a journey that guides you through the layers of your personality to the innermost essence of being. Throughout the Training there is supported conscious focus on living the art of being in your daily life.

The Training group rapidly becomes an Art of Being® community, a circle supporting and inspiring ever-deepening presence in everyone. In addition to the four 6-day sessions there are various training assignments and participants' self-organised gatherings to sustain the vitality and effectiveness of the Training. After completing the 3rd Circle, you also have the opportunity to assist in Art of Being® workshops in which you have already participated.

The 4 Circles can be regarded as one continous inward journey of personal realisation and spiritual awakening. The personal journey involves a gradual opening to your own inherent gifts, together with real appreciation for whatever you experience as your limitations. Appreciating your gifts and limitations hand-in-hand removes the inner barriers to being whole and integrated. You also need this foundation of deep self-acceptance to be able to receive and accept others fully.

For people wishing to become Art of Being® teachers, the essential training is your participation in The 4 Circles. It is in these workshops that you learn how to be with people, beginning with yourself. There are several ways in which you can acquire whatever practical skills you eventually need (and these are addressed during the Training), but all the skills in the world are irrelevant until you are able to offer others what you can only discover through your own inner Odyssey.



THE FOUR CIRCLES
(each circle is a 6-day workshop led by Alan Lowen)


The First Circle: Dying into Life

It is hard to be happy and to find fulfilment and meaning in life if you believe that in some way or another you are not OK, or that there is something wrong with you or with life; and it is almost impossible to grow up in our culture without being fed these notions. They become for most of us deeply rooted sub-texts that prove their point by quietly sabotaging the best in our lives. Here are just a few of our most common such beliefs: "I don't deserve... I'm not good enough... I'm better than... It's my fault... I don't belong... I'll never be really loved... or healthy... or wealthy... or happy... or successful... or..."

All these beliefs are rooted in fear. They cause us to develop survival strategies with which we protect ourselves, and these strategies shape our personalities, our egos, our images, our neuroses and our addictions. Eventually we forget that these are only costumes that we wear for our protection. We come to believe that our personality is who we are and as a result we live alienated from our greatest gift - our actual being.

The first session of the training is devoted to shedding the layers of personality. This is not something to be done or made to happen. Being cannot be taught, but in a certain space it can be discovered. How this happens is what the art of being is all about. It is the essence of the entire training. There are countless different ways to create this space and make it available to others, but always and only in a climate of total trust.

It is a kind of death experience to let go of your personality when you believe this is who you are, but this is how you begin to discover what is real in you. In the light of your being you see the personality for the costume it is. Like any costume you can enjoy wearing it, but now you are not so identified with it and it is less in the way of your real being.

After the First Circle, the training assignments given are designed to keep you seeing, in your day-to-day life in the ordinary world, what your personality looks like; how it functions; and how to release yourself from its restricted experience of life.


The Second Circle: Becoming Visible

"I am here to sing my song and dance my dance". The second circle is the discovery of who you are when you allow your being to express itself! It requires both trust and courage to let your self, and not just your image, be seen! Your visibility is not about being on stage, but about recognizing that the way to say Thank you for the gift of your existence is to give your gifts! In doing so you become a creative participant in life as it is happening and you begin to see what you personally have to offer; you begin to sense your own Art of Being! Your orientation is not about "getting what I want", which is the normal perspective we learn in our culture; it is about "giving who I am".

This is not about becoming a do-gooder but about changing your relationship with existence. "Getting" is a compulsive and fear-based way of living. Hence it is always unfulfilling. To live happily you have to learn to give who you. This keeps you connected with your personal power and with your being. You become less busy with your fears because you are no longer worried about getting and not getting. You become more attracted by your courage and more fascinated with all that happens as you learn to trust giving yourself fully to the here-and-now happenings of your life.

So the Second Circle en-courages you towards more and more expression of your being. As well as inviting you to allow your spontaneity and to act intuitively, the circle will include rituals with voice and body in sound, chanting, song, movement and dance. These are all designed to deepen your trust and courage to "sing your own song and dance your own dance".

The assignments related to the Second Circle are about practising in your daily life what has been learned. These include meditations, creative projects and self-discovery adventures.



The Third Circle: Mother Nature, Father Shaman

It is difficult for most of us to maintain an intimate connection with nature. Our civilisation has distanced us. It gives us all kinds of comforts and resources in the material world, but something priceless has been lost, or so diluted that we are hardly aware of its magic. We bring plants and flowers into our homes, we tend our gardens when we have them, and we are, many of us, still touched deeply by nature's presence. But seldom do we enter nature?s domain with all our inner nature open. To do so is to invite the revival within us of the connection between nature and spirituality. In a sense we then meet our Mother Nature and our Father the Shaman - the male spirit who moves and acts with the understanding and blessings of Mother Earth.

These are symbolic relationships that contain a certain precious wisdom. When we open ourselves deeply to nature, its wisdom permeates us and transforms us in a very definable way: we become our own mother and our own father. Being our own mother, we rediscover caring.

I invite you to pay attention to what may happen in your life if you truly care for everything in it. Nothing would more dramatically change this whole world than humanity learning to care again! And the Father Shaman, working hand-in-hand with the Mother, walks the world acting uncompromisingly to awaken and to heal. He is an inner aspect of each one of us, but mostly we are very afraid of his power within us, just as we fear it in others. We call him the "witch doctor". He is our inner warrior too. He can stand for what matters, and he knows how to use the resources of existence.

This Third Circle is a reunion with mother and father nature. It is a shamanic journey, which involves your consciousness, your feelings, your natural and supernatural senses, your spirit and the spirit of existence beyond any personal boundaries that could be called "you". The purpose of this session is to offer you the means to heal the gap between yourself and nature so that from now on you can live on this planet with the means to use its wisdom as well as being one of its guardians. It will of course affect your way of relating with everything, because even in the middle of Manhattan or Zürich or London you will live and breathe with nature: the tree, the raindrop, the bird flying, the wind, the moon all speak to you. Your own mystery deepens. You walk the world differently.

The assignments related to this circle establish and strengthen your relationship with mother and father nature and integrate their ways into your daily life. There are also practices to support you learning to consciously look after the details of your life that need your care and attention. This work continues over several months, alone and also with training partners. You support each other in learning to care. You also develop your "inner warrior" who can meet, act and creatively move and work with life and its manifold dances.


The Fourth Circle: The Zero Experience

The most powerful force that drives us is our longing. We can either be run by it, striving endlessly to get satisfaction, or we can learn to feel its fire burning inside us. It's not that we're supposed to suffer. What really keeps us in pain is running through the world reaching out all the time for something that will make us happy. Doing this we live as beggars, ignoring our own inner richness.

The Fourth Circle is about changing the direction of our longing from outwards to inwards. When we dare to just sit in the fire of our longing, two very valuable things happen. First, we discover how rich we really are. And second, the energy we connect with is so powerful that it can guide us inwards to the very source of our being. Only here can we find the fulfilment that we were so desperately seeking outside ourselves.

Meditation connects us with our longing. As a community open to the spiritual dimension of being we turn all this energy in towards what Osho called "the zero experience" or what one poet described as "the still point of the turning world". When we then learn to give the energy of our longing to existence, we discover what prayer means.

In this final session of the Training we come together in meditation, celebration and sacred rituals, each of us finding our own communion with the source, essence, God, Goddess, spirit, existence... call it what you will. The ceremonies are "fingers pointing to the moon"; they give direction and power, and they also support us in keeping a spiritual connection in our everyday life. Integrating the inner with the outer is an important aspect of this work.


Living the Art of Being

The Art of Being® is a way of living your life so that everything that comes your way - blessings and challenges alike - is inviting your self-realization as a loving, conscious, happy and creative person.

Throughout the Training you have the dynamic support of Alan and the circle of participants and assistants to keep on discovering and practising this. It is the climate in which the training happens. Every workshop session is inviting you to assimilate it so that you can live your normal daily life supported by the vision and the practices that keep you living in harmony with existence and your inner being. There is also, every 3 weeks, a tele-conference for the Training group, and an ongoing very lively e-group that keeps everyone connected and buzzing!
And...
You are encouraged to keep in touch with each other and to arrange your own occasional gatherings during the life-time of the Training (and after as you wish). Some of your assignments are designed with this in mind.

The First Circle 13-19 May, 2011
The Second Circle 20-25 Sep, 2011
The Third Circle date to be announced
The Fourth Circle date to be announced

The 1st Circle begins 8.30pm Friday evening
Circles 2-4 begin at 10.30am on the first day and end at 4pm on the last day.

There is an ongoing internet e-group that keeps everyone sharing and connecting throughout the Training, and usually for long after!


Graduation and Becoming a Licensed Art of Being® teacher

Everyone who completes The Art of Being® Training receives a graduation certificate. You are then welcome to assist Alan and other Art of Being® teachers in workshops and courses in which you have already participated (you pay only for your food and accommodation).
Every year, the weekend before Easter, there is a Graduates Weekend gathering with Alan.
Graduates may also apply to become licensed Art of Being® teachers. The essential criterion is that you are able to create a space in which people can learn to celebrate the gifts of their own being, realize their untapped potential, and live happy and fulfilling lives. This naturally requires that you yourself have a real and well-integrated understanding of the art of being. The teacher's licence is renewed annually through participation in the annual Graduates weekend workshop.

© Copyright 1999-2010, The Art of Being®

Upcoming dates for this workshop:


The Art of Being Training, 1. circle  May 13, 2011-May 19, 2011

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