Introduction
 

It is no secret that we live in a time of unprecedented stress. Never before in human history have we, as a species, been subject to so much rapid change in our environment and in the "psycho-sphere" of the world. The fact that we now can, at the click of a mouse, bring the news of the moment from across the whole planet streaming into our awareness presents us with challenges other generations never dreamed of. As we are asked to process the daily barrage of events and information that presents itself to us each day, the need for inner growth and development has never been greater. 
 

This course is about learning specific tools for grounding, finding your center, expanding your consciousness, and mining your inner resources. The ideas and practices I will share with you have accompanied me over the past thirty years. These are practices that I myself use, both as a meditator and in my work as a healing practitioner. I have taught these and similar exercises to my workshop students and given them as "energy prescriptions" to clients in my practice. 
    Whether this is your first foray into meditation practices or you are a seasoned inner astronaut, there is something here for you. 

Energy Work and the Inner Journey
Learning energy skills like the ones in this course will not only enable you to take your meditation practice to new levels, you will also learn strategies for working with the inevitable obstacles that all meditators encounter. Like any skill set worth learning, this takes practice, but as you get the hang of it, it will reward you with a deeper connection with yourself and your inner resources.

In this course, you will learn to:

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• Connect consciously with your own energy system and allow it to draw you, naturally, into deeper states of meditation;
   

• Dive deep in meditation in a way that is safe, balanced, grounded and healing;

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• Gain an appreciation for the “ancient spiritual technology” provided by Nature;

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• Move from grounding yourself occasionally to becoming a grounded person;

 

• Create for yourself a deepening practice that will feed your other creative, meditative, and healing endeavors;

 

• Get more out of your meditative practice and appreciate the authority of your own experience.

Why Do This At All?

There comes a time for many of us when we are driven to find some kind of doorway into our inner world and discover what's in there. Maybe it's despair or a tragic event in our life, the need to heal from an injury or illness, or a quest for meaning and inspiration. Maybe something cracks open in us in a spontaneous revelation of some kind, and our perceptions about our lives change. Or just plain old curiosity. Something starts you looking. 
    There is no single, right reason for getting into some form of inner work, from taking time out for prayer and solitude to diving into a course like this that combines energy healing and meditation. Motivations vary, of course, and it is good to ask yourself what propels you to learn new practices. 

This course is conceived in the belief that hands-on bodyworkers, perhaps especially energy healing practitioners, need to have a regular personal practice for their own healing and self-development running parallel to their external client practice. Of course, the focus of that regular practice will change over time. This can range from meditation practices to therapy, from healing sessions with other practitioners to going on retreat. It all feeds the process of growing as a healer. 
    The practices and perspectives offered in this course are not bound to any specific healing or meditation modality, but rather reflect universal principles that apply to a wide spectrum of practices. Each lesson is presented as a “trailhead” for gaining personal experience in such universal areas as grounding, centering, holism, and expression, all of which apply to your evolving practice, no matter the style of your inner and outer work. 

Jump-Start Your Meditation Practice
Inner work is about the renewal of the age-old experience of finding ourselves nestled in the sacred Ground of all Being. It's not something we do just once. Your inner work nourishes you physically, emotionally, and psycho-spiritually. And it doesn't stop there. You will find that the steps you take in your development will naturally carry over to your relationships, your creative life, and your work with others. Your inner practice delivers a changed person to the world and, in its small way, changes the world. This is the work of a lifetime, and we all need to jump-start our practice of this renewal from time to time. 
 

I wish we could be sitting together in the same room. At the same time, let’s not underestimate the power of reading. Just by doing these practices together in our own locations, we generate a field together that approximates a "room" for us to work in. In the process, you might just be surprised at how closely we can feel each other's presence. 
    For my part, I will do my best to offer you a "whole protein" in this teaching and make it interesting. Working together, in combination with your interest and commitment, we will have something we all can grow from. 

A Note on Terminology
In this course, you’ll notice that I use rather generic language to refer to things like chakras, energy points, and energy streams, which are among the stable features of the human energy field. For example, you will see terms like “energy centers” and “energy-active positions” to identify key energetic locations on your body. By doing so, I hope to steer clear of preconceived notions and find a language that works for an experience-based approach to learning energywork, one that honors the venerable traditions that have fed world spirituality and at the same time allows me to point to ways of using these energy systems of ours to generate authentic experiences that are not colored by lots of ideas about what’s supposed to happen.

Energywork and Spiritual Process: Important Dots to Connect
Finally, I would like to put these practices into a bigger perspective. While energy-oriented practices like the ones you will learn in this course have many uses in holistic healing, I feel that it would be missing the boat to think of them mainly as ways to manage physical or emotional symptoms. Of course we all want to feel better, but it is important to recognize that these practices have a strong psycho-spiritual component. This means they have the potential to take you inward, into your body and your psyche, as well as expand you into a transpersonal state. These practices can be both comforting and confronting, bringing you into a deep experience of stillness, as well as stirring things up in your inner process. It’s nothing to be afraid of, but it is important to know from the outset that when you consciously enter your energy field you are also working with your unconscious, which has tremendous power and needs to be approached with respect.
    Energy practices like these are next of kin to the classic disciplines of the inner life: prayer, meditation and contemplation. And like these classic disciplines, they are tools for inner work and they join actively with the human longing for peace, unity and self-realization, and with the concerns of the pilgrim, or spiritual traveler, within each of us. 
    Put simply, inner work is anything you do in order to take care of your inner world. In this way, you are finding out, first hand, how you tick. This is about more than merely mastering a set of techniques: you are attending to qualities in yourself. By this, I mean you are cultivating the potentials and spiritual gifts that you carry in you, for example those of an artist, healer, teacher, or leader, not to mention the un-nameable blend of qualities that are uniquely yours. If attended to, your gifts will grow, following their own natural cycles, and at some point they will turn outward and touch others. In the words of psychologist Robert Johnson:

 

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With this introduction, we are now ready to launch into our first lesson. Click here for Lesson 1: Connection.

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