The Valley of Not Knowing
Hallelujah! There is something that wants us to grow and learn, something that wants us to dare to poke our heads out of dull holes and shed the chitinous shell of the familiar, something that will mosey along into our lives unbidden and give us a royal kick in the rump if we need to molt the old skin that has become too small and chipped, cramping our shimmering souls.
Who knows what this mysterious something is, but without it we would still be burrowing our little tadpole bottoms down into the muck every time a big shadow loomed past, missing the call of the evening breeze whispering through the shoreline, starlight rippling across the water.
I make this sound poetic and lilting, and it is, but the lived feel of our moseying friend sauntering into our life when we have become comfortably complacent, kicking up the dust and turning over the rocks in the hidden dreams of our innermost psyche is, to put it mildly, terrifying. There is a tendency to like the status quo.
This mysterious something that longs for our transformation is notably unceremonious. It does not hold much truck with our fearful planning and truncated lives, it wants us to know who we actually are, the glory that we actually wield, and it does not care what it takes to reveal our true beauty.
We can ignore these angels, we can fight them, or we can release back into their wings, fall back, sink in, and be carried to places we cannot conceive from the old crusty peepholes of this ancient conditioning we call 'well, that's just how it is'.
I don't know what brings us there, angels seem apt, but I do know the place we're plopped. The Valley of Not Knowing.
And so my friend, it could be it's time to take that brave step out of the habituated hamster wheel of planning planning planning, and figuring it out, time to stop burrowing into the muck every time the night darkens. It might be time to lift your hand and catch a brilliant angel toe and see what there is to see when you leave the threadbare need-to-know, have-to-figure-it-out machine posing as wisdom far behind, and allow the peace of not knowing to dispel the clouds of ego and reveal the lay of the land (the Kingdom of Heaven, as it were).
With that, I am proud to announce the next group course I am offering, a course that bravely goes where no man has gone before; The Valley of Not-Knowing (actually I just wanted to put in the old Star Trek plug, but you get what I'm trying to say.)
This course is designed to support anyone who intuits that there is another way to approach life than with the mind’s compulsive insistence that it must know before it moves, that it must know before it leaps. (As if it could.)
The Valley of Not-Knowing, beginning June 30th, is based on my own travels through not knowing, my moments of melting back into the angel wings, wings that know how to beat within the fabric of the cosmos, and the wisdom and techniques I’ve learned along the way.
This course is for people who have tasted (or dreamt) of that Shangri-La of resplendent infinite possibility and joy, and want to strengthen their ability to reside there more permanently. This Shangri-La is real. More real than here. Trust me.
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The Valley of Not Knowing is a contemplative group course specifically created for those who are ready to shed the mind’s habituated compulsion to always know, and open into the vast field of infinite, vibrating potentiality where all real inspiration and transformation originates.
You can expect:
A safe place to open into the unknown. It can feel like a frightening place, but only because of what our mind projects into it. The benefit of being in a group is that we will foray into the unknown together. Yes, it's ture, eventually we go alone, but you don’t have to start that way.
A structured way to really explore the unknown. Some structure is good when you go into the unknown, and the format of the class, your classmates, and the curriculum helps provide a sense of safety and structure. Like training wheels for the unknown.
True Knowing. Eventually, and this is not the goal of the course, but eventually, true knowing is revealed by abiding in the unknown. Strange but true. Once this real knowing hits you there is no denying what you have been shown. You Know with a capital K, and no person, institution, or previous unconscious conditioning can tell you otherwise. This can be terrifying or relaxing, but there is always some sense of in-breath when this real Knowing hits. Your soul can feel the bedrock nature of the Knowing, and there is relief in that.
We will practice reversing the learned behavior of panicking when presented with an unknown in our life. We will practice relaxing into the unknown when the unknown comes along. If this sounds revolutionary, thats because it is. We are habituated to freak the heck out when we don’t know something, and culturally we take it as our honor-bound duty to figure it out at all costs. We’ve moved so far from understanding the benefit of relaxing into the unknown that it can even seem negligent to not get all het up and figure something out with our mind. If we really were applying just our logical mind to an unknown, that would be fine, but usually we are applying a giant wad of unconsciousness and trauma informed beliefs to making a decision, not the logical mind.
Puttering! Relaxing into the unknown! Yes, by purposefully inviting the delightful energy of puttering into your life you can start to soften the ancient ropes of the ‘I-’Know mind noosed up tight around all real creativity, juice, and fun. Puttering is a familiar experience to many, and much less intimidating that straight up swan-diving into the Void of the Unknown. We’ll do a little of both, but trust me, puttering is a solid teacher.
We will also learn to really and truly recognize the energy of fear. Basically the thing that will pop people into unaligned action is listening to fear. So, it is important to get very very familiar with the energetic signature of fear, even if it’s really subtle, so that we can notice when it is informing our decision.
The ability to hear your intuition more often and more clearly. In large part we are able to hear our intuition, or the messages of the unknown when we take time to listen. True listening has no goal, no object, no agenda. Only when there is pure listening and nothing but pure listening can you hear what the other is saying, and in this case the other is the unknown, or perhaps you call it God, universe, life, real self.
Other general benefits of being in The Valley of Not Knowing group course:
Less reactivity.
Friends, help, support from your classmates and Evangeline. Don’t underestimate this!
More insights and realizations about patterns in your life, family, and community.
A place of stability that does not change with what happens around you.
A growing ability to unhook your well-being from the circumstances of your life.
A growing capacity to truly BE with those you love, connected, present.
A steadily growing capacity to truly BE with yourself, and gently see the unconscious material that is operating.
