Mini form Lessons And Warm Up Exercises

Here are the Mini Form Lessons and Warm Ups for Monday morning's class. Scroll down to yesterday's post if you are looking for the link to the Letting Go Movie



Mini Form Lesson 1 and 2 from ann on Vimeo.







Turning the ball warm up from ann on Vimeo.



Warm up exercises from ann on Vimeo.

Short form To crossing Hands

Here is the short form to crossing hands for Monday Night's short form class.
And one with Joan leading last night's lesson.
I will post the Mini form lessons as soon as I get a chance to record them ( probably tonight ).

Here is the link to the Letting Go Movie   Letting Go




Short Form to Ward Off Right Joan leading from ann on Vimeo.





Short Form to Crossing Hands from ann on Vimeo.

Resonance Or Being In Tune

I love the concept of resonance  (the response of a body to vibrations of its own natural frequency clock here for examples and  good explanation resonance ).
What I love about this concept is that it helps me understand how certain aspects of life work and allows me to use the principle of resonance to enhance my skills and endeavours.
When we tune into a teacher and really connect with their ideas and apply them we begin ( in my opinion ) to resonate with them and their teaching. If we practise, over time we resonate more and more with the work until eventually we embody the work ourselves and have shifted from our original state of 'being ' to a new state.
Knowing this is very useful if we wish to grow or change, first we must recognise where we are resonating right now and also we must have an intention or desire to change . Then we also need a 'ideal ' to work toward. maybe someone embodies certain characteristics we admire and aspire to. If we have such a role model we can work to resonate with their vibrations.
This is a form of discipleship. Many religious people have used this method of modelling their lives on saints in order to grow spiritually. But you can use this model to grow in any area of your life . Pick someone who inspires you and begin to resonate with them by learning with or from them and you will be using resonance in order to grow. You don't need to focus entirely on one person you can pick a few or many people who have the characteristics that inspire you. Read their lives, read their work, recognise that they are human just like you and me . They were once starting their journey of growth.  They probably followed someone who inspired them , they too found inspiration through resonating with their heroes. It is good to know that all we need is our dream and some inspiring role models and anything is possible.

 Here are the links to the Clean Up Process Clean Up and the Letting Go Movie Letting Go Movie I promised last night. A Big Thanks to everyone for being there and really ' Letting Go' .
It was fabulous to share releasing and hear how the method is working to make life more fun and enjoyable.
As Lester said , " Each time you Let Go you get Lighter , if you Let Go continuously you will become  continuously lighter.
This really appeals to me and I have noticed how much easier it is to see the funny side to life since releasing.  Others too have remarked how they just find themselves laughing in  situations where previously they would have stressed. A good sense of humour can be our greatest ally in personal growth. It stops us from taking ourselves and our journey too seriously.  And as the saying goes " If you don't have a sense of humour then it's just not funny. ".


"The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it." W. M. Lewis

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

You're going to die. You're going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we're just going to be gone. The world's going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.
Bob Dylan

And finally " Wisdom begins in Wonder " Socrates

I believe that being 'Light hearted and living with a sense of humour also allows us to be more open to wonder.
So why not Let Go today and have some fun You deserve it.

Being - Adyashanti

Above the entrance to the Oracle at Delphi were written the words, “Know Thyself.” Jesus came along and added a sense of urgency and consequence to the ancient idea when he said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

What Jesus is saying is that spirituality is serious business, with serious consequences. Your life hangs precariously in the balance, teetering between a state of unconscious sleepwalking and eyes-wide-open spiritual enlightenment. The fact that most people do not see life this way testifies to how deeply asleep and in denial they truly are.

Within each of our forms lies the existential mystery of being. Apart from one’s physical appearance, personality, gender, history, occupation, hopes and dreams, comings and goings, there lies an eerie silence, an abyss of stillness charged with an etheric presence. For all of our anxious business and obsession with triviality, we cannot completely deny this phantasmal essence at our core. And yet we do everything we can to avoid its stillness, its silence, its utter emptiness and intimate embrace.

To remain unconscious of being is to be trapped within an ego-driven wasteland of conflict, strife, and fear that only seems customary because we have been brainwashed into a state of suspended disbelief where a shocking amount of hate, dishonesty, ignorance, and greed are viewed as normal and sane. But it is not sane, not even close to being sane. Nor is it based in reality. In fact, nothing could be less real than what we human beings call reality.

By clinging to the mind in the form of memory and thought, we are held captive by the movement of our conditioned thinking and imagination, all the while believing that we are perfectly rational and sane. We therefore continue to justify the reality of what causes us, as well as others, immeasurable amounts of pain and suffering.

Deep down we all suspect that something is very wrong with the way we perceive life but we try very, very hard not to notice it. And the way we remain blind to our frightful condition is through an obsessive and pathological denial of being -- as if some dreadful fate would overcome us if we were to face the pure light of truth and lay bare our fearful clinging to illusion.

The question of being is everything. Nothing could be more important or consequential -- nothing where the stakes run so high. To remain unconscious of being is to remain asleep to our own reality and therefore asleep to reality at large. The choice is simple: awaken to being or sleep an endless sleep. 

- Adyashanti

When we learn to release we come to recognise the ' beingness '  that is already here, and  always present. Our 'beingness' which , endlessly patiently awaits our attention.

I am so looking forward to spending an evening sharing in that inward journey to presence, to becoming ever more conscious of our true nature.

Lessons For Tuesday Evenings Class And An Alan Ginberg T'ai Chi Poem

Here are the lessons one from the beginning of the Short Form and one from  the third section.
I'm including the full Mini Form for our beginners.
And Alan Ginsberg's T'ai Chi Poem to finish .




Lifting hands and shoulder stroke to white crane spreads wings from ann on Vimeo.




102 2334 from ann on Vimeo.






Full Mini Form from ann on Vimeo.




Alan Ginsberg  T'ai Ching in his kitchen .In My Kitchen In New York


Enjoy With Love,  Ann

Being Right Or Believing We Are Right

                         Ruth and  Suzie  love made visible


Believing we are ' Right ' is often a big block in life.  We can all think of situations where we dug our heels in and fought an argument and stuck to our version of the 'truth ' long after we had realised we were wrong.  Pride often holds us stuck in wanting to be right, it can prevent us from yielding and admitting the other person's point of view.
When we can learn to let go on the need to be Right, the need to know the answers life opens to us.
We have shifted our perspective and allowed in an intelligence, a knowing that is much bigger than our minds can comprehend. We have let go of our pride and in doing so we have moved up to courageousness where so much more is possible.
Miracles and insights happen here in the 'don't know ' mind.  Conflicts can find resolution, hurts can be healed, and love can find a home in which to dwell.

Remembering the last workshop

                                               Jo


My daughter Jo came home for the weekend and helped me set up Sound Cloud .
Now I can upload the recordings Chris made at the last workshop so you can listen again and remember the work we did.

 Here is the link  Open Focus from the workshop

Really looking forward to Friday's Workshop. We will begin at 5 with some simple T'ai Chi and energy work to prepare us for a night of releasing our limitations.

A Short Trip Along The South East Coast

                  Dungarvan early yesterday morning

                Sunshine and a promise of the trip ahead

                    Duncannon Fort looking out over the beach

                     Secluded lanes

 Country Houses

Spring Flowers

To delight

Ferry Crossing

       To colourful East Ferry

All in all a magical day out.

Attachments and Aversions in a Bob Marley way

Came across this earlier and thought this is another way of saying it.

Tuesday's Short form lesson

Apologies to Tuesday's Class I forgot to post this until tonight.

Lifting hands and shoulder stroke to white crane spreads wings from ann on Vimeo.


I love Karma Tube  such great videos   Unsung Hero

Attachments and Aversions

According to Lester we have attachment and aversions to everything in our lives and they block our clear knowing and our freedom. They blur our vision and keep us stuck. I also resisted this idea on first hearing. "I love my life and couldn't see how I had aversions to living, aversions to having a body, aversions to being happy etc. This is where the exercises ( enquiry) helps.

I remember doing an attachment aversion exercise to my body and it was areal eye opener. I had never considered my body in that way before.
Here are some examples of what I found as I worked the exercise.

What do I like about having a body.              What do I dislike about having a body

Being able to feel sensations.   Release                       Feeling tired , cold etc Release

( We release by letting go of the under lying want ,you may need to watch the movie  Letting Go to know how to do that).


Can you see already feeling has a positive and negative side to it. Genius ! As soon as I saw that I knew what Lester meant about attachments and aversions. When doing the exercise we release on each attachment and aversion so we can become free from them and just be.
I love this form of enquiry as I can do one in a few minutes and each one I do leaves me a little lighter and freer.

Have a go yourself I bet you will be amazed at what your subconscious will reveal to you.

Mini form Lesson and warm ups

Mini Form Beginning Posture from ann on Vimeo.






Beginning Posture of the Mini Form from ann on Vimeo.





Turning the ball warm up from ann on Vimeo.






Warm up exercises from ann on Vimeo.

Hope these help your practice.

Some ways Setting Goals Can Help Us,

When I began studying Lester's method goal setting made no sense to me. At that time I had become 'spiritual' and considered the 'world ' to be a distraction. I thought that I should set aside all 'worldly ' interests and devote myself completely ( or as much as possible) to my spiritual practices.
However the world wouldn't go away, I had bills to pay, and relationships that rattled me and even though my life was much smoother and more productive than it had been I felt there must be more.
As I began (reluctantly) to set conscious goals and release on them I began to understand why Lester encourages us to use them.
Here is how it works.
 Say you set a goal  " I allow myself to have an abundant income. "
You write this goal at the top of a sheet of paper and read it aloud to yourself  paying attention to the thoughts and feelings that arise as you hear yourself reading the goal. If you pay attention you will hear your resistant thoughts like " I don't deserve an abundant income , I not good enough, I don't know enough ." etc.
As soon as you 'hear ' the first resistant thought stop and ask yourself if this thought ( or feeling ) is coming from wanting control , wanting approval , wanting safety, or wanting separation or  oneness . Release whatever want feels most relevant and repeat with the next thought or feeling.
It is also a good idea to do advantages and disadvantages and likes and dislikes  to  achieving your goal.
Again you do one thought or feeling at a time .

For example  " I allow myself to have an abundant income. "

        Advantages                                                     Disadvantages     
   Write one advantage here                               Write one disadvantage here
 and release on it                                                   and release on it
When  you can think of no more advantages or disadvantages  repeat the process as likes and dislikes and release on them too.
When I began doing this I couldn't see any point or even imagine that I could have disadvantages to achieving goals that I believed I wanted to achieve. Doing advantages and disadvantages and likes and dislikes was a revelation to me as doing the process brought up lots of subconscious thoughts that were blocking me. I never would have imagined that they were in my subconscious mind without asking myself questions like "What disadvantage would it be to me to achieve this goal. " Some of my hidden 'disadvantages' surprised and even shocked  me at times but at least as soon as I recognised them I could let them go.
Lester says if you have not achieved your goal there is some hidden 'disadvantage' in having it and as soon as you find it and release it you will achieve the goal.
If you are working on releasing some problem and you still have the problem then there is some 'hidden ' advantage to still having that problem. As soon as you recognise the advantage you can release on it or hold on to your problem.
I found this hidden advantages and hidden disadvantages a revelation it made perfect sense to me and has been a huge help in understanding how and why I 'resist ' achieving goals.
For a full understanding of the process you really need to invest in the Release Technique books and CD 's by Larry Crane or The Sedona Method books and Cd's by Hale Dwoskin. I  have used both and find their contrasting styles great. They approach the same material in different ways and I find  that stimulating and also helpful as hearing the information from different angles provokes me to think in different ways.
I hope this is of help to you and that it inspires you to set some goals and in doing so that you too will come to know yourself in ways you had not imagined were possible.
You may come to realise (like me) that setting goals and releasing on them is a great form of enquiry.

We will investigate the goal setting process at the next releasing workshop. I'm getting great feedback from the last workshop . Releasing is such a fabulous tool, a great way to stay open to life's possibilities while letting go of our conscious blocks and unearthing our unconscious blocks so we can let them go too.

With Love and Gratitude to Lester and all his Teachers, Ann

Cleaning Up Your Relationships

                   
                         Rainbows in my beloved Cork



Wow now if you liked the movie yesterday you may well ' Get ' this exercise and understand why it has made such a difference to me and my sense of relating.

I have been using it and find it amazing to watch how my relating is changing as I work on my side the relationships in my life.

Lester says and I'm paraphrasing " Everything out there in the world is your projection. " .

I can definitely relate to that insight. Working on the 'Clean Up Process' changes my world and I'm sharing it because if you are on my page it is likely that you would like to 'Clean Up ' your world too.

With much love for you and our world.
Ann

Special Release Process

Letting Go

Here is Hale Dwoskin  of the Sedona Method. I found his Letting Go Movie on Youtube link below.

It is a great introduction to the method and how releasing works.
 There are some great 'enquiries' facilitated by Hale which give you the opportunity to experience how this amazing method works.
The movie is just over an hour long,  it's the weekend why not give yourself the gift of an hour to relax and laugh and experience how releasing works.

Letting Go


Next Releasing Event In Cork

I will be exploring this method again on Friday April 25'th from 6-10 pm.

This event will be in Blackrock Commonity Centre Cork

I am  looking forward to sharing some more about how the method
works and reviewing our gains since the last session.

I will repeat  the  introductory session 6-7ish and  then we will go
 deeper into the application of the method.

We will explore our ability to ' Let Go ' so, we can have more fun ,  more harmonious relationships, and more abundance in all areas of our lives.

Celebrating Spring

                  Spring is here and delighting with her exuberance

                 Old friends return

          They  brighten

        And Delight

            On our meander

           Some flowers are already open

And evidence of more delights to come

 It's no wonder the Japanese have a cherry blossom festival
some amazing photos of it in this link   cherry-blossom-festival



  Let's round off this Celebration with
 Louis Armstrong's  What A Wonderful World

The Power Of Belief And Persistence In All Circumstances

An inspiring and beautiful story which illustrates the power of keeping your dream alive.

The Conditioned

T'ai Chi Warm Ups and the Mini Form For New Beginners

Here are two of the Warm Ups we did on Monday's,  for some reason the second video wouldn't upload.  I'll  record the rest of the warm ups again and post them next week.



Warm up exercises from ann on Vimeo.




Full Mini Form from ann on Vimeo.

Enquiry Using Sedona Method Triple Welcoming

      Lester stopped in Sedona on his journey across the US and stayed


Sedona Triple Welcoming To Let Go

1. Allow yourself to remember a situation in your life that you’ve been wanting to change
or improve, some problem, some issue, anything.


2. Could you just simply welcome how you feel about it? Could you let it be here as best
you can? Welcome the thoughts, feelings, beliefs and welcome the memories. Could
you just let it all be here? It’s here anyway, why not just welcome it?


3. Could you welcome, too, and wanting to change it, make it difference, push it away or
keep it close. Welcome any wanting approval, security, control, oneness or
separateness. Welcome all the wanting related to this topic.

4. Could you also welcome any sense that any of it is who you really are or part of your
identity?

5. Now, just open inside, and notice what happens, and as you look beyond all of it, what
is actually here, now?

Fabulous Crows

   Crows are nesting down the lane where we walk

 

                  They call to us as we go by .
         I have always loved crows there is some thing about
             them that attracts me.

          Maybe you love them too ?

         If so you will like these videos and interesting facts about Crows
   
        This one is the amazing video story of a crow
        who 'mothered ' a kitten .Crow and Kitten Love story
   
         I found it  here  10 Amazing Crow Facts 


 

Welcome to T'ai Chi

A Big Welcome to all of you starting your T''ai Chi journey today.  This is a truly amazing art that has the power to teach you about your own body from the inside out,  to transform your stress into an opportunity for personal growth, and what's more it is fun to, learn and practice. I could write a book about the benefits of practicing T'ai Chi it certainly has transformed my life  and I am honoured and excited to have the opportunity of sharing T'ai  Chi with you.
 Give yourself a few minutes each day to practice and soon you will love this quiet time when T'ai Chi can recharge your energy, relax your mind and renew your spirit.




Full Mini Form from ann on Vimeo.

A Truly Inspiring Story of Love and Healing

                                                   
                                               Owen and Haatchi


Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfil them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The video below illustrates Chardin's belief in the healing power of Love.  It is such a beautiful uplifting and inspiring story. I hope you find it lifts your spirits too.
                                                   
                                                      Owen and Haatchi

Lester's Story

                                                Lester



At T'ai Chi tonight Joan sugggested  that people might like to hear Lester's story so here is a short version from the Sedona Method


Lester Levenson was a man who had mastered life’s greatest challenge. In 1952, at age 42, Lester, a physicist and successful entrepreneur, was at the pinnacle of worldly success, yet he was an unhappy, very unhealthy man.
He had many health problems including depression, an enlarged liver, kidney stones, spleen trouble, hyper acidity, and ulcers that had perforated his stomach and formed lesions. He was so unhealthy, in fact, that after having his second coronary, his doctors sent him home to his Central Park South penthouse apartment in New York City to die.

Lester was a man who loved challenges. So, instead of giving up, he decided to go back to the lab within himself and find some answers. Because of his determination and concentration, he was able to cut through his conscious mind to find what he needed. What he found was the ultimate tool for personal growth—a way of letting go of all inner limitations. He was so excited by his discovery that he used it intensively for a period of three months. By the end of that period, his body became totally healthy again. Furthermore, he entered a state of profound peace that never left him through the day he died on January 18, 1994.

"I began by asking myself, “What do I want out of life?” And the answer was happiness. Investigating further, I went into the moment when I was feeling happiest. I discovered something which to me was startling at the time. It was when I was loving that I was happiest. That happiness equated to my capacity to love rather than to being loved. That was a starting point."
Lester Levenson

Lester shares his discoveries with others.
What Lester discovered firsthand is that we are all unlimited beings, limited only by the concepts of limitation that we hold in our minds. These concepts of limitation are not true; furthermore, because they’re not really true, they can easily be released or discharged. Lester’s experience made him understand that not only could he practice this technique himself, he could teach others how to do it as well. As a result, he began working with people, both in small groups and individually.

Since his discoveries happened so quickly and without warning or preparation, he had no language to describe his discoveries and what he was experiencing. The first place he looked for an appropriate language to use to help others was in the Bible. And he became good friends with several evangelical ministers. He then went on to read many books both from the west and the east in order to find the right language to be of service. He eventually settled on his own unique way of describing his experience and his own unique ways of sharing this experience in a useful way with others.

"In realising how much I wanted to change things in this world, I saw how it made me a slave of this world; I made the decision to reverse that. And in the process of following out these two directions–actually unloading all the subconscious concepts and pressures in those directions–I discovered I was getting happier, freer, lighter, and feeling better in general."
Lester Levenson

Lester believed strongly that personal growth was not dependent on any external source, including a teacher, and he did not want to be anyone’s guru. But, because of how elevated people felt around him, despite his protestations and attempts to keep it from happening, many of Lester’s students insisted on seeing him as a guru. So, in 1973, Lester realised that his teachings needed to be formalised into a system that he could allow others to teach—leaving him out of the equation. A way to transform his powerful techniques for personal growth into a non-sectarian do-it-yourself system was devised, which is now called the Sedona Method.

"When we get in tune, our capacity to love is so extreme that we love everyone with an extreme intensity that makes living the most delightful it could ever be."
Lester Levenson

More About Lester and Freedom

As Lester explored his beliefs and released them his life improved.
 His health improved he became happier lighter and eventually completely free.
What he discovered was that subconscious programmes had been running his life, as he be conscious of these programmes ( limiting beliefs ) and released them his life turned around.
Lester shared his discoveries so we too can become conscious of our previously unconscious limiting beliefs and release them so we too can free ourselves in this lifetime.
Lester realised that we have attachments and aversions to everything in our lives, we need to let go of our attachments and aversions in order to be free.
We can use his method to become conscious of our attachments and aversions and then release them.
He found that our feelings come primarily  from  underlying wants, wanting approval (Love), wanting control,  and wanting safety.  There is nothing wrong with feeling love it is the lacking feeling that holds us back.
Feeling in control is good, as is feeling safe, its when we are out of control that we are being run by our subconscious beliefs (or habits). These 'habits' can keep us responding in ways we later regret.  Do you remember times you said to yourself , " I don't know what came over me ? " Those were  times that you actually recognised that some unconscious programme was operating. However most of us operate on an unconscious level almost all day long, this is where the method helps. In using Lester's method we can make these unconscious programmes conscious and release ourselves from  them.
  The Release Technique and The Sedona Method and and are both versions of Lester's work.
I have studied both versions and find that they compliment each other and give slightly different approaches to this work. This is interesting as we get to investigate our issues from different perspectives.

I will be exploring Lester's ideas and work again on Friday April 25'th. It will be an evening session from 6 to 10.  It will be held in Blackrock Community Centre.
In this session I will review the work we did at the last workshop and go deeper into how the method works and how we apply it in our lives.
We will share our insights and gains from applying Lester's ideas in our lives.
More details on this event as it gets closer to the 25'th.

Time

Here is an interesting article from Nipun Mehta , I thought it well worth sharing.

Should We Spend Time Like Money?
by Stefan Klein

Benjamin Franklin once said: time is money.  He meant this only as a gentle reminder not to "sit idle" for half the day. He might be dismayed if he could see how literally, and self-destructively, we take his metaphor today. Our society is obsessed as never before with making every single minute count. People even apply the language of banking: We speak of “having” and “saving” and “investing” and “wasting” it.

But the quest to spend time the way we do money is doomed to failure, because the time we experience bears little relation to time as read on a clock. The brain creates its own time, and it is this inner time, not clock time, that guides our actions. In the space of an hour, we can accomplish a great deal -- or very little.

Inner time is linked to activity. When we do nothing, and nothing happens around us, we’re unable to track time. In 1962, Michel Siffre, a French geologist, confined himself in a dark cave and discovered that he lost his sense of time. Emerging after what he had calculated were 45 days, he was startled to find that a full 61 days had elapsed.

To measure time, the brain uses circuits that are designed to monitor physical movement. Neuroscientists have observed this phenomenon using computer-assisted functional magnetic resonance imaging tomography. When subjects are asked to indicate the time it takes to view a series of pictures, heightened activity is measured in the centers that control muscular movement, primarily the cerebellum, the basal ganglia and the supplementary motor area. That explains why inner time can run faster or slower depending upon how we move our bodies — as any Tai Chi master knows.

The brain’s inclination to distort time is one reason we so often feel we have too little of it. One in three Americans feels rushed all the time, according to one survey. Even the cleverest use of time-management techniques is powerless to augment the sum of minutes in our life (some 52 million, optimistically assuming a life expectancy of 100 years), so we squeeze as much as we can into each one.

Believing time is money to lose, we perceive our shortage of time as stressful. Thus, our fight-or-flight instinct is engaged, and the regions of the brain we use to calmly and sensibly plan our time get switched off. We become fidgety, erratic and rash.

Tasks take longer. We make mistakes — which take still more time to iron out. Who among us has not been locked out of an apartment or lost a wallet when in a great hurry? The perceived lack of time becomes real: We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.

--Stefan Klein, translated by Shelley Frisch

Feelings and Why It Is Important To Release Them

                                                     
                                             Lester Levenson          


More and more I am coming to understand and appreciate the simplicity and depth of Lester Levenson's teaching.
Lester taught that feelings only lie they tell us that holding on to them will give us what we can only get by letting them go.
Let me give an example, we hold on to feelings of hurt , disappointment  maybe even revenge, thinking that these feelings will protect us in the future when they only keep us stuck in the past.
 When we hold on to those feelings and  replay the situations in our minds we relive those experiences. Our bodies and minds think feel and respond as if  those experiences are actually happening again so we actually inflict the same hurts to ourselves over and over. How crazy is that.  The person or event that upset us may be in our past but if we don't learn to let go we live as if it is still happening and experience many physical and emotional  symptoms such as pain anxiety, depression etc.
So why not learn to Let Go and become free.

Try it yourself  here Release technique with Ken