Coming Home to your Self, Coming home to your Life: Journal Workshop One - Getting Your Bearings

Life has a way of getting away from us even on good days, and the cumulative effect over years and decades is often experienced as a sense of having lost ourselves somewhere along the way. The profound changes that have shaken the world in the recent past have added to that sense of disorientation for many of us. “I want my life back!” is an urgent, and all-too-common, need. A first step in finding our way again, and coming home to our lives, is to come home to ourselves.

This two-hour workshop will focus on basic questions:
 
    Where am I now in my life?
    What path(s) have I taken to get here?
    Who have been significant persons in my life?
    What events and circumstances have shaped my life?
    What activities have been important in my life?
    What decision-points have there been that may not have seemed to
        be decisions at the time?
    What possibilities are still present in those decision points?

Through a series of guided writing exercises, participants will find their own unique answers to these questions, as well as gain access to the deeper meanings carried by what may seem to have been ordinary life events. Participants will also be given instructions for “next steps” so that those who wish to continue their work may do so in the days and weeks following the workshop.

Participants will not be asked to share any of their writing, even though we will be working at the same table, and creating a safe and deepening communal environment for that work. This is work we do alone, together.

$12

923 N 8th St

*Bring a notebook and favorite writing tool

Tom’s interests and experience have ranged from the repair of old VW buses to music composition/performance, from counseling to carpentry, from leading journal workshops to building computer networks, along with cooking, brewing mead, baking bread, hiking, camping, exploring theology and the spiritual traditions, and, of course, meditating on the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. He’s built houses, taught in a public elementary school, served as pastor, and worked as counselor both in a psychiatric hospital and private practice. He is one of the few people in the world in recent history to have taken four years of Latin in High School, played accordion from the age of three, or admitted either publicly until now.

He is the co-founder of Bodymindspiritworks™, an intentional community, sanctuary, and integral therapy center. He is also the co-founder of Integral Treks™, a program of full day journal workshops, set in the natural world, incorporating journal work and hiking or biking. He is the author of:

    + An ABCDium for Irritated Times
    + Integral Quadrants and Moral Quandaries:
        an integration of the work of Robert Pirsig and Ken WIlber toward an ecology of morals
    + Coming Home to your Self, Coming Home to your Life:
        the journey of a lifetime
    + Waking Up: realizing Spirit in the midst of ordinary life
    + Walking: treks to now here

His other writing (pending publication) includes One Hand Waving Free: scenes from an unfinished life and Walking: treks to now here.

A basic assumption running through all of Tom’s work is that “body” “mind” and “spirit” are not three separate things needing to be integrated or (even worse) “balanced,” but simply three already-and-always dimensions (like length, width, height) of the integrated One, to be awakened to, now upon now.