Before I have began to even write my feedback to the Easter Gathering, I have pondered what feedback is, and what it may serve at a deeper level than votes on likes and dislikes and consequent tweaking of the form of things to please the many and perhaps to less displease the vocal few.
Feedback, in a scientific sense, is neither good nor bad, in that it is communication that can serve to illuminate the underlying mind or culture of which the experience of the event was a fruit. The ‘feedback’ reveals meaning according to the questions we ask. Therefore we are never dealing with external facts, so much as participating in a relationship that inherently includes our desires, questions and the accepted beliefs from which they spring.
What is the purpose, basis or culture of the event for which feedback has been invited? If this itself is fragmented and conflicted, then on what basis can feedback be reliably evaluated? Is popularity or its opposite a reliable indicator of value? But feedback can simply be a vehicle by which issues can be raised and communication shared with the organising team. In that case it is enough that they read it and allow it to speak in their hearts (discernment) such as to walk with it in the next step. But the event itself is already feedback - as each organiser's experience and participation - and carries far more information than can be written or conveyed in words.
Before presuming to gather or articulate my feedback about the event, I consider my own journey of experience - that was my participation with you all - and discern its fruits. I cannot honestly say it wasn't perfect. But this is not perfect at the level of my personal shopping list of likes and dislikes. Perhaps I can clarify.
I have realized that the experience we meet, tends to be set up for and by ourselves according to the desires and intentions that we set out with. Much of this is usually running unknowing as personal wishes and fears, and in the process of experience some of what had been hidden may be brought to light of conscious awareness. This is always transformative.
When fears come to the surface, we tend to become defended, controlling, rigid and reactive. But finding a way to move THROUGH such states without investing in them IS the release of fear and this always opens a more spacious, tolerant, accepting and compassionate presence. In this freedom, love and the true desires that arise from love of life can move us directly, and we feel blessed, joyous, and grateful in an ease or natural harmony of being.
The attempt to control or manage fear IS fear, but it is fear operating strategically and coercively to seem fairer in some respects or less extreme in its effects. And by adopting mutually agreed definitions as a culture of joining without really meeting, in empty rituals upon which each projects their own imagined meanings. Joylessness becomes the new standard - against which background our personal satisfactions become our reward and the cost of conforming to a joyless culture, becomes the price exacted.
To share a living culture, as a positive life honouring gift - known in its sharing - we must learn to move free of the fear of upsetting the rules that the fearful put upon themselves and each other, by living out from a different place than a fearful separated sense that seeks to validate itself or become something valid - as if we are not already worthy of love.
Our natural authority, or integrity of being, is lost when we feel disconnected from our love and joy. We feel undermined and confused and tend to mask this with what seems to work as acceptable to or aligned with that which seems to be given authority. And we then defend and identify with our masks and their allegiances against unmasking - as if they were our selves.
Our mask also filters and limits our communication, for whatever appearance we may present, the actual energetic is what is communicating beneath the appearance - and fear or division calls a mixed response - because of wanting conflicting things. But joy calls forth wholeness of being because it speaks directly to the same in all and disregards the mask altogether.
In our teaching, we demonstrate. We firstly teach ourselves - for we are learning by what we teach. If we teach that we are moved or inspired to share something we love and value - as an expression of trust, then THAT quality will bring all else into alignment in ourselves and others - and we will teach and grow and learn in trustworthiness. To trust our self is not the same as being in control.
In a heartfelt safety, the mask evaporates of falls away of itself as unneeded, and joy shines the freedom to be unlimited and unconcerned by such thoughts as feel the need to hide. This is the context that we can invite and share as the basis of our dancing.
The form of what we teach doesn't matter - IN THE SENSE that joy is not strategic and can discern in the moment how to teach, what to emphasize, what manner to adopt - in short, how to be in the moment. So we may then also focus of the particular exactitudes of form without getting bogged down in the mind that clutches them as a mask.
The masked mind may be the normal but acquired culture of our society, but it is not our Nature now to be drawbridged, under siege, joyless and withheld from sharing in the presence of being alive. Because we feel a sense of temporary security in such attempt to control, we resist opening into life energetically and emotionally, as the feeling beings that we simply are, regardless of how locked down that sense might seem to be.
The true safety of our being, arises from growing discernment and trust within our selves, as to what we open to, and join with - at the level of our thoughts. Instead of using and identifying with a fearful template that re-enacts our past judgements and locks us out of our connection now, we live out from a felt or intuited sense of life, listening and feeling as we go.
A dying network, a dying culture, or a dying planet - these are all symbols of a sickness of our thought - even if their fruits seem irrefutably tangible. Allowing that the world is a transient phenomena that cannot be held onto anyway, we still have and Are the life that Lives us now - in and of which we may behold in a wonder and appreciation that inherently moves in us as shared being and not as withheld thought.
That whose nature is wholly shared cannot die - though it can seem to be killed over and over again. The Source of life is timeless. When the structures that arise around ‘loving to hate’, disintegrate, the birds are already singing as the dawning of a spring morning.
Thank you for your attention
In Peace
Brian
Wednesday 18 April 2012
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