The upcoming November retreat – ‘Paths to Well Being and Prosperity’ has grown out of the ongoing creation and evolution of the LIFE Membership Program.
The Membership Programs purpose is to deliver course material to a community whose members get the added advantage of advocacy, accountability, and application all in one place.
For those who engage with it the potential exists to accelerate them along the path to greater well being and prosperity.
While it has taken me longer than anticipated to get things rolling with the LIFE Membership Program (by about a month! – because I am making the experience as good as it can be for the Trailblazing Beta Testers!) the process has forced me to engage with the course material in a deeper and a broader way – especially when it comes to delivery.
The Power of Commitment
Committing to something, be it a person or a process, or anything that requires consistent attention, will show the gaps between your expectations and what is actually there.
It is in this gap that we find ourselves – no less through the feelings we are invited to confront as a result of the disparities we experience. Our health and well being invariably contains an invitation to respond appropriately to things. When we resist the facts and the truths that we come across, or cling to falsehoods that we wish were, we must suffer the consequences.
Facts can have harsh edges though. They can be awkward to pick up, painful even – even more to hold on to. This is, in part, the work that I help people do.
How we deal with them is half the path.
How we learn how to manage our expectations is another.
The Power of the Imagination
The image of the horse has sometimes been used as a symbol to represent the imagination. As our expectations are always founded on it I will use it here to explore the notion further.
A wild horse running free is a thing of beauty to behold and some might argue that this natural state of freedom is where all beings should claim as a right.
When it comes to the imagination there are three ways that we can consider such an image.
The first is that the wild horse is like your imagination allowed to go where it wishes when it wishes. When it is free it is free, but there is not much you can do with all that power in a practical sense, and just try to keep up with it!
The second state is that of control, of seeking to harness and shape the power of the horse – of your imagination – to your will. This requires that you break it in and then use it in service to your will. This is likened to discipling ones imagination.
Sometimes this control is internally driven. People can seek to claim their imagination and harness its power according to their own will, their own needs, and their own desires.
It is worth bearing in mind how often this control can be externally guided too. Through suggestion and manipulation the horse can be coerced and led. Some peoples imaginations are used in this way. The promise of fearful or pleasurable outcomes are behind many peoples decisions to act and advertising and propaganda is built upon this fact. Many governments and industries are founded upon their ability to manipulate and control the imaginations of others, because imagination can be used to create emotion, and that is how the vast majority of people are controlled.
To use the symbol of the horse, it is like riding in a carriage, and the horse at the front is being led by someone with a carrot or a stick away from the path that you or the horse might have have taken if left to your own devices.
If you are unable to guide the horse, they will.
There is another way; a third way.
The Power of Intimate Connection
The third way is to make friends with the horse.
By acknowledging its needs and its nature you build a relationship with it.
Over time respect and regard develop to the point where when you ask the horse for its company, because it knows it is valued and cared for and appreciated, it will come.
This relationship, founded upon connection and mutual respect means that you can ask the horse for help. If resistance is to arise at all it will be as a result of what is against the nature of the horse – what is against your own best interests. Because, after all, the horse we are talking about is just an aspect of you. At one level what we are talking about here, is intuition.
Learning to work with your imagination in this way it to invite it to work with you, not to force it to the will of your ego or the image of self it might be trying to create or reinforce.
When you work with the imagination in this way it is like riding on the back of the horse. You go where the combined nature of your connection seeks to go. By all means, you can invite the horse on detours, where it trusts you and where you are not in conflict with some deeper instinctual need, it will more than likely go. But sometimes it will just want to go where it wants to go. The difference is, it is not running away with itself. You are following the path it is taking with it, as a companion, observing where it leads.
The Power of Truth
As much as we might find some things that are harsh in the gap between expectation and reality, sometimes we can see, or feel, or sense, something that leads the other way, into a pleasant surprise.
Perhaps we had anticipated a negative outcome and found something remarkable instead.
For me the idea of this retreat was sudden and intuitive. It was just there; in me, and in the future.
All I needed to do was commit to it in order to make it real.
In this way, it is making itself.
In other words, I’m just following the horse
The Power of Difference
So while the point about the power commitment is valid for for all of us, the bit about how we realise ourselves is invariably going to follow different paths.
In part that difference is what so much of this work is about. The same is true for the retreat.
Understanding the principles behind ours and others motivations is a key aspect in what broadens and deepens our ability to relate.
As our knowledge grows in this regard, so the paths become clearer.
This is what the LIFE Membership Program and the Paths to Well Being and Prosperity Retreat are essentially about.
If you are interested in joining us or have any enquiries then book in a chat below using the ‘Free Introductory call’ option and lets talk options.
I will add that it is going to be an intimate intensive – with only 6/7 people on site.
Also, if you are interested, please be aware that there are only two places left, so the sooner you act the greater your chance of securing your place.
All the best,
Clive