Stepping into Awareness

1024 683 Karen de Luna

Awareness Enabled Life Positioning

The inaugural Awareness Enabled Life Positioning workshop auspiciously debuted on the weekend of the Vernal Equinox at Nalanda West. Alongside approximately thirty participants, I spent Saturday and Sunday exploring my life, values, strengths and aspirations. Led by Mark Power, we examined our situations, reflected on our gifts and our talents, determined strengths that would support our dreams, and took steps to manifest these changes.

“What is it that I really want from my life?”

The question feels almost too big to even ask. Many in the workshop shared that they were on the verge of big changes in their lives or had already begun a process of evolution. We approached the question by means of a series of written exercises interspersed with moments of pause and reflection. Sometimes a poem was read aloud, sometimes Mark guided us in a short meditation. This particular reading moved me deeply:

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

David Whyte (The House of Belonging)
excerpt from “What to Remember When Waking”

In one of the first activities, we reviewed our lives and made note of formative experiences, both good and bad. An outcome of this exercise for me was the realization that although some of the high point were notable achievements, they were not, in and of themselves, fulcrums. Rather, the inflection points for fundamental changes in my life happened often at times of great suffering, in the lowest of low times. We chose a few instances from our own timelines to share with the larger group and created a collective lifeline which highlighted a sense of resiliency and commonality.

Community LifeLine

Community LifeLine

Later, we examined the characteristics that give our lives value and the character traits that define us as human beings. Quantifying where we stand today in terms of these values, we then contrasted that with where we would like to be in relationship to our core values. The discrepancies found here gave us a peek into what areas of our lives might need attention and where we might consider making a change in order to achieve fuller congruency in our lives.

I am an artist and creativity is something that I highly value, something that defines me as a person. I have been concerned that where I am creatively is not where I would like to be and over the weekend was able to identify three strengths I could focus on to help re-align my life with my creative ideal. It was with great pleasure that I spent time elucidating these strengths, Commitment, Structure and Play, in collage form. Creating postures evincing those same strengths was a challenge, but learning to embody the strengths makes a lot of sense. I want these strengths to become part of my skeleton, to incorporate them so that I stand with them on a cellular level.

Commitment, Structure, Play

Commitment, Structure, Play

Many thanks to Mark Power for facilitating a potent weekend of reflection and change. I am grateful that I was able to step into spring with increased awareness and focus because of the Awareness Enabled Life Positioning workshop.

It’s time. It’s almost too late.

Did you see the magnolia light its pink fires?
You could be your own, unknown self.
No one is keeping it from you.

Elizabeth Austen
excerpt from This Morning