Care and Feeding of the Energetic Core

This course is designed to provide guidelines for the development of the basic skills for self-mastery.  Self-mastery, as I define it, is the ability to hold one’s true center across all internal or external conditions.  In other words, no matter what is happening around you--hurricanes, arguments, birthday parties--you remain balanced within yourself and retain your capacity to be present and aware.  Additionally, no matter what is happening inside of you--old bad feelings, dark thoughts or great epiphanies--you remain awake and connected to your essential self.  The implications of embracing this capacity are astonishing: Once you know how to live from your Core, you can never be lost to yourself.  You are always at home because home is something you have found within yourself.  You are connected to your greatest clarity and to your creating self.

Beyond the development of self, there is an additional reason that self-mastery is important.   At this point in time we appear to be in an era of great transition.   Many of our traditional sources of guidance are falling apart.  Educational, health, religious, social and legal systems are de-structuring.  In the past, they have all served as authoritative voices, providing guidance for what was right and true.  Though painful and often confusing, this de-structuring is both allowing and demanding that our reference points come from an internal source.  The deep message of our time is that the ultimate guidance and authority must be found within.  Who is responsible for your health, your spiritual well being, your learning, your personal relationships, your financial security?  You are, of course.  Self-responsibility and internal authority are sisters who travel together.

With respect to the issue of self-responsibly, I need to say that you will find no magical formulas here.  As humans, we can easily become superstitious in our use of techniques as if in applying them we will magically be protected from failure and pain.  Years ago as I was being wheeled into an operating room for surgery, I watched a thought skitter across my mind.  “How could I wind up needing an operation?  I meditate.”  Looking for the right way to live one’s life can subtly and sometimes not so subtly be an avoidance of life itself.  Use these techniques in this book to live your life, not avoid it.  A wonderful teacher once said to me, “Enlightenment doesn’t mean the end of problems, it just means that you won’t be rocked by them because your perspective is different.”  One does not need to be an enlightened being to benefit from this wisdom.

The era in which we now live is heralding a remarkable opportunity for many of us to grow up psychologically and spiritually.  This maturation gives us the means to live authentic lives based, not on what we are told we are, but on who we have discovered ourselves to be.  We are being asked to step forward responsibly and create our own lives and a new world, not in isolation, but in concert with the great web of life which holds every living being.