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SofA is One Year Old...
Now is a New Beginning
To celebrate our first birthday this month we have a whole new range of workshops, retreats and events that will enable you to:
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Experience Absolute Truth! (Enlightenment Intensive 3-day Retreat over Easter),
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Explore and Deepen your experience of Love and how You Relate to others (Tantra: the Deepening)
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Restore vitality, de-stress your body and let go of chronic aches and pains by re-educating your entire body/mind system (BodySense)
Plus the return of
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Ecstatic Dance Meditation (The Alternative Saturday Night Out). A Vibrant and Powerful Journey to Reconnect with Your(Inner)Self
For details of all these and other events please see the left-hand column or the School of Awareness website www.SchoolofAwareness.co.uk
For a deeper insight into one of these please see the personal account of Enlightenment Intensives by Ankur below...
How Enlightenment Intensives Changed my Life!
By Ankur
Enlightenment Intensives (also know as Awareness Intensives and 'Who is in?') really have changed my life. When I first heard about them some years ago I thought the technique of sitting opposite a variety of partners being repeatedly asked who I was, sounded a bit strange. I would have let the opportunity pass me by, except that so many people recommended it to me, I thought I should give it a try and see what happened.
At that time I had absolutely no idea or concept of what experiencing 'myself at my deepest level' or 'Absolute Truth' might be like. Fortunately I didn't need to know, I just had to keep doing the simple technique we were taught. And in my first 3-day intensive in India in 2006 I had an amazing experience of opening up in a way that my mind could not really comprehend, a feeling of lightness and freedom for absolutely no reason. After that I knew I had to do more, and I have gone on to do more 3-day and 7-day intensives and had deeper enlightenment experiences which have completely changed the way I live my life.
It is difficult to find words that are sufficient to get across what a glimpse of Enlightenment is like. For me I can say that for periods of time (of several hours) I have experienced:
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Being in absolute bliss. Just being!
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Total fulfillment. Everything in this moment is perfect, just as it is.
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inner feelings of total Peace, Joy, Love, Beauty and Freedom.
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Total Acceptance of what is without any fear or worry. In that moment nothing could make it any better (even winning the lottery) or any worse (even the world coming to an end!)
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Complete Connection with everyone and everything. That we are all connected by a single universal energy, higher power or god (which for me, as a non-believer in any kind of god was a bit of a surprise!)
It's really the quality of the experience that makes it so profound. The inner Peace, Joy, Love, Beauty and Freedom that I experienced are so powerful, intense and all-encompassing, they take over completely. And that makes it just sheer Bliss!
And then there is the 'Knowing' that comes with it. Not logical mind-based knowledge but a much deeper certainty of what is being experienced. Experiencing the unexplainable and (to my mind) the unknowable - how does that work? I mean how do I explain the existence of god? One moment I am a non-believer, and the next moment I am certain of there is something there, a god or whatever I want to call 'it' exists. I know because I experienced it, but I cannot explain it at all...
Not that I need to explain it to myself because I was there and experienced it, and requests by my mind to explain it seem ridiculous. I did start to notice that the whole way I lived and experienced life became different. It wasn't through huge conscious effort, I just knew it needed to change and it did. And as a result I found I had let go of a lot of stuff I had previously thought to be essential, for example:
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letting go of what I thought I 'should' be doing in my life and moving towards what I deeply wanted to do,
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taking my value from myself rather than from others expectations,
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letting go of doing more, and focusing on the Quality rather than the quantity of my life.
The last one is perhaps the most important, especially in London where rushing around and doing more stuff seems to drive most people, for as quantity increases, Quality decreases. By doing less and being more, the Quality of each moment is there for me to enjoy. And I come back to myself at a deeper level and live my life from that inner space with real freedom of choice...
So if you have a desire to experience Absolute Truth then this is your chance. This Easter E.I. is being facilitated by a friend of mine, Ellen Dacre, and the opportunity is there to have quite an experience. As the name suggests, it is an intensive process, and what happens is up to you, but potentially it is life changing!
Hope to see you soon
Best Wishes
Love
Ankur
For details of all events see: www.SchoolofAwareness.co.uk
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Tantra:
Ecstatic Dance Meditation
Socials in the Forest