Nine Stages: Day 1 - February 15, 2025
Part 1: Review the themes of the day with your group (35 minutes)
Facilitate reflections on the following questions:
What is the goal of the Nine-Stages?
Why is conjoining Love and Awareness so important?
How do we conjoin them?
In the Heartmind model for Calm/Staying what do we mean by? Awareness, Attentional System, Self-Operating System, Center of Operations?
Why is the Heart Center so important?
How is Loving Awareness an injunction?
Why is healthy attachment so necessary for healthy growth?
What is Attachment to the Primordial Mother?
How do we attach to the Primordial Mother?
Part 2: Meditation Review (30 minutes)
Posture (3 min)
Resting hands face down on the thighs
Beginning by releasing into the ground, letting everything go into the stability of the ground. The humility of letting go into the earth. Letting it all go.
Now keep releasing the body and slowly supported by your inhaling lengthen the spine, until you are upright and sovereign. Rooting and Sprouting
Balance letting go with reaching uprightedness. Finding the sweet spot of these two qualities at the heart
Allowing the heart to float upwards. Gently draw the head back so the brain center is in line with the heart and the heart inline with the center of your belly.
Sitting as your best self (1 min)
Sitting as your best self, your extraordinary self, bringing all your best qualities to this
moment.
Sitting with confident determination
Sitting with Energy
Sitting with Patience
Sitting with Love
Sitting with Humility and Sovereignty. Upright and Releasing
Loving Awareness (4 min)
Allowing the attentional system to relax out of the head and into the heart
Letting the attentional system settle into the warmth of the heart center
The heart like a sun. Loving awareness.
Connecting to the sangha circle (3 min)
Allowing ourselves to come into the circle of practice. Allowing our hearts to open and embrace our community.
Coming into relationship with the Ground (4 min)
Directing loving awareness to the stability of the ground beneath you. Allowing your heart to come into relationship with Earth.
Loving the stability, coming into coherence with Earth and Sacred World. Extending a sense of gratitude and appreciation to the Earth intelligence beneath. Relating to the presence of the stability as the stability of our planetary being.
Allowing yourself to feel the reciprocating resonance of the Earth. Allowing coherence with the stable Earth.
Releasing into the stability and safety of the ground (5 min)
Attuning to gravity, continuously releasing into the stability of Earth,
Noticing how aligning with gravity encourages us into a continuous flow of release.
Continuously releasing into the ground
Continuously releasing into coherence with Earth.
Trusting the ground’s stability (10 min)
As we are continuously aligning with gravity and releasing into the stability of the ground and encouraging our hearts to cohere with the earth now noticing the trustworthiness and safety of Earth, the trustworthiness of the stable ground of Being.
Sitting upright, aware, silent and spacious, hearts networked together, continuously releasing into the stable coherence of Earth.
Resting into the stability beneath….. recognizing the quality of safety that arises from the stability…... .continuously releasing into the safe stability of Earth.
Allowing the quality of safety to saturate the body.
Sitting together, networked into our circle. Lovingly aware of resting continuously into the stable safety of Sacred World. Synchronized together.
Part 3: Q & A | Greatest Hits Cheat Sheet (25 minutes)
‘I’m getting distracted’:
At this stage just keep steering back.
The fact that you are steering back is the practice. That’s what is supposed to be happening. You are learning to steer.
‘I’m feeling dull’:
First, check your posture.
Second, check your attitude. Which aspects of the self are showing up (sitting as your best self).
Introduce ‘wide open is wide awake’. Have them open their eyes and take in everything for 30 seconds before closing down the eyes’.
Lie down and rest.
‘I’m overwhelmed by all the instructions’
Go one step at a time.
We are learning to trust cause and effect. If you do one thing something happens, then you do another thing and something else happens. You don’t have to make it happen, just plant the causes.
Let the instructions work on you on an unconscious level. Part of this method is to just allow the instructions in whether you are tracking them or not.
Listen, and just do what you can do. We will be repeating this over and over again.
‘I don’t know if I can do this’
Trust the process.
Feeling this way is normal.
We can all do this; it is what the human heartmind does.
‘I’m not experiencing the sense of connection to the group’
You might be trying too hard. How would it feel if the connection was already here?
The energy body follows the imagination. Just imagine it. Don’t try too hard with the imagination. Just like when you were a kid. Imagine that we are already connected.
Again, trust in cause and effect.
“I’m feeling physical pain or discomfort”
It’s ok to change your position to find a comfortable posture.