SAT 2:
The Origins of Character
2014 dates to be arranged
This second retreat is concerned principally with an experiential exploration of the circumstances that played a key part in shaping our character during infancy and childhood. This exploration focuses on how relationships with our parents effected how we feel, think and do. How did our perception of our family and our attempts to survive and flourish within it, become generalized as a way of being in the world? What is it in these intimate histories that was left unsaid, unfelt, undone? How am I still carrying the past into the present, my reaction being coloured by old conflicts, old sufferings, old fears, old needs and hopes?
As well as exploring these questions of personal history, the journey looks to create an attitude and capacity for forgiveness of the past with a view to moving forward into new possibilities of relationship not so conditioned by those early experiences. To this end, work with the Enneagram of Personality, movement and drama initiated in the SAT 1 will continue to offer possibilities for critical analysis and experience of our patterns of behaviour and of new and possibly healing directions to explore. In the Enneagram particular attention will be placed on the nature of the cognitive component of the enneagram - the ideas and beliefs that both stem from and sustain our emotional compulsions. And as an antidote to both these fixations and their corresponding passions the SAT 2 begins to explore the specific virtues whose cultivation will help us to loosen the hold of our habitual thoughts, feelings and behaviours.
Also, meditation practices will move on from the Vipassana based exercises of SAT 1, focused on the observation of the here and now, to a focus on the Zen practice of ceasing ‘to do’, emptying the mind of thoughts and observing the quiet mind or contemplating mind as space. It is this blank space, the fertile void, whose cultivation will create an internal environment that is ready to let go of the old and ready for something new. Meditation enables its practitioner to gain an experience of self that is not thought, of self beyond or outside thought, as well as the opportunity to see in what ways thought compulsively interrupts us. Meditation sessions will include video recordings of Claudio presenting and talking around meditation themes.
Facilitators
The team of facilitators is yet to be arranged