Allyson Rice’s TheTotal Human ™ and
Malcolm Ringwalt’s Earth-Heart Institute of Vision and Healing
Vision Quests, Spiritual Retreats, Women's Retreats, Kundalini Yoga & Meditation, Creativity Retreats, Personal Intensives
JANUARY 2007
Welcome to the quarterly newsletter collaboration between The Total Human™ and the Earth-Heart Institute of Vision and Healing. Collectively, we offer Vision Quests, Spiritual Retreats, Women's Retreats, Kundalini Yoga and Meditation, Creativity Retreats, Personal Intensives, Healing, and Spiritual Counseling. If you are not interested in receiving these newsletters once each season, you can click on the “unsubscribe” button at the bottom of the page.
Click on our names (above) to visit our complete websites.
UPCOMING PROGRAMS
Click on the underlined links below to read about a particular class, or go to The Total Human™ Programs or Earth-Heart Programs to read about other classes not listed here, and TTH Student Comments or E-H Student Comments to read comments from past participants.
This year’s Sedona Women’s Retreat “Reconnecting With the Power of the Sacred Feminine” is running April 18-22 at Angel Valley Retreat Center, and spots are filling. Come and spend 5 days in an extraordinary setting with a group of women as amazing as you. Ancient yogic and Native American women's power teachings, plus much, much more…. One partial scholarship still available.
A weekend retreat in the Los Angeles area! Allyson’s Your Wild Creative Soul : Free Your Mind and the Rest Will Follow (yes, I’m talking to you) will be running the weekend of March 23-25, at the 10-acre Holy Spirit Retreat Center in Encino. Yoga, meditation, mask-making, mandalas, LifeMap collage, writing, finger painting, and more. Connect with your deeply creative nature in this very fun, wonderfully relaxing, soul-nourishing time. “ I'm still amazed at how much moved in those few days... ” “ Really wonderful -- so fun and so deceptively deeping and inspiring” “The best class for me so far. I hope and pray to be able to make this an annual event in my life from now on. I would even go so far as to "recommend" it as a pre-requisite for any or all of your other classes.” (Extra days can also be individually scheduled with the retreat center if you’d like a longer personal retreat time, during which you can schedule an energy healing session with Allyson or counseling with Malcolm).
Malcolm is expanding his private counseling practice in the L.A area. Short-term counseling for individuals and couples. Offices in Santa Monica, Malibu, and Topanga. Call for an appointment. Phone consultations are also available for those out of the area.
Malcolm’s next Vision Quest is scheduled for May 12-18 in southern Oregon near Ashland. See website for additional dates and locations.
Allyson’s All-Women Vision Quest has been scheduled. It will be run in southern Oregon near Ashland Oct 14-21. It will happen one day after the Advanced Women’s Retreat “Accessing the Ancient Wisdom Within You,” being run close by at Buckhorn Springs Retreat Center (Oct 8-12), for anyone wishing to take them back-to-back. Please note that you must have attended the Women’s Retreat (above) to come to the advanced women’s program.
Malcolm’s Personal Intensive dates now available between now and the end of May (only 2 per week scheduled) are:
Sun Jan 28 – Fri Feb 2
Sun Feb 4 – Fri Feb 9 (only 1 spot left)
Sun Feb 11 – Fri Feb 16 (only 1 spot left)
Mon Apr 23 – Sat April 28
Mon Apr 30 – Sat May 5
Dates fill up very quickly.
PERSPECTIVES
“All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
--Pablo Picasso--
Having grown up in a household where my little brother and I had an arts and crafts table since we were old enough to hold a crayon, a home where my parents built our furniture, my mom made our clothes, and my grandmother made the most beautiful Christmas decorations out of yarn and felt and old tin cans and recycled cards; it’s sometimes hard to understand why people are so afraid of anything with the words art or creativity in it. To me those things are like breathing. Perhaps the lack of money created a need for creativity. Whatever the reason, I now can’t imagine being without some sort of creative outlet, whether it’s making my own Christmas balls, or painting furniture, or making jewelry, or painting, or writing a poem. I don’t work in the same medium each time. I think I would get bored if I “specialized.” For me, something strikes a note of inspiration within me, and then I follow it wherever it leads. I have multiple projects unfinished and “in progress” at any given time.
Yet people’s fear of having to be creative is one of the most pervasive fears and avoidances that I confront when working with clients and students. It’s intricately woven with low self esteem, fear of not being good enough, not measuring up, looking foolish. It is a fear of being vulnerable by putting your unique personal Voice out there in the world and running the risk of having people not appreciate you, or perhaps worse, not even understand you. And yet, when you don’t let that energy flow through you and into your life and your work in a constant and unblocked flow, when you don’t put your creative self out there, you become like a stream that’s choked off and stagnating.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in a culture that encourages the development of the creative voice within us. Rational practicality is placed over all else. We have school systems that are under-funded; and the programs that are considered “expendable,” the first to be cut, are art and music. So we learn at an early age in life, that the expression of the voice of our soul through our art, is expendable, not necessary in our daily life. For most people, the idea of taking time each day to slow down and daydream and create something is a ridiculous notion. “Sure, it sounds fun, but it’s a little frivolous. Who has the time?...” There’s no connection with the fact that the time you spend on creating for creating’s sake, when there are no important stakes riding on it, is the very way you learn to incorporate the creative flow into everything you do in life.
Students and clients sometimes complain of not being able to come up with solutions to their problems, they feel that they are “stuck.” To me that’s an expression of a block in the creative flow, the inability to see an alternative path in front of them. The ability to create innovative solutions in your business, or creatively negotiate a difficult relationship, or envision the life that would be fulfilling to you are all outgrowths of how open the creative flow is in your life. If you don’t “practice” by being creative in the moments when there’s nothing at stake, how do you expect to have your habitual mental blocks disappear; and easily flowing creative ideas magically appear when you need them? They don’t. It’s a way of life that you cultivate by participating in the creative flow without self-judgment, on a regular basis.
The first year I ran my women’s retreat, there was one woman who came who, when I said we’d be coloring during part of the first afternoon, had a completely negative reaction. The beautiful drawings that we color are geared to open specific female energy for the rest of the week, but she immediately thought “Oh, God. Coloring?? No way – that’s stupid. What’s the point of that? I don’t want to do it.” Well, she did it anyway, and we never saw her again that week without her markers and a picture that she was coloring -- during conversations, over breaks, at meals, etc. She realized that her initial reaction had come out of the fact that when she was growing up, she was always told that she was the smart one, but that she wasn’t creative; and she’d lived her life with that belief about herself. Just through the simple act of coloring, it opened up a place that calms and nourishes her. She continues to color several years later, because it’s an immediate doorway to opening that flow in times of stress and feeling “stuck.”
Men sometimes get even less supportive messages around creativity than women (it’s a “girl thing”). The first night of the creativity retreat I run (Your Wild Creative Soul), I have people do an exercise where they write down all the memories they have regarding their creativity, good or bad; comments that were made as they grew up; things that were implied even if not said. For some people, the most powerful message that they got was silence. Nothing was ever said or attention put on creativity at all. You can’t get a more powerful message than something not being worth the time to even mention it. It’s important to bring some conscious awareness to those moments and messages, because otherwise these are the messages that are at play within us on a subconscious level all the time. They are a constant drain on our life force energy, because they lead us to cut off that innate creative flow. The ultimate point of the exercise is to allow us to recognize that our beliefs about our own creativity, and our “level of ability,” have been adopted by us from the outside in. They are not really ours. We don’t arrive here as children thinking “oh, I’m not very creative,” “I’m not an artist.” It’s not until someone tells us we aren’t creative, or that we aren’t as good as others, that we buy into that corrosive belief system.
Once people begin to feel those beliefs on an active level, they can begin to see that they are not true. We spend the rest of the creativity weekend doing activities where there is no right or wrong, where there is not a desired outcome. We don’t draw a tree in a visually realistic way so that people can then mentally compare their “bad” drawing to the actual tree, and feel like they’ve failed. We might draw objects, though we draw something about that object unseen to the naked eye. We might paint music. We might write, but we do it with a set of words given to you so the mind is jogged in a different way, because you don’t have to come up with the words from scratch. We move in ways that your body might not be used to because movement opens up different neural pathways in the brain, opening it up to new “paths” of creative thought.
It’s all about getting the old mental critic out of the picture, because the critic is nothing but a mental habit. People begin to feel a creative flow moving within them without judgment attached to it. And for some, it’s a first time to feel it that energy freely moving and uncriticized. One of the most common remarks we hear from people at the end of the weekend is about being surprised at how much moved internally just by spending a couple of days playing and having fun. People begin to feel the creative heart of who they are. When is the last time you allowed yourself the breathing room to experience that?
You are a deeply creative being,
and when you open to that creative flow within you,
the gift that arrives is that your life becomes your greatest work of art.
Allyson
HELPFUL PRACTICES
EXERCISE YOUR CREATIVE MUSCLES
Mark off some time in your date book to do something creative. Actually schedule it in as though it’s an important business meeting that can’t be missed, and keep the date with yourself. Once a week if you can manage it. Color, paint, build a bookshelf, etc. It doesn’t matter what it is – but create something that’s just for you. Setting aside time to devote to exercising your imagination is highly undervalued. Everyone seems to agree that it’s important, but when push comes to shove, how much time do you actually devote to it? The most creative thing people seem to be focused on these days is creative planning on how to pay the pile of bills sitting on the table. Make 2007 the year you put your own creativity back in your schedule.
NEWS
Earth-Heart students, please be aware of an address change. The new P.O. Box is 1437. Please change it in your address books. The rest of the info remains the same.
RECOMMENDED PRODUCTS
Join the Spiritual Cinema Circle, and have inspiring, uplifting movies delivered to your door. Click here for details.
Journey to The Wild Divine : biofeedback, breathing, and meditation skills. Build stairways with your breath, open doors with meditation, juggle balls with your laughter, and so much more. The Journey makes biofeedback, a popular method of alternative healthcare, easily accessible and empowers you to take mind-body wellness, literally, into your own hands.
 
WORLDWIDE “WEB OF LIFE”
We want to support organizations out there who are working for the uplifting of humanity. If you know of websites that are doing really good work in the world, email them to us for possible inclusion in a future newsletter. We’d like to help get the word out.
http://www.cartercenter.org
The Carter Center is committed to advancing human rights and alleviating unnecessary human
suffering, and in creating a world in which every man, woman, and child has the opportunity
to enjoy good health and live in peace. Peace programs, health programs, volunteer opportunities.
http://www.officeofgooddeeds.com
Promoting sharing, healing and practicing of good deeds all around the world. Do a good deed, let them know of good deeds you witness, or consider joining their Drop-A-Grudge campaign, inspired by the Amish response after several young Amish girls were murdered this past year.
Many blessings to you all,
Allyson
and
Malcolm |
