Retreat Update - Reserve Your Seat for August
June Sold Out!
Dear Friends of the POP-UP School,
Today I learned that the June retreat is sold out. This is wonderful news, of course, and it makes me so happy to imagine the group of people getting together in real life at Sky Meadow. Our New England Spring this year is one of the most beautiful.
Which means the August retreat will be even more spectacular! The summer wildflowers in Vermont can’t be beat; and the gardens will be bountiful for harvesting directly from the field to our tables.
August in Vermont is shaped by long summer nights and unforgetable sunsets. We will be focusing on cultivating receptive and open awarness by attending to the core state, the truth sense which I wrote about in the Phenomenology of the Self Series:
It is this sense of ‘inner understanding and clarity’ that is a marker for awakening of perception. The insight that emerges from awakened perception arises as a core truth or trust.7 But in this case, we are not trusting of anything, meaning, symbol, image, or dogma that has been handed down to us. Rather, we are trusting in the truth of perception based on transparent participation. To trust, to truth, is to behold. It is a consequence of beginner’s mind, which is based on ‘believing in nothing.’8 It is a state of dynamic stillness, of active preparedness to participate, authentically and fully, states of intense clarity that I call still hunting—a phrase that captures the alert, attentive, intentional, dynamic stillness that integrates sensitivity with clarity, awakened feeling with awakened perception. Diana Fosha refers to this as the ‘core state and truth sense:’
Core state refers to an altered state of openness and contact wherein individuals are deeply in touch with essential aspects of their own experience. Experience is intense, deeply felt, unequivocal, and declarative; sensation is heightened, imagery is vivid, focus and concentration are effortless… The affective marker for core state is the truth sense. The truth sense is a vitality affect whose felt sense is an aesthetic experience of rightness, the rightness of one’s experience.
We can think of the cycle of an awakened experience from affect through perception as completing and repeating an ‘arc of transformation,’ as composing and recomposing the transformational self. Fosha writes:
“The emotion-based transformational process, unfolding through the directional thrust of emotion, moment to moment kept on a progressive track by vitality affects signaling the operation of recognition processes, describes an arc: A psychoevolutionary perspective at one end is organically linked with aesthetics, spirituality, and the quest for personal truth at the other. The experiential processing of emotions shaped by eons of evolution, naturally culminates in experiences of aliveness, hope, faith, clarity, agency, simplicity, compassion, coherence, and both truth and beauty.”
Reserve your place for August Now
You can find the formal event website here