Follow-up classes to the workshop in Italy, given via WebEx Video and Audio conference!

Three Sundays, July 25, August 1 & 8, 2010

19:00 h to 20:30 h Central European Time
10 to 11:30 am Pacific Standard Time



A View from the Green Room: Opening our Hearts
 

A Continuation of the July Tensegrity
Workshop in Italy

“The criteria that indicates that a seer is free,” don Juan said, “is when it makes no difference to him whether he has company or whether he is alone. The day you don’t covet the company of your shields, that’s the day that your being is free. What do you say? Are you game?”

- Carlos Castaneda, The Active Side of Infinity

For our teachers, visiting ‘the Green Room’ is a joyous daily affair – a place where we can nurture and celebrate our most important relationship—the relationship with ourselves, as expressions, and integral aspects, of intent, the source of everything that is.

When this relationship with ourselves is strong, we are able to identify and release unnecessary shields: habits, addictions, or beliefs that are familiar and which we believe protect us from loneliness, fear, self-pity, etc, but which in fact bind us further to those states and push us away from that creative relationship with our essential being.

One type of shield, our teachers said, is our habit of reacting to specific limiting statements, made by others or ourselves. Glimpsing past this kind of shield is a key element to beginning to dream our experience in concert with intent.
In this series of classes, participants will have the chance to go deeper into the tracking of energy begun in “The Green Room: Opening Our Hearts” workshop. Participants will practice the magical passes called Releasing the Shields, and be guided to identify some of their own ‘triggering’ sentences, reviewing them to release them, uncovering a more expansive and inclusive state of being, where we can heartily embrace more enhancing statements and beliefs, and the greater perspective of the many gifts we receive.

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Class is taught by Tensegrity Instructors – students of Carlos Castaneda, Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar and Carol Tiggs.

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This particular class series is for participants who attended “The Green Room: Opening Our Hearts” Tensegrity Workshops in Los Angeles 2010 and Italy 2010 only – Please respect this requirement, and be assured that we will have other Webex classes soon which will be open to all practitioners, seasoned and new.
This class is designed to be taken with another single Tensegrity practitioner in the same room, or a group of Tensegrity practitioners—another practitioner or group who also attended the workshop in Los Angeles or Italy this year! There will be a simple ‘energy testing’ and reviewing component of these classes which needs to be done in person, in pairs!

Please be ready when you register to send us a list of which other participants will be present with you in the room. You will be prompted at the end of the registration process to send us a form with that information.

Classes will be conducted in English with consecutive translation into Italian. If translation into another language is needed, please make your own arrangements with Tensegrity practitioners who are also signed up for these classes.

Please bring a mat and a notebook with pencil or pen.
Additionally, you will need at least one computer at your class location, a good internet connection, a web camera, computer microphone (built into most computers) and good enough speakers to be heard by all present. Class Schedule and Guidelines for computer ‘connection’ and a Release Form will be sent to you upon registration. WebEx is easy to use and does not require any software, just the ability to connect to a web link.

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Cost: $25 or 20 Euros (per person) per class
July 25 class
August 1 class
August 8 class
$65 or 55 Euros for whole class series

Register

A Workshop on
Carlos Castaneda’s Tensegrity:

The Green Room: Opening Our Hearts
 

July 9, 10 & 11, 2010

Riccione, Rimini Area, Italy

The average man is either victorious or defeated and, depending on that, he becomes a persecutor or a victim. These two conditions are prevalent as long as one does not see. Seeing dispels the illusion of victory, or defeat, or suffering.

don Juan Matus

Don Juan Matus guided Carlos Castaneda to create what he called a breaking point--an interruption in the continuity of his life—meaning the continuity of his habits of thought and action. He said that to see energy and live with inner presence as the root of one’s life, one must reach such an interruption, either through one’s life experience, or by deliberately bringing it about.

In Carlos Castaneda’s case, he said he had to stop using his friends and other distractions as shields or excuses against the most important encounter: the encounter with himself. He advised him to rent a room, the more drab the better, one with drab green carpets with cigarette burns, and drab green curtains, and stay there by himself until it made no difference to him whether he was alone or in the company of others.

Carlos Castaneda did end up renting such a room. At first, he said, he wanted to climb the walls. Yet, over time, an unexpected thing happened. As he came to accept his own company and his own life experiences—his failures as well as his victories--the room ceased being drab. He started to appreciate the warmth and shelter the green room provided, and the room began to take on a certain sheen. He opened the curtains one afternoon and looked outside and saw at the end of the parking lot, a trio of young spruce trees he had never noticed before. Their leaves shimmered in the sunlight and danced on the soft breeze. A crow hopped across their branches, cawing enthusiastically. Across the street he noticed a man whistling a tune as he swept the sidewalk in front of his impeccably kept letter shop. He had seen the man before but never noticed the pride and joy he clearly took in caring for his humble store. The afternoon sunlight poured over the scene, and spilled into the green room, and in that light, the green carpet and the walls and fabric of the curtains all looked cheerful to him, a clear, radiant green hue that warmed and lit his entire being. And he realized that it made no difference to him whether he was alone or in the company of others. That evening he looked out at the moon and stars, and he knew that ultimately, he was never alone. He opened his arms and chest and hands to the night sky. He was part of the earth, the plants and trees, the birds, the people around him, the sun, the stars, and they were a part of him.

He said that going alone to that green room showed him that the true journey of awareness is not something outside of us: rather it begins within. “The green room is a metaphor,” he said. “It represents life experiences or events that help us to disrupt the flow of our habits and assumptions about ourselves—ones that keep us from connecting with the deepest parts of our being—our true mind, our hearts, the paths that would be the expression of why we are really here.”

The green room is the moment or place or experience where we can’t run away from ourselves anymore—where we are compelled to confront, accept and learn from the events and patterns of our lives where we may have been perpetuating stories of disappointments of the heart, such as: I didn’t have the courage to do what I really love in life, because no one encouraged me. Or: I was given too much, early on, so I believed I was special, and find it difficult to handle any criticism or challenge, or work well with others. Or: I chased away any possibility of a relationship because I didn’t want to end up like my parents. Staying with ourselves also means acknowledging moments where we and others showed true grace, moments of: Celebrating another’s victory, without comparing it to one’s own; Encouraging creativity and strength in oneself and others; Being good stewards of the gifts given in life by sharing them with ourselves, with others, with the earth, with Spirit.

To open the heart, he said, we can enter that green room every day, for a moment—through practicing deep listening and appreciation of oneself and other beings and states of awareness. We can open the window, the door into conversation with the infinite Now and Here.
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In this workshop we will practice magical passes and tracking exercises that help us to enter the green room, to open our hearts to a new kind of freedom—one where we are not attached to our failures or our successes. Where we learn from it all, where we let it all bring us closer to the Spirit.

The green room can be a prison, Carlos Castaneda said, or it can be a paradise. It all depends on how we view it.