I normally reserve this space for my insights. However, on this day I am posting the insights of gentleman I had a conversation with recently. His words deepens my conviction in it’s not just about information and knowledge, it’s about engaging what we know in our body.

My desire and intention to work with both men and women comes from a section from the Declaration of Evolution by Intention™, created by Louise LeBrun, it states:

An opportunity to engage in life differently through:

• a call to women to lead and co-create with men differently
• an invitation for men to relax into new ways of being”

My intention is to create the space where the men who are ready, willing and able have access to the same information and processes women have been experiencing through the evolved “WEL-Systems® journey. Enjoy!

“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity,
wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”
~ E.E. Cummings

I saw this quote on one of my FaceBook groups and it really struck in relation to my two-hour chat with Lisa Weiss last week in her wonderful program room in Carp, Ontario.

However, and with no apology to Mr. Cummings, I would change it to read: It is ourSelf — using the creation of the “someone (else)” — that reveals the deep realization of what is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of trust and sacred. I also see very little risk involved when it is Self that is the driver. It can only lead to increased curiosity, wonder, spontaneity, delight and a closer relationship with spirit.

The chat with Lisa opened up some of my own wonderment at how much more the conversation is now in the WEL-Systems environment. Having experienced WELS in 2002-2003, I would find myself asking her: did you do this exercise or that induction?  She would usually say no and say we talked … and when we needed to introduce WELS content, we did.

And what emerged was a very expansive image of a deep multi-day conversation that allowed participants to drive deeper and deeper. It struck me that a lot of words I continue to use now from my WELS experiences don’t seem part of the WELS vocabulary anymore. It’s clear WELS work has exponentially leaped forward since 2002.

My takeaway: while I may intellectually know the WELS content – and its revolutionary way of contexting life — if I’m not willing to engage in the conversation with mySelf then it really is quite useless.

The other element of conversation that struck me was how similar some of Lisa’s and my life experiences are. She talks about how she holds a lack of childhood memories, much like me. And the one that sent shivers down my spine – how she emerged out of one of her WELS programs with a blank page on the wall. That really resonated given my experience of walking out of Catalyst (an earlier WELS program) without a written intention for my life.

I’m aware of two related currents in me since our talk. The best image is the caduceus – the two intertwined snakes and staff of the Greek god, Hermes.

On the one hand, I was aware during and continuing after the conversation of a low level field I’d label anger, unease, irritation. It was something vague around some notion of “I’ve been working with this longer than you, Lisa and yet I feel like the child in the room.” Or: “She’s saying things that I should know, and yet, it’s clear I don’t know them, in this moment.”  (Interesting language!) Or is it jealousy? Seeing that Lisa has found an intentionally deep way of being and doing what she loves, every moment of her life, and creating herSelf in others juxtaposed with my belief that I haven’t found or touched that deep driving force in me. The yearning and shame that for me there always seems to be something more, just out of reach, something I just haven’t figured out yet and should have by now. And if I had figured it out, then everything would be just fine.

This past summer, before my last vision quest in New Mexico, I wrote that the whole search for intention and purpose in life had become meaningless to me. In looking back, there was a certain element of tiredness in the quest for intention. For the last five years my intention was spoken as “elusively seeking” – always searching for something, never finding it. In the past, the question has always been how comfortable, and maybe more importantly, how useful, is this to me? Intellectually, I completely understood how it all fit together.

What’s clear to me now is that I got caught in the past – both my deep past and the more recent WELS past – one I deemed profoundly useful and right and one that limited my ability to grow. I let it “restrict” me.

It wasn’t until the conversation with Lisa that my body relaxed into a different message. At one point in our conversation she suggested just stopping and contemplating a life that doesn’t have to include elusively seeking and asking myself what’s useful in holding to it?  “What emerges in the now-ness of the breath?” she asked. And that’s when the other energetic snake started to emerge from the hole … almost as if a new doorway opened up into a space and light that I haven’t seen for a long while.

And while I felt a bit unprepared for it, clearly this was the time for it as I almost immediately was able to process it without understanding it — something new got birthed where elusively seeking and usefulness lost their hold and no longer governed or directed the conversation. They remain elements, but not overarching guiding metaphors anymore.

It makes me think back to that blank piece of paper on the wall back in 2003 in the Catalyst program. At the time, even after affixing a childhood photograph of myself, a drawing of a Japenese sword, and a 3-D drum made out of paper with an eagle motif drawn on it, to overlay the white blankness; I still knew underneath the words were missing.

I know I sat at the front of the room that last Friday morning of the program convulsing and collapsing because I still didn’t have the answer … that I was about to leave without a stated intention. And now, I feel more comfortable than I’ve ever been with something I’m not even sure there is … and certainly would have no way of describing or defining it.

And you know, I’m just going to let my body play with these currents and whatever else happens. Maybe something will emerge, maybe not. I do know I feel different. I see different. I am different. Changing.

~ Allister Hain, Ottawa, ON~