IAM
The Institute for Applied Meditation

April, 2005 Newsletter

In This Issue:

  • Heart Rhythm Meditation for Advancing Relationships
  • "Treating People With Delicacy" by Hazrat Inayat Khan
  • IAM Teacher Training
  • The 2004 Annual Report
  • The 12 Archetypes of the Heart

Upcoming Events: Register here

  • Relationship Seminar, Bakersfield, CA, April 23-24
  • Webcourse 101, starting May 6, for 9 weeks. Price reduced: $225.
  • Seeing with the Heart: The Twelve Archetypes,
    London    , April 8-10 and Chicago, May 13-15
  • Heart Rhythm Meditation 101, Santa Cruz, CA, April 30 - May 1
Heart Rhythm Meditation for Advancing Relationships

Bakersfield, CA
April 23 - 24, 2005
by Puran and Susanna Bair

The Road to Fulfilling Relationships

You can create relationships that are more satisfying, deep and harmonious. You can learn to tune your heart to the needs of the relationship, and benefit from its continuation. There are many ways you can relate; the only error is to break off a relationship. Ultimately, in every human relationship you are practicing your relationship to the divine within your heart.

The Steps of Relationships

Commitment is a sacrifice of freedom, for love, that changes your life. Can you see the one you love through their covering of fear and confusion? Can you bring out the best in others through the way you relate to them? Is your relationship dedicated to mutual transformation? To truth? To harmony?

Every relationship operates as a teacher, causing growth in both persons. Furthermore, both people act as teachers and students to each other, carrying both through the developmental steps.

The Institute for Applied Meditation presents a map of nine steps, extending the ideal of relationship far beyond its usual conception. This map will give you hope as it shows what's possible for your relationships when you use your heart. The map of nine steps will also show you where your relationships can be improved.


In this seminar, you will find which step of realization you operate from in your relationships, and what are the possibilities of further steps, to allow a greater commitment, understanding, joy, harmony and growth of each other and of the relationship. The content is taken entirely from the teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan, the great mystic musician of the early 20th century who taught primarily in America, England and France.

Treating People With Delicacy
by Hazrat Inayat Khan

Our point-of-view in life differs very much from the general point-of-view. It is not because of its difference from the others, but because of its profoundness. In the case of dealing with people, treating people, in whatever way one has to treat them, the first thing we think is, "In what way can I spare the person's susceptibilities? How I can avoid bringing the person displeasure, by avoiding a word, or by avoiding doing something? How I can speak to someone without saying something that will hurt a person? How I can act so that it will not hurt, or it will not touch the person wrongly?"

In other words it is a delicate point of view, to think delicately; and that is what the generality overlooks. It is not simple to be thoughtful, it is not easy to be considerate. It requires a great deal of delicacy, skill; one must know the art of approaching another.

Our second attitude is still more difficult, and that is to maintain sincerity, to maintain faithfulness, to maintain truth. False flattery, polished politeness, made-up refinement, these things are against our ideal. And therefore on one hand we must be extremely fine and polite and delicate, and on the other hand we may not prove to our own conscience in any way insincere, external, or superficial. Very often there are some sincere people, but with their sincerity there is an abruptness.

You will find many people saying, "Well I tell the truth; if it does not agree with them, it shows that their digestive power is not great." A person very proudly says that, "I have given him a good talk, he feels that I am quite sincere." But sincerity has no value without fineness. If one overlooks the law of fineness, of gentleness, and one wishes to be very truthful, that is an unbalanced condition.

On one side fineness, on the other side sincerity makes a balance in life.

Our third attitude is to be resigned to the past, to be attentive to the present, to be hopeful for the future. What is done is done, what is the use of grieving over it? It is past, it is gone; turn your back to it and forget it; and what is being done, be attentive to it wholeheartedly; give your whole being to it, to make it good; and what is to come, be hopeful towards it.

Our fourth attitude is tolerance, which the heart teaches us. By tolerance we do not mean "defend the wrongdoer": tolerance simply means sparing yourself from judging someone whom you do not know. Whether the person is in the right or in the wrong way, let him go; that is the attitude. Very often by judging a person you spoil people; as soon as you accuse a person of wrongdoing you have thrown him down deeper. If you let him loose, his wrongdoing will become his greater teacher; and by interfering with that teaching which a person is getting by life, a person spoils the other person's life. That is tolerance.

Besides, one is never sure whether a person is in the wrong or right. What we can see is from our point of view. One cannot see from the point of view of another, one does not know the reason behind it; the reason can take one so far and no further. Therefore we try to keep ourselves back from judging persons and their actions. One's standard of right and wrong is what one thinks to be right and wrong for the moment, but by this standard one must not judge others. Rather say, "Maybe they have their own standard according to their particular evolution, I am not the person to judge it."

People might misunderstand you owing to this, because either people are without a rule or they are the slaves of the rule, and there are very very few who take the rule for their use without being its slave, who make rules, and who use rules, and yet who are not restricted by them.

Our fifth attitude is to honor our one sacred duty, and that is to prove true to one's conscience in having dealt with everyone kindly, not for advantage, or disadvantage, but kindly as far as life can allow one to be kind. Because kindness has no limit; there can be very little things which you can call kindness, and there can be very great things which you can call kindness.

IAM Teacher Training

Teaching Heart Rhythm Meditation and mentoring students is a profession, and IAM can prepare you for this fulfilling career.

The Teacher Training course has three sections, according to the three topics we teach in local classes:

  • Physical Heart Health, improving heart rhythm and the strength of heart that counters stress.
  • Emotional Heart Health, healing the wounds of the heart, using the power of emotions and improving relationships
  • Spiritual Heart Health, discovering the heart as the instrument in which one's physical, mental and emotional aspects emerge from the Universal Heart and which holds the impression of life's purpose.

The next Teacher's Training will be in Tucson, AZ, June 11-13. If you're interested, please email Doug Johnson at heart@AppliedMeditation.org    Although this will be the third of the three teacher's training seminars, the three seminars can be taken in any order. For all the requirements for certification as an IAM teacher, please see Teacher Certification.

All the IAM teachers and mentors are expected at the annual retreat, an extension of which will be devoted to teaching.

IAM's 2004 Annual Report

We are just now mailing out our Annual Report for 2004. If you don't get one in the mail, please let us know.
We'd like you to have this summary of last year's accomplishments and this year's goals:

Full-time Leadership & Dedication
Program Development
Growth of the IAM Community
A year of research into the effects of Heart Rhythm Meditation
Financial Income and Expense Report
 
Developing the IAM Storefront
Building a Graduate School for Heart Ecology
Moving Our Headquarters to Tucson
The 12 Archetypes of the Heart
Find your "Soul Archetype",
"Presenting Archetype",
and "Emerging Archetype"
 
 
Join us in
 
London, Apr 8-10, or
 
Chicago, May 13-15

Here's the characteristics of our typology, called the "Twelve Archetypes of the Heart".

  1. The system of 12 types is complete, that is, it covers the complete variety of human beings.

  2. One axis of the matrix comes from the four kinds of subtle energies: rising, descending, spreading and directionless. The second axis comes from the three approaches to using energy: receptive, expressive and balanced. The source of the theory is Sufism, a universal approach to mysticism.

  3. Each archetype is an ideal, an aspect of the divine. The archetypes have been named trustee, king/queen, healer, artist, partner, disciple, warrior, knight, dervish, scientist, priest(ess) and oracle.

  4. The type of a person can be observed without a questionnaire. It does not depend upon a person's intellectual self-assessment. One's archetype is shown in one's response to different sounds, one's natural walk, the quality of one's voice, the qualities expressed in one's art, etc. It may also be assessed by a teacher in a state of contemplation of the other's heart.

  5. A person's type is independent of their maturity. Indeed, the maturity of the person is an axis in a third dimension from the two-dimensional matrix of the archetypes.

  6. The archetype system leads to a plan for self-development. The ultimate objective of self-development is for a person to develop all the archetypes. This development proceeds in a conscious, prescribed manner, starting from one's primal archetype.