November 2006

Editors: Porter and Jeanie Underwood

50 years ago, on November 4, 1956, my parents and we four girls moved with a wagon, two horses and six duvets, from Hungry to Austria. I was four years old; it was the time of the Hungarian Revolution and the border was open for two weeks. Many Hungarians and Germans took the opportunity to escape the communist regime which had taken over Hungry after the second World War. Our grandparents had been disowned and forced to leave Hungry ten years earlier. The reason for the forced exodus was the loss of WWII by the Germans. Our German families had been living in Hungry for four hundred years, but the Hungarians felt they had the right to make them go home.

Where do you go "home" to, after 400 years?

When we arrived in Austria, I remember that I completely stopped speaking for a few months. I did pretty much the same thing when I moved to America in 1980. Although the circumstances where completely different, to America I moved on my own. Through my studies of theater and acting, I was determined to find a teacher. I was led to New York City and interestingly enough, the teacher I found was Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, not an acting teacher but a spiritual teacher who helped me to act in life.

In my journey, the period of not speaking was rather interesting in the sense that it helped me to adjust, to process more deeply and to avoid ridicule when making mistakes. It is a very painful time when all that is familiar to one is taken away. But through that pain the inward movement becomes much stronger and the inner voice becomes more audible.

Hazrat Inayat Khan uses the metaphor of a boat that we learn to direct through the inner voice:

"The way to develop the power in oneself to withstand all disturbing influences in everyday life is to quiet oneself by means of concentration. Our mind is like a boat in the water, moved by the waves and influenced by the wind. The waves are our own emotions and passions, thoughts and imaginations; and the wind is the outer influences which we have to cope with. In order to stop the boat one should have an anchor, an anchor to make the boat lie still. Now this anchor is the object we concentrate upon; if it is heavy and weighty then it will stop the boat, but if this anchor is light the boat will continue to move and not be still, for it is partly in the water, and partly in the air.

"But in this way we only control the boat; utilizing the boat is another question again. The boat is not made to remain motionless; it is made for a purpose. All of us do not seem to know this, but finally this boat has to be made to go from one port to another. And for the boat to be able to sail, various conditions must be fulfilled; for instance, that it is not more heavily laden than its capacity. Thus our heart should not be heavily laden with the things that we attach ourselves to, because then the boat will not float. Also the boat should not be tied to this one port, for then it is held back and will not go to the port for which it is bound.

"Furthermore, the boat must have that responsiveness to the wind which will take it to that port; and this is the feeling a soul gets from the spiritual side of life. That feeling, that wind, helps one to go forward to the port for which we are all bound. Once it is fully concentrated, the mind should become like a compass in a boat, always pointing in the same direction. A man whose interest takes a thousand different directions is not ready to travel in this boat. It is the man who has one thing in his mind, and who considers all other things secondary, who can travel from this port to the other. This is the journey which is called mysticism."

This is the insight and understanding I have gained into the different steps I have taken in my life and this is the way I have arrived here in Tucson ready to open up a center, "The Core", and the graduate school of the Institute for Applied Meditation, for guiding and helping all those who are ready to listen to their inner voice and embark on the journey with their boat ready to move where the wind of the divine spirit is taking them.

In this season of gratitude, my thoughts turn to the gratitude I feel for the teachers I've had in my life, especially my spiritual father, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan. This has led me to think about what a teacher does, a critical question for IAM, a school of meditation that trains teachers.

A teacher is a model of the result of the teaching. He or she can do something that we cannot, like cross a lake, solve a formula, or serve an exquisite meal. A meditation teacher is the proof of the meditation. It's the charm of the personality that attracts us to whatever the teacher is offering. How many college students have chosen their major so they can be like the one who teaches it? The personal example of my teacher was certainly what drew me to his teaching.

A teacher is an instructor who knows a method of action or a body of knowledge that he or she can impart to you. I think of those who taught me to row a canoe, to program a computer, to cook brown rice perfectly. I had a wrestling coach, a mentor in graduate school, and a sweetheart that first revealed to me the ecstasy of a kiss.

A meditation teacher is one who can share the steps of the method of transformation. Illumination may occur in a flash of grace, but to make it reliable there is something to be learned. Some methods, like Heart Rhythm Meditation, are complex and have steps and stages to go through. Questions will arise when you attempt meditation, the most difficult and most worthwhile thing that one can learn to do. Meditation, like swiming, is difficult to learn without a teacher, and books don't help much. We get blocked and stuck at crucial points, which are fortunately well-known to a teacher, who can suggest a new approach.

There is something else a teacher does that makes learning and performance easier in the teacher's presence. I don't think I could have learned to swim without the voice of my swimming coach; his instructions got buried in my fear, but they were resurrected by his confidence in me.

Beyond the teaching of a technique, beyond the example in life, there is an intervention that the teacher performs that makes it possible for a student to go beyond what they can do alone. My teacher used to say, "If all I had to go on was my own teaching, I could not learn to meditate. Meditation is so difficult that it can't actually be taught, it must be caught. "

In meditation, we say the teacher "opens the window." We feel the difference between our meditation experience alone and our experience in a group, and again the difference between a group without a teacher present and a group with a teacher. The teacher activates the connection, which always existed, between the student and The One and Only Being. This allows the student to experience a lifting of consciousness that reveals what had not been seen before and touches what had not been felt before. I cannot speak of the gratitude I have for what I have been shown and permitted to experience from the world unseen - first through communing with my teacher.

A master teacher has an additional effect that lasts longer than the time spent in their presence. Not only can the teacher lift the consciousness of those in his or her presence, but also raise their ground level of consciousness, which we call raising realization, which is a permanent change. This may result from the teacher absorbing the disharmony in the students that clouds their minds and covers their hearts, or it may result from a transferrence of a charge of energy from the teacher's heart. I have felt both sides of this, and I feel it recurrently when I think of my eternal gratitude for the relationship beyond life that has began here in this life with my teacher and my students.

IAM is announcing the beginning of a new training program in mentoring, starting March 31, 2007, with the first course in our curriculum of heart-based Mentoring: The Pressing Need and the Development of the Heart. The number of people wanting mentors in IAM has continued to grow and we urgently need to train more people.

This will be IAM's first course at a graduate-school level. We intend to eventually offer ten 3-credit courses to complete a curriculum for a Master of Arts in Heart-Based Personal Development and to obtain accreditation with the help of the first class. Five courses and a practicum are necessary for certification as an IAM mentor.

This course, and the ones to follow it, are in-residence at IAM in Tucson for the first five days, then continue on-line for 12 weeks, and finish in-residence for five days. We expect the course will require 9 hours of work per week for the twelve weeks, as we study and write about the levels of health and the interaction between one's life and the dimensions of one's heart. A new text, The Illuminated Heart, by Puran and Susanna Bair, will be the main reference, augmented by the best texts in holistic health, the stages of relationships and a purposeful life.

Mentoring has become an important part of career development, as it has always been vital to personal development. A new profession, called "Life Coach" has emerged to meet the need of an integrated approach to health, relationships and accomplishments. IAM's mentoring program has contributed to this new field the underlying theory of adult development through specific steps and archetypes, and a set of practices that operate the transformation, all integrated with the universal path of spirtual growth.

Our emphasis in mentoring is to demonstrate the heart's qualities in life, along three dimensions: (the short-term work) valuable achievements, deep and meaningful relationships and strong physical vitality, with (the medium-term work) an advanced realization of the nature and workings of reality and (the long-term work) a noble and magnetic character.

We bring to the mentoring relationship a set of diagnostic and developmental tools:

• A model of the heart and its development, from wounded, pessimistic and hidden, to the illuminated state.

• An ability to recognize the five mystical stages of extraordinary experience that develop extraordinary abilities.

• A map of the nine steps of the path that determine how a person understands and interpretes their life.

• A system of twelve archetypes of the soul, the heart, and the personality.

• A description of the ideal of a noble character, in three stages.

• Experience with a set of practices that develop the heart, the mystical states, the next step of realization, the next phase of emotional development and the next stage of character.

Graduates of this program would apply their knowledge and skill to therapy for individuals, couples, families, and organizations. A graduate of this program would work with business leaders, educators, artists, students, performers, health care workers, entrepreneurs, and spiritual seekers. Some graduates may become mentors of IAM members, where the mentees would be provided by IAM.

From Puran Bair --
When I was 27 I met my teacher, a man who would become my friend for life. The initial attraction was very personal: I thought he knew more about me than I did. What he saw in me was what I wanted to see in myself. Over the three and a half decades I knew him, he not only showed me what I had missed in myself, he taught me how to see into the hearts of others.

I valued so much the opportunities I had to speak privately with him. We would talk about the holistic path and how it works, and we would discuss the challenges and difficulties of my life and how they related to the path. From the insight and strength I received from these talks, I gained immeasurably. He became my greatest supporter, the one who knew me best, the one I could count on to help me figure out my mysteries, and the one I trusted most.

Looking back on many, many conversations, I have come to understand there were three categories of lessons and guidance he gave:

The first was help in accomplishing whatever I was engaged in. He was genuinely concerned about my worldly problems, and he also knew they were the catalysts for my growth. There were problems with my business, with my relationships, and with my health. They became his own problems and he spoke to me earnestly about them, but he always left the decisions to me. By working with me on my pressing need, he was able to help me with my heart's growth in practical ways.

Secondly, my teacher always seemed to know my path, where I was on that path, and what was next. This gave him more hope than I had for myself, for he could see long-term beyond my crises to the progress I was making as a mystic. He happily celebrated the steps I went through in "realization", the ability to understand myself and the world and the interaction between the two. But he was not a passive observer -- he urged me on by prescribing exercises I could do on my own. Some of these were very difficult, but his support allowed me to do what I couldn't have done alone.

Thirdly, he modeled a character that was more important to me in the end than anything he ever told me. He was a great man, not small or petty, a noble man, capable of putting the welfare of others ahead of his own. He treated his personality as an art form and that inspired me to try to do the same. He showed me the difference between the politeness that masks one's feelings to pretend at greatness, and the character that expresses one's heart to demonstrate its greatness. What came out of our relationship, for me, was a more whole and grand version of myself than I had known before.

When he asked Susanna and I to start a new school, I hoped we would be able to offer the valuable mentoring relationship I had known and even make mentoring the main thrust of our school, the central activity that would pull all the teaching together in a way that best suits each person. With the help of Susanna's background in counseling psychology, it's clear that's what has happened in the last eight years.

In this beautiful path of the heart we don't work alone. We have the advantage of looking for and finding all that we seek in a human form. You develop the ability to see the unlimited potential in a human heart, and then you become what you see. Your mentor is your mirror in this process, showing you all that you can recognize and inspiring you to be all that you can see.

More on mentoring is here. For more information on the mentoring training, please call Susanna Bair, +1-888-310-7881.

Tomorrow morning, my husband and I will drag our weary selves out of bed, go out to pick up a 24 foot moving truck, and drive it to our house, where we will back it into our driveway and begin to load our furniture, as well as more boxes than we thought we could possibly fill, especially considering how much we have given away.

We are moving from Bloomington, Indiana to Madison, Wisconsin, the city where I grew up and lived the first 35 years of my life. So, for me, at least, I am going home.

People ask us why we are moving, especially given that we have lived a couple of decades in Bloomington. They ask us why we are moving to Madison. After all, if this is about getting ready for retirement, who goes north?

Even though I can joke about my Northern European ancestry and my hunger for crisp cold air and sparkling snow, we find that we have trouble coming up with a ready answer for these questions. Yes, Madison is a fine city any way you look at it; yes, I have family there; yes, the natural lakes and wetlands and oaks and prairie are still where I feel most at home. But it's not like telling people we are moving to the ocean or the desert or the mountains. Wisconsin, like Indiana, is considered the Midwest, and even though I could go on for much longer than anyone would care to read about the differences between Indiana and Wisconsin, it still doesn't make a lot of sense to most people.

The truth that we do not try to explain to most people is that we feel guided to do this. And even though this endeavor involves some risk and some immediate expense and an enormous amount of work, not to mention the willingness to separate from familiar roles and routines and relationships with people we truly love, we feel an inner urgency that is moving us on our way - and quickly enough that even we are surprised.

This experience is a midlife change which will reverberate for the rest of our lives. I certainly don't know, right now, all that it signifies or portends. But one theme that has risen like a migrating flock of birds is gratitude.

We have been thanked by so many people over the past few weeks that it has literally been hard to take it all in fully. I have been challenged repeatedly to stay open to receiving the good wishes and appreciation and gratitude and love that friends and students and colleagues and clients have expressed. But the gifts must be received to honor the giver, and I, myself, feel so grateful for having had the opportunity to make a difference in the community in which I've lived. I do NOT feel like I have done it alone. I feel I, and those I've served in whatever way I did, have been blessed by what moved through me.

And then there is the gratitude that rose like the sun this morning, as I stood in my back yard to pray and breathe in one more dawn in this particular place that has been my home on earth for a little while. It is the gratitude that arises when one greets the world from one's heart. Leaves heavy with frost fell around me. Orange, the color of transformation, glowed from trees in the sunrise. A pair of cranes flew low overhead, calling with their woody voices. It's time to go, although I can't really say why. But I don't need to. All I really need to do is simply breathe in the gratitude that fills me full and then send it out to wherever I am - and will be.

During most of this year, Puran and I have worked on an exciting new frontier of meditation, applying the method of Heart Rhythm Meditation to understanding -- and influencing -- the economy. Our goal is to understand the economy as a whole, in its entirety, embracing all aspects of the economy, leaving out nothing. The problem with this is that economic theory is far too limited to include all facets of the economy. Every economic theory proceeds by identifying economic or social phenomena to explain, and by positing cause and effect relationships. All theories share this feature; it's what makes theory valuable. Theory is by its nature a generalization, and hence a simplification, of reality. Reality is messy, contradictory, and complicated. Theory is relatively neat and straightforward. Yet every theory has its limitations, failures, and omissions; adherence to one theory often creates areas of blindness, as a theory naturally focuses your attention on only one portion of the complex whole.

Economic theory is, of course, a product of the human mind. While we have the greatest respect for the mind and its creations, we must recognize that the mind has its limits. A brilliant thinker may be able to understand how a few variables exercise an effect on a particular cause, but what if the causes are themselves effects of other causes? What if there are thousands -- or millions -- of causes, each one continually changing as it interacts with other causes and effects? What if many of these are difficult to measure, or unobservable? What if the acts of observation and theorization are themselves causes, which then interact with the millions of others? This is the situation with any complex system such as a modern economy -- indeed, almost anything worth studying will involve these issues of complexity, perception, change, and contradiction.

Practioners of a theory generally deal with this by admitting the theory is incomplete, focusing on the parts of the complex system where practitioners feel the theory is on solid footing, ignoring limitations of the theory, or calling for more research to better understand areas that are weak. Of course, new research opens up new problems; new theories arise, which focus on new issues, asking different questions, or focusing on a different set of cause and effect relationships, and hence deriving different conclusions about the same phenomena. Adherents of each theory then do battle, attacking other theories while defending their own.

We seek a different approach. We don't want to be limited by any particular theory; we want to draw upon the whole of economic theory, as well as the lived experience of the billions of beings who co-create the economy each moment. We want to embrace all and exclude nothing. This is where the science of economics ends and the science of mysticism begins.

Since the mind is too limited to include all causes, all interactions, all experiences that relate to the economy, we must use a different faculty: the heart. By 'heart' we mean the essence, the vital core of our being, without which we cannot exist. The heart is the center of feeling, the key to our physical existence, and the seat of our individuality. The heart contains all the feeling that there is. The deeper you go into the heart, the fewer boundaries and restrictions there are, the fewer words and labels there are attached to emotions, until you arrive at a vast pool of pure emotion, which contains every feeling in its ultimate state: perfect, infinite, and timeless. You discover that your own heart contains much more than you've experienced, yet you feel it all. The heart is breathtaking in its glory, sublime in its sensitivity, powerful and dynamic in its enthusiasm and motivation, profound in sympathy and compassion, and tender in the love it gives. Exploring the dimensions of the heart is the greatest of human explorations.

The heart can hold the contradiction that the mind cannot, for feeling is itself contradictory; love is joy intermingled with sorrow, pain, exhaltation, passion, and so many other feelings it would be pointless to list them all. Our approach is to use the heart to perceive, understand, and ultimately influence the economy. In the webcourse, "The Heart of the Economy", we taught this application of the method of HRM for the first time. Basically, it involves taking into your heart the whole economy, concentrating on the economy intently until you achieve the state of contemplation, where your heart has become the economy itself. What a quantum leap it is to go from concentrating on the economy, to actually becoming the economy -- it completely confounds the mind.

Yet there is more, much more -- for it is possible to feel in the economy its own true nature: balanced harmony. By identifying with the unbounded harmony that is the essential nature of the economy, you enter meditation, not on the economy, but as the economy. As you deepen the experience, you find that you can begin to embody the infinite harmony, manifesting it wherever your consciousness rests. Ultimately, you find that there is no difference between you, the economy, and the limitless harmony; your being encompasses all in the state of unity.

We see economics as, in the broadest sense, any effort to understand the complexity of the economy. Assimilating this experience led us to the conviction that a kind of economics exists which encompasses the full range of human experience, what we call the "Five Stages of Consciousness with Heart Rhythm Meditation". This new way of understanding the economy is inclusive enough to contain all economic theories, all of humanity's experience, all our hopes, dreams, emotions, and ideals: an economics felt deeply in the heart, which then rises to illuminate the mind.

Dr. Bair has a Ph.D. in economic theory from University of Massachusetts Amherst and is a faculty member at City College of San Francisco where he is teaching economic theory and statistics. Asatar is a certified Heart Rhythm Meditation teacher and is being trained as an IAM mentor. He is also a certified instructor of T'ai Chi Ch'uan by the Northwest T'ai Chi Ch'uan Association and maintains a weblog on meditation at www.myspace.com.

All that you desire in life comes from the heart. The human heart has the ability to attract or generate all that it wishes, while the divine heart continuously creates all that exists, out of love.

It's the nature of the universe to respond to our intention. There are certain, known forces that can delay the manifestation of our wishes, but the heart always succeeds in the end if it remains steady.

"Pick not flowers, for they will detain you in your progress on the path and as you go, they will only fade away. Look at them, therefore, and admire their beauty, and as you proceed on your journey they will greet you with smiles all alone the way."

To counteract the distractions that deter you on your path, there are certain spiritual principles that must be followed, principles by which the heart operates, different from the mind.

November 4-5, 2006

Houston, TX

The Heart of Relationships

November 11-12, 2006

Kansas City, MO

Expanding the Heart Using Four Subtle Energies

December 1-3, 2006

Tucson, AZ

Teachers' Training 2

Jan 17 - Mar 28, 2007

Internet

Restoring Optimism

Jan 17 - Mar 28, 2007

Internet

Expanding the Heart Using Four Subtle Energies

February 16-21, 2007

Santa Barbara, CA

Winter Retreat

March 10-11, 2007

Tucson, AZ

The Seven Energy Centers

March 31 - April 4

Tucson, AZ

Mentor Training, 1