Janurary 2007

Editors: Porter and Jeanie Underwood

So much has happened to us in one year! Can we say we've assimilated it? Hazrat Inayat Khan said, "To assimilate is the most difficult thing there is." What is the sign we've assimilated the lessons of the past year? That it's become so much a part of you that you can't think of it.

Sometimes a person says they've forgotten something, but it's just under the surface, and it reappears in meditation or when touched by some event. To really forget something is very difficult.

Do you have a strong digestion system? Can you take any food and turn it into nutrients? Very few people can. A lot of what we eat gets passed through without complete digestion, or sticks in our skin, fat, blood and organs in unhealthy ways.

Similarly, what we experience in life we take into our heart, and this has to be absorbed and digested into life's wisdom. This process is called "assimilation", and it is generally as inefficient as our physical digestion.

The importance of assimilation is two-fold: First, it is necessary to keep the psyche healthy. If we do not assimilate something, we hold it as a regret, a resentment, or a confusion. "How could that person have done that?" "I cannot tolerate what has occurred." "I wish I had never done that." But when we have assimilated something we have truly learned it; it has become a part of us.

Second, assimilation is the process by which the whole universe learns through the experience of each of us. The One Being assimilates what we have each assimilated, and in this way humanity progresses.

Assimilation is done by breath. Therefor, we offer you this meditation on the depth of the heart, a region that performs emotional digestion, very close to the stomach that performs physical digestion.

Heart Rhythm Meditation for the New Year

Step One:
You want to put 2006 behind you?
You can't just blow it away; it's working on you.
Draw your breath into your Solar Plexus,
the sensitive spot just below your rib cage.
Hold your breath here in the depth of your heart
and digest all the emotions you feel.
Breathe out and send the incense of your experience
to infuse into your cells,
propagated by your heartbeat.

Step Two:
There were many lessons in the past year -
valuable lessons not to be forgotten.
The All needs all of your experience,
to disseminate it throughout the One Being.
So let your breath carry your life-learning
as it is drawn out of you.
Breath carries the combined new wisdom of all life
as it is blown into you.
Your heartbeat is gently tuned
by the world-wide rhythm of life.

Step Three:
Now be active, not passive.
Be the One that breathes the universe.
Breathe in as the All-Pervading Being.
Assimilate into your heart all that has been
experienced by any being in the past year.
Breathe out to fill the hearts of all
with an update in wisdom and love.
Your heart beats in all hearts, by reflection.

Mentor Training

The IAM program in Mentoring is something we are very proud of, as an answer-in-progress to the concern of providing individual guidance on the path of the heart.

The mentors, who provide this service, are trained in both diagnosis and prescription: diagnosis of the state of the heart, the level of realization and the archetype of the person's character, and prescription of a range of meditation practices taken from the Egyptian, Hindu, Buddhist, Zorastrian, Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions and current research.

We need more mentors! So we are offering the Mentor's Training again, to train 10 to 20 new mentors who will work with the IAM members and others outside IAM in business, education and health care. This training has five courses:

1. The Pressing Need and the State of the Heart

2. The Steps on the Path of Spiritual Realization

3. The Archetypes of the Soul and the Stages of Character Development

4. Giving Spiritual Practices: Breaths, Sayings, Exercises, Sounds, Dialogues and Invocations

5. Building the Mentoring Relationship with the Mentee.

The first course is being offered starting March 31. The topics in this course are as follows:

• The four dimensions of the heart: the strengths, weaknesses and distortions of each dimension

• The six powers available in meditation and their purposeful use

• The "Pressing Need" that focuses the heart's development

• The mental/emotional/spiritual issues which underlie specific physical health problems

• The ways that relationships develop the heart

• How to choose an external goal that fosters internal heart development

• How to use the subtle element energies to accomplish the goal one sets

• The practice of contemplation for long-distance, direct contact with the mentee

The format of the course is as follows:

• Starting Saturday, March 31, at 9:00 am, through April 3 at 1 pm, four days in Tucson.
• Immediately afterwards, a webcourse of 14 weeks
• A final four days in Tucson, August 18-21.

The course will be taught at a graduate-school level, involving approximately 50 pages of careful reading each of the 14 weeks. Short written assignments will be due approximately every two weeks, generally submitted by computer transmission. They are essential warm-ups for being able to submit the final assessment project at the end of the term: the assessment of and recommendations for a set of six case studies.

IAM will be seeking accreditation as a graduate school. When that is attained, this course will be accredited retroactively toward a Master of Arts degree.

At this time, we are planning to offer the other four courses in the Mentor Training as three-day seminars, not graduate-level courses. (Eventually, we will have a graduate program that includes all five courses, as we are able to fill out the curriculum of the IAM graduate school.) These last four courses will be scheduled in the winter of 2007-08, the spring of 2008, and the fall of 2008.

Heart Work, by Jody Curly

I moved back to my home state of Wisconsin in the dying days of autumn. I was just in time to see the last leaves of the huge cottonwood tree at the lake's edge fly away in the first winter storm of the season. I heard and saw migrating Canada geese and tundra swans make stopovers at the shallow end of the lake, where the vegetation just beneath the water offered an all-hours salad bar - until the ice began to form. I watched the ice grow quickly, soundlessly, the edge farther and farther from shore each day, pulling the water birds away with it. As air and water did their transformative dance, I saw steam and mist and fog rise to fill the sky over the lake, and I gazed as the setting sun sent spills of molten copper across the mirroring ice. I watched the bare bones of trees quiver in cutting winds and shimmer in clinging veils of snow. This is part of why I needed to come back here. There is something in me that yearns for true winter - the clarity of icy air and crystalline sky, the cleansing power of a cold so penetrating that it feels like a holy annointing. And the quiet - the utter absence of insect song, and the absence of most people, too. There are no games at the frozen playing fields, and only the very occasional well-insulated walker or jogger braves the lake shore. When we meet, we smile with our eyes but do not speak from behind our scarves and face masks. To go out into winter is to come into a seasonal solitary retreat, where one is rarely distracted by others and is regularly offered the chance to go inside to fuller relationship with one's own heart. When all of life has seemed to turn within, like the hibernating bear in her den beneath the snow, the silence and stillness calls us to do the same, slowing ourselves to the pace of our breathing, letting the long dark night put to rest all we must let go of, carefully feeling for and nurturing the fragile new life that is just beginning to grow while we wait for the turning toward the morning. Love to All, Jody   Three Webcourses Learn Heart Rhythm Meditation All starting January 17, 2007, for 8 to 10 weeks "Peace comes when self is in harmony with the rhythm of the heart. This is accomplished in silent meditation when one enters into the life-stream in the heart so that it takes up the proper pulsation. If there is any form of concentration to be used in meditation, it consists in first getting into the rhythm of the heart, by watching the heartbeats, feeling them and harmonizing with them. Then one centers all feeling in the physical heart and out of feeling selects love, and out of love, Divine Love." [Hazrat Inayat Khan] IAM Webcourse 101 Introduction to Heart Rhythm Meditation Taught by Catherine Warrick, PhD You can gain a stronger personal center of confidence and peacefulness so you can live from your heart even in an environment of stress and conflict. Heart Rhythm Meditation is the best tool you could have for managing stress. If you aren't practicing it, you could benefit from a structured course with personal feedback that would get you started, or restarted. You'll experience an empowered focus in your heart from which you can work and relate in health and effectiveness. Following Puran's book, Living from the Heart, this webcourse offers a thorough training in the basics of Heart Rhythm Meditation. No prior experience is assumed. At each step, you'll use your physical sensations as feedback to guide you along. Catherine will give personal instruction in this body-centered method that makes it easy to meditate, even if you have difficulty sitting still. And this course starts you on a path of self-healing and self-development that continues in the next three experiential webcourses: 102, 103 and 104. Register here. $195.