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Annual Teacher Conference Updates
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Our annual Trillium Awakening Teacher Conference was held this year at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland Colorado. We discussed an initiative to create a one- or two-year program that introduces new students to the full range of Trillium offerings, beginning with our Orientation Course and including specific recommendations for teacher sessions, sittings (on-line or in person), mutuality group participation and retreats.
The program will also likely include a curriculum of videos, essays, and audio recordings highlighting the three areas of our Trillium Awakening process: Consciousness, Embodiment and Mutuality. We envision this program being an alternative pathway offered in addition to our current student-directed process. We also set in motion an offering of weekly on-line sittings hosted by different teachers as well as live introductions to our work.
We are looking for someone skilled in social media. Contact Joanne Lee
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Rod Taylor Interview:
New Principles of Awakened Relationship
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Beloved Trillium teacher, Rod Taylor, recently published an updated version of his book New Principles of Awakened Relationship: Mutuality as a Dynamic Component of our Awakening Nature. The following is an interview with Rod about some of the principles in his book.
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Fax:
How would you define an awakened relationship?
Rod:
An awakened relationship involves people who are coming into their own whole-being realization and therefore can apply some of the principles of their own awakening process to the awakening and evolution of their relationships.
Fax:
How are the symptoms or principles of awakened relating different from contemporary "self-help" ways of looking at things?
Rod:
Just as we discover, in the process of our whole-being realization, that there are many aspects of ourselves that we haven't been able to fix--we find that we don't know how-and we learn that there is a way of giving ourselves allowance to go ahead and be who we are - we call that "green-lighting"- and find that through that allowing we come into a more intimate relationship within ourselves, and as a result allow a natural evolution to occur that couldn't occur through any application of techniques and processes.
Fax:
So, if the usual ways of trying to fix or reprogram each other don't work when there's a conflict in the relationship, say when you're not understood or seen, how does the relationship deepen?
Rod:
Yes, it's not simple to change those things. We don't know how, just like we don't know how to awaken. So we allow the shared space of the relationship where we can share awareness of discomforts without the intention that they need to be resolved immediately. In other words, we're deepening into the shared discomfort that has its own elements on each side, and we're giving them room to evolve. And they evolve through us, through evolutionary awareness that first notices it, and then feels it, and then becomes the being of it, and then begins to find its own resolution and transformation.
Fax:
In your personal life, how has this evolution into an understanding of the principles of awakened relationship manifested, and were there any specific transition points that that have brought this home to you?
Rod:
I had a past deep and long relationship that ended in a way that was traumatic for me, but it helped propel me, in the end, into my whole-being realization. I found a way to become well within myself, a ground of increasing wellness and wholeness outside of relationship.
So, when the possibility of a relationship with my wife Andrea came--it came on the ground of not knowing and not expecting. That was profound for me--I saw the other who comes to me magically and unknown, and how do I open to this very different other? I found myself opening, through the principles that I had realized and integrated, and from reasonable wellness in myself, to meet the awkwardness of not knowing how to be in relationship from the standpoint of being relatively autonomous and well in myself, meeting someone who is relatively autonomous and well in herself.
Fax:
Yes. So what happened is that there was a kind of mutuality that developed that wasn't dependent on fulfilling each other's needs. It was more of a mutual respect and a holding of the other as they are, and coming to hold yourself and stand up for yourself as you are, in a field of love and respect. And that that was a prerequisite, you could say, of bringing the relationship to a deeper level.
Rod:
Yes. And that is the freedom to experience the love. Not having those awkward expectations we had out of need allows the reality of what's there-that is the magic of attraction, because it's not there now to accomplish something. It's there in its own nature. The more we acknowledge our own self-wellness and the other's, the more that that field of love, the magic of love-is discovered. It gives the freedom for the flow and living of love.
Fax:
It strikes me as different from conventional modalities for creating relationship that involve solving the problems, like talking things through, reaching a resolution in the moment, and "don't go to sleep on an argument."
Rod:
It sure is. For those of us who have been in our whole-being realization process, it's like thinking: oh, here's a hurt spot; I have to fix it before I go to bed." We've had it for years, but we're going to fix it now, before bed. We've seen it and therefore we're going to deal with it. So, it's much like that in relationship, that we realize many things aren't ready to be resolved at that time. In fact we don't know how. And we can be in good will with the love that exists in the relationship and not know what to do. And it's beautiful to open increasingly to not knowing and yet being fully aware, not hiding from it. Just like we met our own pains and discomforts in our own awakening process. It's the same in relationship.
Fax:
And so the primary mover for this evolution of awakened relationship is awareness, and having the capacity to hold the space until the awareness comes to bring resolution. Is this just a matter of holding?
Rod:
Yes, and awareness comes through a range of ways. It's not just a simple thing of saying "OK, here's the mechanics of the problem." Awareness is including the feeling level and the being level, and it's including the talking about it, because that allows us to have another perspective on it. So, we're talking not to try to find the solution immediately, the sharing with another and the holding of it with another actually enhances the evolutionary capacity of mutual deepening to grow.
Fax:
I'm finding in my relationship with my wife Sharon that aspects that were very difficult are starting to transform into feelings of endearment-in other words, there's something more fundamental that's been hooked up that is able to hold the differences as they arise. It sounds similar to what you're talking about, that there's a beauty in the limitations and differences which before were sources of conflict, but then somehow transform into a wholeness which is stronger than those differences and which allows the differences to be there and to be expressed-even more fully-but at the same time, it's not something that splits but rather unites.
What would you say could enhance this growth of wholeness and bring about wellness in relationship?
Rod:
I would say fundamental to the growing of awakened relationship is through the relationship with the self, with oneself. The work we do in Trillium Awakening path really is a requirement. That kind of work is a requirement for us to open and come to know and be and realize our full nature--our ongoing awakening and integration through greenlighting -giving the go-ahead to be who we are. Less than our full nature is not going to contribute to the best possible relationship with others.
In a relationship in which both parties want to grow the relationship and have found that there are places they weren't able to resolve, then doing that together and being conscious together of this evolutionary process that is applying in themselves to awakening, they can also practice the allowing of it in their shared relationship.
Fax:
What are some of the things that you would do to bring greater awareness to yourself as a foundation for awakened relationship?
Rod:
It appears that, at this stage of human evolution, we can't do it by ourselves anymore. We actually need to be with others, doing this. And we need to be with others who are opening to these deepening principles of whole-being realization and awakened relationship. And so, finding communities and resources that can support us in that is crucial.
I believe that whole-being realization, as we talk about it in the Trillium work, is a new dimension of the capacity of humans for awakening. Awakening in
the whole range of creation. The field of mutuality is the magic that adds the depth of relationship to conscious embodiment, a depth in which we discover our non-separateness simultaneous with the respectful admiration of the creation's differences. This is what we're recognizing as mutuality. It is crucial to our own whole-being realization, crucial to the application of our pursuits in life, and crucial to all our relationships.
Fax:
Could an extension of that generate an awakened relationship within an organization?
Rod: That's such a great point. It's pretty potent to talk about it in terms of the relationship with one other, a beloved other, but these principles are applicable to every connection. The next challenge is to apply these principles to a collective group in which the group is meeting in a field of mutuality, each of them not knowing best
and discovering together what they can be as a whole. That requires quite a significant wellness in each person and a distinct trust in Being arising and expressing through the whole.
Fax:
Thank you, Rod.
Rod's book is available in paperback and Kindle editions on Amazon.
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| 2018 Teachers Retreat, Boulder, CO |
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Creation's End:
A Video by Allan Morelock
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Trillium Awakening's mystic poet and teacher, Allan Morelock has beautifully realized one of his poems in this video,
Creation's End.
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Virtual Sitting Opportunities
All Hearts on Deck! - Awakened Activism virtual sittings. Every 2nd Saturday at 10:00 am PDT. Next sitting: August 11
Contact Margit Bantowsky or Laura Wittke
Fax and Sharon Gilbert have an opening for another participant in their
Sunday
mutuality group.
The group meets every third
Sunday
. Contact Fax Gilbert
Looking for an on-line Mutuality Group?
Both teacher and peer led groups now forming.
Contact
Victor Antillon
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Olympia, WA
08/29 - 09/5
Transfiguration Retreat
Teachers: Sandra Glickman, Rod Taylor, Fax Gilbert, John Bottone, Joanne Lee, Margit Bantowsky
more info
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Trillium Awakening is a unique offering to the world, with 40 teachers, 18 mentors, workshops/retreats and sittings, community and online mutuality groups, and a shared manifesto and mission for catalyzing awakening for individuals, society, and the world.
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