The Resistance to Surrender: Exploring the Ego’s Unwillingness to Trust in A Human Being

The Resistance to Surrender: Exploring the Ego’s Unwillingness to Trust in A Human Being

A One Year Program

There is a part of us that trusts nothing and no one. It believes the truth about life is that we are born alone and die alone; that we must survive on our own and by ourselves; that it is foolish, moreover dangerous, to totally trust or depend on anyone for help or unwavering love. Many aspects of our lives are adversely affected by these beliefs, none more so than the primary love relationship.

There are few areas in life in which we experience as many heart-soaring and heart-breaking experiences – moments of clarity and confusion, closeness and loneliness, love and pain. This is because no other experience in life, short of perhaps the love and helplessness parents feel for their children’s well-being and the process of physically dying, asks us to be so vulnerable. And we are extremely conflicted about the choice to vulnerable. As Gary Zukov puts it in his book The Heart of the Soul : “Your life is a journey into vulnerability. You do not trust that journey. The consequences of this are terrifying.”

Anyone who enters a primary love relationship has to ask themselves the following questions, and by their answers, determine how they live and love:

• Is showing my vulnerability and personal truths a strength or a weakness?
• How close do I allow myself to get to this other person and how close do I allow them to get to me?
• Do I bring all or just some of my mind, heart, body and soul to them or do I hold some back for my protection, independence and personal freedom?
• Can I be true to who I really am and be loved or must I always sacrifice the one to have the other?
• Can I love fully without losing myself? Is it possible to give too much and how do I know when I am doing so?
• Is it possible to give too little and never know the beauty, richness and transcendence of love?
• With love comes pain, and most certainly loss. Is it truly “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”?
• If great love requires great courage, how do I handle love’s enormous risks?

This One Year Program will use our primary love relationship as the mirror in which to examine our deepest (ego) conflicts, dynamics and tactics in our relationship with other human beings. Its purpose will be to assist participants to identify, take responsibility and heal the personal barriers we place in the way of love’s fulfillment – be it with man, woman, child or a Higher Power. We will see that the barriers that we keep in place to true and lasting intimacy with our mate and those that we keep in place in our relationship with a Transcendent Power in our life are, in fact, one and the same.

The program will emotionally support and guide participants to become more comfortable with, express and enjoy their vulnerabilities, seeing in them our means of connecting to the richest and most fulfilling depths of our human experience.

Format:

6 experientially-based weekend workshops spaced approximately 2 months apart beginning April 14/15, 2012; buddy system; and optional weekly support group meetings (highly recommended)

Cost:

$1650 + H.S.T. (payable over the course of the year)

To register:

This seminar has ended. Please see the list of current seminars for the latest offerings.