LETTING LIFE IN
Opening and surrendering to grace & love
(Our natural state)
Divine guidance often shows up as a whisper. It does not yell and never insists.
When we come to a great barrier, when we find a place inside us we do not know how to navigate, when we are in a painful experience that we cannot avoid, we need to sit down right there—at the root of that experience, at the root of the tree of life—and be still. It is not an easy teaching, but it is a great teaching — be still amid difficulty, making yourself available to whatever is occurring in that moment.
(From The Most Important Thing; Discovering Truth at the Heart of Life
Adyashanti, 2019)
Context
Challenges abound in the lives of us all. Amid the beautiful moments we would love to hold onto there are other moments we want nothing to do with. Adyashanti's statement above captures the one consistent teaching that shows up across virtually all spiritual traditions: pay close attention to actual experience, especially when this experience causes us to clench. This clenching can be very noticeable — clenching the steering wheel when another car swerves in front of us — or it can be very subtle. We all know moments when something happens, we have a reaction to this, there may be a feeling that arises and a feeling tone or felt sense around this moment and a judgement about this experience and/or our reaction to it. This amazing subterranean dance takes but a fraction of a second, but our escape from actual experience has begun.
There are impossible people and tough circumstances that leave us at our wits' end. Health crises and bodies that seem to betray us. Financial challenges and interpersonal tensions and misunderstandings that defy our attempts to resolve. Strangely, Adyashanti suggests that in the center of challenges we cannot avoid, at the root of the painful experience, the essence of life is happening! In our endless attempt to control life we may actually cut ourselves off from the equally endless flow of grace and love that we always already are — The tree of life — present in the center of those moments we would otherwise avoid. Real spirituality, Adyashanti argues, awakens us to who we really are, allowing what is essential and natural in us to more easily flourish.
The Spring 2019 Refiners Playground will focus on sharing our current learning about noticing and relaxing into the clench, welcoming it like a long lost friend, experiencing the stillness and grace while allowing more and more of our life experiences to have their way in us, without our attempting to judge, fix or change them. We expect this to be a deep, rich, challenging and wildly entertaining conversation. Join us.
A quick heads up: our Summer gathering will take place in the mountains of Evergreen, CO on July 18-19, 2019!
Hotel Information for the April 2019 Refiner's Playground gathering:
LAKE LAWN RESORT
2400 E Geneva Street, Delavan, WI 53115
(Between Chicago and Milwaukee)
TEL: 1-800-338-5253
Be sure to ask for the Refiners Playground rate.
Deadline for the reduced rate is March 11, 2019. This venue sells out quickly!
Your trusted guides
Jim and Dan bring a half-century of experience wading around the inner landscape of human experience in ways that result in greater light, buoyancy, presence and power. We each have our unique spiritual path. We come in not as experts or even as facilitators who speak from the front of the room but as guides who walk alongside. We're aware of the terrain but cannot predict what will happen. Hence, the focus on playful experimentation.
 
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From Dan Holden’s
view, The Refiner’s Playground is:
“Time to lay down the armaments we use to fix ourselves and to come home. There is an un-changing center within us that isn’t concerned with anything other than NOW. I often see and recognize the Essential that lurks beneath those moments we naturally resist. I speak directly to it and am learning how to move with it and allow it more play in myself and in us. I am here to usher in an intimate, liberating partnership with the Essential in each all of us! We ARE this!” |
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From Jim Anderson’s perspective, The Refiner’s Playground offers us:
“A unique opportunity to embrace the perfection each life experience offers in burning away the dross of our deluded self perceptions, allowing the true, infinite, essential beings that we are to find fuller creative expression now. I am here to playfully master the art of finding, mining and refining the very best in us, allowing it to creatively express itself in response to the perfect challenge or opportunity that presents itself in each moment.” |
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What is the Refiner's Playground?
We are an open cohort/community of people who come together for two days each season of the year. 2019 marks our eighth year and we intend to meet for 80 seasons. Some conversations liberate a person. Others liberate a planet. Still others seem to transcend the time dimension itself and impact generations going backward and forward in time. To date, we are seeing extraordinary things happen—beyond our wildest expectations—as a result of the dialogue that unfolds in "The Playground". Come as often as you want and stay as long as you want.
What happens in a typical gathering?
We meet in groups that range from 10-20 people. We share our stories of what we understand through direct experience and/or are currently learning through our own active experiments on the nature of being. There are no long-winded speeches or dazzling intellectual discourses. We tend not to agree or disagree with each other and seldom give others advice. We have no front of the room instructors or teachers as we all serve this role. We find that when we share our experiences with one another, as co-explorers- we each become more clear and confident about taking our next steps.
What we currently know
People who most benefit from the "Playground" are those who have--
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A life long yearning to know what is true about themselves and the universe. |
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Grown tired of the typical self-help menu with its implied assumption there is some "defect" in us that requires improvement. |
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Believed more licenses, degrees or certifications will leave them finally and forever feeling "enough". |
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Many years' experience feeling alone, judged, misunderstood and have simply grown tired of this. And even more tired at having contributed to or led the charge themselves! |
If you have experience with any of the above, welcome to the club! You will likely enjoy the solid food of the "Playground". The hard truth is that no amount of suffering or achievement can satisfy the deeper longing tugging at our soul. Our secret desire is wholeness and only our essential nature knows how to weave the fragments we present it into a coherent whole. Our hard work and effort to fix ourselves usually make matters worse, or at least continues the entertainment.
There is another way.
Welcome
You are welcomed to come for as many sessions as you like and can leave whenever you like. Regardless of how much experience you have with deeper work, you will likely find in the Refiner's Playground a quality of dialogue and loving presence unlike anything you have ever experienced before.
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Investment
$695 per session (includes breakfast and lunch). $2,495 when you sign up for the next four events. A savings of $285!
Bring a family member, partner, significant other at no additional cost!
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2019 dates and locations
| APRIL 11-12, 2019 |
DELAVAN, WI |
| JULY 18-19, 2019 |
EVERGREEN, CO |
| OCTOBER 24-25, 2019 |
EVERGREEN, CO |
| JANUARY, 2020 |
DELAVAN, WI |
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