Since 1987 I have trained almost 2000 people to be facilitators of shifting consciousness. And since 1995, we have been training people to practice the tools of “Awakening Coaching” in all parts of the world. Many of the graduates of these courses have gone on to be extremely successful. Some have helped hundreds, or even thousands of people to shift into radically new states of consciousness, to awaken to their true nature as limitless, and to break through and dissolve unnecessary barriers to self-expression. Some of these graduates have gone on to write their own books, to find their own unique gift in the world.

For example, when I was in Vienna recently, I told my host, Catharina Reider, that I would be happy to support her coaching practice while I was in town. I told her that when the weekend seminar was getting close to the end,  I would announce that people could contact her for support in Awakening Coaching.

“Oh no!” she said, “Don’t do that! I can’t take any more clients. I’m fully booked, and turning people away.” Katharina has no other training in coaching. I was amazed! She took our training, she took some risks and put the word out, and now she’s fully booked.

Not everybody can say quite the same thing, however. I have seen so many people who take our training, all the way from the Basic Skills course through to all the advanced courses, then they even pay for consulting and training with marketing experts, but still they don’t manage to serve as many people as they want to, and they find themselves still tied to a “day job” and unable to fully give their time and energy to what they most love.

I have to stop and ask myself, what is it that makes the difference? In the small town where I live, Nevada City, it often seems there are more people offering coaching, massage, healing, and energy balancing, than there are clients to receive these services. But still, a few magical people seem to thrive, no matter what, and many others wonder what it takes for it all to flow easily.

The answer to this question, it turns out, has relatively little to do with what you are offering. Incredibly well-trained people often struggle with these issues. Other people with very little training sometimes are able to establish a practice, and help a lot of people very easily. Strangely enough, it is not even always connected with how much you know about marketing. I have met people who spent tens of thousands of dollars on courses which promise to decode the mystery, to make them celebrities or bodhisattvas overnight. But they didn’t always deliver. The course arrives in a big brown box, full of DVDs, CDs, workbooks and access to live events. And there they are, a few months later, now with even more training, and stuck with the same pregnant feeling, of wanting to make a difference, and having trouble finding one anyone interested in listening.

For several years I was in a men’s group with a nice young guy from Australia called David Wood. You might have heard of him, because he created one such course to help people get started with a coaching practice. It’s called The Coach Start Manual. One of the things I like about David’s approach is that he recognizes the one factor that has the greatest impact on making a difference to other people, and making a living at the same time.  What is that one factor?

Fear.

That’s it. As you’ll see in the little video below, you can frequently dance all around the place, getting busy with your website, or email, or the logo, or setting up a new system in the office, all the time ignoring the most relevant factor to your work with people: which is your fear. You might be the kind of person who is more afraid of failing, of being rejected, of discovering that you really have nothing to give. Or you might be equally afraid of being successful, of really helping people, of being financially rewarded, and hitting what Gay Hendricks calls “The Upper Limit.”

Please enjoy this little conversation I had recently with David Wood about the excellent work he does with people to support them in getting over their fear, giving the gift, making a difference, and getting rewarded for it.

At the end of May, (from May 31 to June 2), David is going to be offering a live event in San Francisco where he will share with people everything he has learned to empower people in this way. His co-teacher for the event will be Jack Canfield.

You what? Who is going to be his co-teacher?

Yep, you heard me right, Jack Canfield, the creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series and The Success Principles is flying up from Santa Barbara to assist David in teaching this event. It’s going to be small and intimate enough that you can interact with these two teachers and ask all your questions.  Find out more about the event here.

I’ve invited David to be my guest on tele-seminar this Thursday at 6 PM Pacific time. You can listen to his energized and very compassionate approach to getting over your fear and making a difference in the world. And you can ask your questions, and share your own challenges.

Register for the tele-seminar here

Sending you all the best,

Arjuna

PS, you can join Davids Weekend in San Francisco here.

The post What gets most in the way of making a difference? appeared first on The Translucent View.

Vision is vital. It is the fuel that motivates action. It gives meaning to our lives, the aspiration to reach beyond our limits. Vision tells us where to put our energy, allows us to push through unforeseen obstacles, and, when a group of people work together, it is the cohesive force that keeps them motivated and connected. 

Human beings have an innate capacity to sense their own, and life’s, potential, without any outside help. We are born with a sense of wonder and awe that is untouched by the limitations of the constructed world. The capacity to rest in this innocence is what makes childhood a time of wonder, for many the only time of wonder that they ever know. Although unaware of the stresses and disappointments of the adult world, this vision of our true heart is full of wisdom. It knows something about what is ultimately real.

This wisdom of the heart is worth investigating. If we examine the assumptions we make when embarking on anything new — a romantic relationship, a business venture, even a spiritual practice — they can be very telling. These assumptions reveal something simple that the heart never forgets, even if the mind no longer dares to believe. This vision feels clearer, more authentic, even if it is constantly sabotaged by forces we never anticipate. If we pay close attention to how we feel and act when we are initiating something new, we can discover a great deal about our natural state, and, indeed, about the natural state of life.

Happiness. Whenever we make plans, we assume happiness to be the starting and resting point of our actions. Don’t we always expect our time to be relaxed, infused with happiness?

Contentment. Although we may desire things we could get in the future, aren’t our dreams of that future always desire-free? You are sitting on a beach, watching the sunset, hearing the waves with that special someone; you can smell the sea air. Do you imagine your mind as being distracted with desires for something else? In our imaginings, we are content.

Being fully present. None of our fantasies, whether of the perfect date, quality time with our children, or an effective business presentation, includes time spent worrying about other things. We plan to be fully present, to feel alive, empowered, and capable of anything.

Harmony. In our imagination, we anticipate being attuned to others. Arguments come as a surprise and ruin our desire to meet in an atmosphere of love. Since harmony and conflict exist more or less equally in life, why should we constantly anticipate the former, and feel so surprised by the latter?

Fulfillment. We expect any new experience to bring us fulfillment, to feel whole. We don’t expect dissatisfaction. We naturally anticipate feeling complete before, during, and after the activity.

Success. None of us plans on failure. We imagine the actions we take will bring us the results we want.  We believe we will be the exceptions, the ones who make it.

Ease. In our original vision we do not anticipate having to make a lot of effort. Each time I sit down at my laptop, I expect the words to flow like honey. It is always a surprise, even after all these years, when they don’t.

Honesty. When we connect with our innocent, open heart, we don’t plan to lie. As one seminar participant in Germany said, “When I feel into it, I would say honesty is who I am in my essence, more than something I do or say.”

Other qualities of original vision include being centered, loving, patient, and generous and acting with integrity and social responsibility.

This is an excerpt from my book, The Translucent Revolution: How People Just Like You Are Waking Up and Changing the World, click on the link to purchase your own copy today!

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Dogma translates a living mystery into something concrete, something that will survive the passage of time. Of course, what we really need, to keep the teaching alive, is more and more awake people, living their own direct connection to now, to the source of things. Once the mystery gets written down, formulated, then what was fluid and alive becomes solid and dead; it becomes dogmatic, hierarchical, and organized. Out of living spirituality is born the institution of religion; the living Buddha becomes Buddhism; the living Christ, Christianity.

Once such a creed is developed, it almost always claims to be the one way to heaven, to end suffering. Fundamentalist Christians believe that Jesus is the only way to God, Muslims believe the same about Muhammad, devotees of Krishna claim they’ve got an exclusive too. Any fundamentalist group assumes that the rest of the world’s populations are heathens and infidels, with no possibility of salvation. Obviously, from a rational perspective, they can’t all be right. The number of groups who could possibly be right about having an exclusive license on liberation is either one or zero. As Neale Donald Walsch pointed out in our interview:

photocredit: Neale Donald Walsch

“Each claims to be the single and sole source of divine revelation and divine wisdom, of divine insight, and divine understanding, of divine clarity and divine power. And nothing could be further from the truth. Many of the world’s religions insist that this is so, ignoring completely the contradiction in terms, that it cannot possibly be true of all of them. Somebody must not be clear about this, or perhaps none of them is clear, and the truth is that God is communicating with, sharing his power with, bringing his insight to, and sharing his wisdom with everyone. And that only a few people have had the clarity to see that, to accept that, to receive that. And to embrace that.”  

This is an excerpt from my book, The Translucent Revolution: How People Just Like You Are Waking Up and Changing the World, click on the link to purchase your own copy today!

The post The One and Only Path Home appeared first on The Translucent View.

Our next Awakening Coaching Training begins on-line on May 14th.  If you would like to join us, please complete an application.

http://awakeningcoachingtraining.com/training-application#

The post Good News about our Evolution appeared first on The Translucent View.

What does “relationship” mean? It implies the relating of two separate identities, two distinct points of view on the same situation. Separation is not your original nature, not the Self in its purity, that is in relationship with another. Within silence, peace, infinity, there can be no relationship, because there is no other. It is two temporary identities that enter into relationship. These identities differ in their conditioning, their patterns of thought and emotional responses, and their physiological and psychological habits of seeing the world. Of course, between different identities there must inevitably be places of convergence and difference. “We like the same movies, but we eat different food. We read the same books but have different friends.” If there were complete alignment on everything, they would essentially be the same person.

When there is strong identification with the person you take yourself to be, with likes and dislikes and opinions, relating with another eventually brings conflict and suffering because there is a sense of separation. When there is the perception that this relationship is not between “me” and “you,” but between arbitrary identities or points of view that are both rooted in the Self, which is what we both are, there is release from suffering. “Behold the One in all things,” says Kabir, “It is [the idea of] the second which leads you astray.” This is the approach we take here — learning to transcend the sense of “I” and “you,” “my point of view” and “your point of view,” “my needs” and “your needs.” As rigidly held positions dissolve, relationships may become easier and more harmonious, or they may come to a natural and agreeable completion.

We are concerned not with trying to change the outward appearance of things, but with the way those things are perceived and the degree of unnecessary suffering involved. As we shift from an isolated, personal point of view to the Clear Seeing of things from the eternal Self, personal “love” blossoms into love without any conditions, which does not discriminate according to the object placed before it.

What we refer to as “falling in love” in this culture usually involves becoming fixated on another person as the source of beauty, wholeness and fulfillment in our lives. When two people do this to each other simultaneously, one of life’s greatest joy rides results, which more often than not ends in a crash landing. This is what the Greeks call eros. We also speak of “loving” others in a slightly different way, when we have become so deeply familiar with them and in some way attached to them that their absence from our lives would cause us suffering. This the Greeks call familias: the love of the familiar, of the family. Of course, these two states are an inevitable part of human experience.

There is another kind of love, however, which is actually not a function of attachment or obsession at all. The Greeks call it agape. This is the exquisite recognition of oneness, the realization that the Self is seeing itself and there is no other. It is this love that the German poet Novalis writes of when he says, “We are alone with everything we love.” Rumi tells a story of a man who knocks at the door of the Beloved. When asked who is there, he replies, “It is me.” He is rejected and sent away to suffer the torment of separation. Finally, after a year he returns and again knocks. This time, when asked who is there he replies, “It is you.”

“Come in, my own Self,” the Beloved replies. “You know this house is too big for two.”

This is an excerpt from my book Relaxing Into Clear Seeing: Interactive tools In The Service of Self-Awakening. Click here to purchase your copy today!

The post What does “relationship” mean? appeared first on The Translucent View.

The Last Laugh will be published on May 1st by Hay House Visions imprint. Please enjoy here the back cover description, some early endorsements, and excerpts from three chapters, with audio downloads to enjoy later.

“I stood on the bridge just before midnight, the wind from the ocean arriving in violent blasts, as if saying under its breath, ‘Jump, fool, jump.’ This was the last of a string of attempted departures, most orchestrated in my tired mind. Always a bitter reminder of all that had been lost and destroyed by my foolishness.”

When suicide feels like your best option, you know something has gone horribly wrong—and that’s just how Matt Thomson felt. He had lost everything: his wife, his children, his job, all his money, and his front door key. But everything changes when he meets Joey Murphy, ex-Merchant Marine, entrepreneur, teacher, and wild man, an enigmatic mixture of Forrest Gump, Merlin, and a long-lost best friend. Upon hearing Matt’s woes, Joey offers Matt a life-changing deal he can’t resist:

“The life you know has been completely predetermined by automatic habits, both your triumphs and your failures. If you are really at the end of your rope, these habits will drop away, and you will be free…I give you ten days, starting today. I will show you all you need to see. It is up to you.”

And with the deal struck Joey leads Matt on the roller-coaster ride of his life: a ten day adventure filled with dodging cop cars, playing Blind Man’s baseball on the edge of a cliff, finding heaven in a Taco Bell, and learning how to open the hearts of total strangers. Joey introduces Matt to “the True Teacher,” but also leads him to face his own deepest darkness and despair.

Arjuna Ardagh is an Awakening Coach, writer and public speaker, who trains others to become facilitators of awakening. He was educated in England, at Kings School, Canterbury, and later at Cambridge University, where he earned a master’s degree in literature. He is the author of seven books, including the #1 national bestseller The Translucent Revolution, which was featured in O, The Oprah Magazine. He speaks at conferences all over the world, and has appeared on TV, on the radio, and in print media in twelve countries. Ardagh is also a member of the Transformational Leadership Council.

The post The Last Laugh: available now! appeared first on The Translucent View.

For words to be heard
There must be silence
In which the words are occurring.
For form to be recognized
There must be limitlessness
In which the forms can exist.
For there to be phenomena in time—
Beginning, duration and ending—
There must be an eternity
In which time is occurring.
When you truly understand this,
It will change your life.
Then it becomes obvious.
To perceive anything with limits,
There must be limitlessness
In which it is occurring.
If a phenomenon is taking place
Within something else with bigger limits,
Within what would it be occurring?

This question,
“Who am I?”
Brings one immediately to limitlessness,
To eternity,
To That which is unborn, undying,
To That which has no fear of erasure
And to That which is not separate.
As soon as you look back into your Self
And recognize that there is no separate entity to be found,
Only spaciousness,

Then it is not much of a leap
To look into the eyes of what you thought was another person—
Not at the other person
But through the window of those eyes—
And see the eternity that is common to both of you.
Then what is the difference between
Vast spaciousness and immense boundlessness?
Where does infinity end and eternity begin?
This simple yet profound recognition
Signals the end of separation.

At different times this understanding
Has been given a diversity of exclusive names—
Enlightenment, liberation, self-realization.
People have spoken of this
In a very exalted way,
With massive amounts of worship,
And fast cars and real estate acquired
In the name of this uncomplicated principle.
It is a simple thing we are speaking of here.
This is everyone’s birthright.

This is an excerpt from my book How About Now: Satsang with Arjuna. Click here to purchase your copy today!

The post The Window Of Eternity appeared first on The Translucent View.

Every Saturday morning we clean the house. We start by sitting down together and listing all the jobs that need to be done. Then everyone gets to be the boss for half an hour. We always start with Shuba, our youngest. While he is boss, everyone must do what he says. He is the king. He will check if you are cleaning thoroughly, allocate the jobs, and tell you when you can move to a new one.

We started this game when he was seven. You might anticipate, as we did, that it would be chaos, that he would give crazy commands or not know what to do. But he turned out to be the most caring and careful supervisor of the family. I remember him coming into the bathroom while I was cleaning the toilet. “Do you have what you need?” he asked. “Are you clear about what to do? Let me know when you want to take a break.” I pinched myself. Was I dreaming? When his half hour was up he resorted to his usual personality, complaining bitterly about having to work at all. I learned that we all rise to the occasion.

Of course, we don’t want to make this a daily practice. Kids need time to be kids. But giving everyone a chance to change their role in the family in this way, once a week, shakes up encrusted habits. Everyone, kids and adults, can experiment with other ways of doing things, gaining insight into what it’s like to play another role in the family. When my child gets to be in charge of the family for half an hour, and I get to be the one ordered around, he can feel what it’s like to be boss, and I can feel what it’s like to have someone either bark an order at me or be considerate and patient. My son makes a much better boss than I do; I learn a lot from him about how to supervise others.

This is an excerpt from my book, The Translucent Revolution: How People Just Like You Are Waking Up and Changing the World, click on the link to purchase your own copy today!

The post Rotate the Boss appeared first on The Translucent View.

The veil that hides this Secret

Value emptiness above content
And you are free.
Value peace above drama
And you are at rest.
Value not knowing above concepts
And you are wisdom itself.
Value love above relationships
And you are bathed in love.

So simple.

If you hold the idea,
“I can’t get this,”
You create an unnecessary barrier.

It would be like a wave in the ocean saying,
“Oh, I don’t know,
I see all the other waves
But I just don’t think I can be wet.
There are some really big waves out here
But could I,
Little me,
With all my frothy foam,
Could I really be the Ocean?”

Dive deeply.
Become immersed in your Self!

This is an excerpt from my book How About Now: Satsang with Arjuna.Click here to purchase your copy today!

The post The Wave Is Already Wet appeared first on The Translucent View.

If the translucent revolution prevails, can we expect to see churches and synagogues closing? Will Grace Cathedral be remodeled as the world’s largest Ikea (come to think of it, the Ikea outside Stockholm could contain several cathedrals), with millions of translucent people set free and wandering aimlessly on Sunday mornings, filled with an ecumenical devotion? Absolutely not. Many translucents love their roots, their traditions, and their rituals but see them as flavors of a universal religiousness. Any religious ceremony reminds you that you are whole, not broken, and there is a divine and beautiful world waiting to dance with you in this very moment. All that is asked of you is to shake off the shackles of dusty belief and lose yourself in celebration. Any kind of gathering in spirit, be it a church, a synagogue, a Twelve- Step meeting, or a silent meditation, is an antidote to the dense smog of Iago-based thinking that overshadows our world. Television, advertising, the speed of life, even our families and our work can seem to pull us away from ourselves.

In the Iago-driven model of religion, we need an intermediary between divinity and us. The priest represents the dictates of the church, the moral code that we must follow, and reminds us of the consequences of our actions in the life to come. The translucent minister or rabbi reminds us of the power of now. Translucent religion brings us back to ourselves, to our innate divinity, and indeed back to its original meaning: religare, “to tie back.” The translucent religious leader has a specific role: to facilitate an environment that can be a fertile soil to bring people back to themselves. Mary Manin Morrissey described her role: 

I have a gift for speaking, and a gift of inspiration. I also have a gift of being able to see through the crust of our misconceptions about ourselves, so I don’t attach myself to people’s stories or their past experiences, but I help midwife their own understanding to a much truer sense of themselves that isn’t attached to or bound by or restricted by the experiences they’ve had or the stories they’ve been told about themselves. My role is to expand in the high remembrance of the whole being, which is in every person, to tell stories about that, to create services, music, and experience.

But ministry is not restricted to one person in a church that is alive with its original awakened core. Everyone becomes a minister for the mystery outside time to become embodied as love. That is not to say that everyone goes off to a seminary or rabbinical school, but that we each find our unique way to be a vehicle for the Big Love. Morrissey pointed out that in her church, one woman’s ministry was her motherhood and her passion to create a home, another’s was her business, and one man was a minister for the living truth through his photography. “He’s a wizard with light,” she told me. “That is when he is most alive and it’s his ministry.” When the leader of a religious gathering is willing to sit back in the saddle, to be a facilitator, almost a bystander, to the collective awakening, a spirit of democracy arises in religion that has often been dreamed of, but rarely realized.

At the Unity Church in Cincinnati, groups meet every night bringing people back into themselves from their complicated lives. On Saturdays alone, you can attend the Men’s circle, the Women of Wisdom circle, the Diamond Heart Work group, the Sacred Heart Circle. Each of these groups allows people to invoke the awakened teacher as a meeting rather than as a particular person. Eckhart Tolle’s book has reached more than two million people, and groups based on The Power of Now have popped up all over the world. The people who come together have read the same book, and they rely on their shared direct experience to be their teacher. The great benefit to gathering with other translucent people in this way is that the teacher emerges as the meeting itself. Anyone with a question, or needing support, can offer that to the circle and let the circle become the teacher. There is no guru in the room, spread evenly like hot butter. Rather, the body of the teacher is made up of everyone present and can only speak or move when all come together.

This is an excerpt from my book, The Translucent Revolution: How People Just Like You Are Waking Up and Changing the World, click on the link to purchase your own copy today!

The post The Potential Of Religion appeared first on The Translucent View.