Field Trips Explanations
Advanced Intuition Class Group Participation... ... and Field Trip.
Now you can practice your intuitive abilities while participating
in a group experience in the Montana landscape.
(Following is an example class, all may not follow this format.)
This class is for any past students of my intuition classes or other
people already familiar with their intuitive processes. Now that we
have begun to learn how our intuitive perception works, we can fully
engage our intuition in our lives with natural process, our bodies,
relationships, places, animals, and the environment. Shared group intention
will deepen this process. This class will focus on the intuitive exploration
of a sacred landscape. The class will start in the morning, indoors.
We will explore and refine intuitive and sensory awareness techniques
in small groups and in the large group. This is to reactivate intuitive
awareness and to build a group cohesiveness, a foundation for the group
exploration. As we bring ourselves into a collective inquiry, we will
also elicit information relevant to each of us as individuals. Each
person will be encouraged to clarify what personal intentions and goals
they bring into the intuitive process. We will cultivate a blending
of collective and individual intention to discover an overall understanding
of the landscape and facilitate personal expansion and learning. After
the morning session, the class will travel to a site near Helena, for
on-site exploration and inquiry. This will be a guided group experience
of a science of qualities, reaching towards a collective understanding
of our landscape and how we interact with it.
“Cultivating the intuition means deliberately practicing methods
of investigation that pay attention to the feelings and images that
arise in the course of systematic encounters with natural processes,
leading to an experience of wholes and their qualities. The whole may
be an organism whose distinctive properties one seeks to understand
so as to relate to it appropriately; it may be a consistent diagnosis
that emerges from a set of symptoms, from whose qualities arises insight
into appropriate treatment; it may be a landscape whose qualities are
consistent with particular uses and not others; and so on. That practice
requires both keen observation and the use of methods akin to meditation,
emptying the mind of preconceptions so that the intuition can work freely
with sensory experiences and organize them into meaningful wholes. It
is necessary to allow the spell of the sensuous to work its magic on
the imagination, leading to a deep understanding of the nature of that
which is being encountered.” - David Abram 1996 - “The Spell
of the Sensuous”
Here’s some thoughts from Brian
Goodwin and his article, “The science of
Qualities.” “We all have encounters with nature continually,
though we can be very quick to transform them into something familiar
and mundane and within our control rather than requiring our sensitive
participation in learning to respond appropriately. Experiencing a new
landscape often arouses that sensitivity.” In a sense we are learning
to participate with the landscape, nature, with complexity... “Participation
has two aspects. One is the sharing of experiences and insights within
a group engaged in collective inquiry. There is extensive literature
that describes the procedures and outcomes of such cooperative inquiry
or participatory action research in different contexts (Reason 1988;
Heron and Reason 1997). Those procedures share with scientific investigation
the use of intersubjective consensus as a means of distinguishing those
aspects of experience and insight that are common to the group from
those that are idiosyncratic to individuals. The idiosyncratic or the
particular is important in relation to the personal narrative of the
individual. That which is common can be taken as a universal for that
group, revealing a shared aspect of the encounter with real process
in which the group participated. The process is similar to that in which
scientists seek to describe and make sense of, say, an emergent property
of a complex system, but now there is no constraint on what is allowed
as legitimate experience, so that secondary qualities are included as
well as primary ones.”
Though that’s a bit technical, it means that our experiences are
legitimate, we’ll use them on Saturday to further our own group
understanding and awareness... For the next day or two I’d like
you to consider what your personal intentions or goals are for Saturday.
Was it something about the flyer that caught your attention, a personal
interest or curiosity. Whatever your interests are, be aware of them,
describe them to yourself, make them conscious. This will help us move
together as a group and begin to differentiate what parts of our experiences
on-site relate to the group or to our personal intentions. Also I’d
like you to consider doorways, or entryways, or portals... When we pass
through a door, even a door in a house, we enter into a different space.
There may be physical differences, perceptual, emotion mental, etc.,
maybe even simply energetic differences. Our whole beings have great
sensitivity to these differences, especially when we enter into a different
space, we feel this shifting, notice the changes. It’s easier to
sense these changes before we accommodate to them. We often sense a
person’s energy in their home for instance when we first enter
into their space. In the same we we will be working with our awareness
and our sensitivity on Saturday, entering into some spaces that may
be different, perceivably so. The doorways with which we enter these
spaces aren’t always concrete or physical, but may only be recognized
by our response. So an exercise I’d like you to do is to pay attention
to the doorways, the portals, you encounter the next few days. See if
you can be aware of the differences you are entering into, and by contrast,
also those you are leaving. Notice those changes, bring your awareness
to these, notice, pay attention. We can do this with physical doors
and it helps us recognize the felt changes that occur when we enter
through non-physical doors. This is more noticeable when you sense beforehand
a place you are going, a friend’s house, a familiar place, a new
territory, we have an expectancy in these places. Stop and feel then
before entering these spaces, recognize what you are experiencing, sensitize
yourself. Then with all your self, enter and enjoy where you are going,
enjoy that shift. This can be a joyous awareness that we do with increased
consciousness...
I’ll see you out in the field - Patrick
Contact Patrick Marsolek at 406-443-3439
or e-mail to research@irfs.co for more information or questions about field trips