Upcoming Events

Heart Yoga and Sacred
Activism: An Initiation into the
Sacred Marriage

Register Here

“Fuse the powers of the sacred heart with the energies of the body, and you can transform everything.”
- Teillhard de Chardin

“The Spirit shall look out through Matter's gaze
And Matter shall reveal the spirit's face
And all the Earth become a single life.”
- Sri Aurobindo

COURSE OVERVIEW:

Heart Yoga and Sacred Activism: An Initiation into the Sacred Marriage, fuses together Andrew Harvey's vision of Sacred Activism as described in his new book The Hope: a Guide to Sacred Activism, and Andrew Harvey and Karuna Erickson's pioneering new yoga, as detailed in their new book Heart Yoga: the Sacred Marriage of Yoga and Mysticism. From the sacred marriage of these two interrelated visions, Andrew and Karuna have constructed a template of initiation that mirrors the rhythms of the ancient mysteries of India, Egypt, and Greece.

Andrew will be our mystical guide and our guide into Sacred Activism. Karuna will be our guide into the profound way in which a mystically inspired yoga can provide the tender strength and illumined power that creates a perfect container for each of the three stages of the initiation. Over the years, they have evolved a seamless way of interweaving mystical and yoga teachings that mirrors the Sacred Marriage in its beauty, grace, inspiration and empowerment.

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

This course offers a five-day initiation into the birth of the divine human, through the fusion and sacred marriage of Andrew Harvey's vision of Sacred Activism and Andrew Harvey's and Karuna Erickson's Heart Yoga. They present their united vision of Sacred Activism with Heart Yoga, a unique interweaving of ancient wisdom traditions with classical yoga practices that can sustain and inspire Sacred Activism. This course is an opportunity to join devoted teachers in a three-part initiation that unfolds the mystery of divine embodiment and provides the fuel and wisdom for Sacred Activism.

This initiation will open your heart to love, strengthen and infuse your body with light, and deepen and inspire your yoga practice (whatever your level of experience) as well as your commitment to sacred service. You will experience the profound union of the radiant body with the awakened heart, and the love, peace, and sacred passion that is birthed from this marriage.

When yoga practice is infused with the inspiration of sacred texts and poetry, and is married to the most powerful meditations of the embodiment of the light, yoga becomes a way to experience the great mystery of birthing the divine in the human. Our initiation will be both an experience of the journey into divine embodiment, as well as a prayer for all human beings to enter into the fullness of this birth of the divine human. This course will provide the fuel for acting with the peace, passion, stamina and inspired focus that we all need to be authentic sacred activists capable of co-creating with the Divine a new humanity and a new world.

Heart Yoga is grounded in the universal mystical vision of the Sacred Marriage, the marriage of spirit and body, transcendence and immanence, heaven and earth, masculine and feminine, profound contemplation and sacred action, that is continually birthing the cosmos through the power of radiant love. In this workshop, the vision of this marriage will be explored by unfolding the Five Great Joys that emanate from it: the joys of transcendence, creation, love for all beings, Tantra, and service. For each of these joys, beautiful combinations of yoga postures with sacred poetry, meditations, and visualizations drawn from the classical mystical traditions will be offered. These enable each joy to be experienced simultaneously in the illumined mind, ecstatic heart, and conscious body.

The three stages of our initiation mirror the unfolding rhythms of the ancient mystery schools and reinterpret them for our modern crisis. In the first stage, we will unfold the glory of the sacred marriage of transcendence and immanence that makes possible in and through the Death of our world crisis the Birth of the Divine Human. In the second stage, armed and inspired with the Five Great Joys, we will undertake together a descent into the collective shadow causing the death and the collusion with it of our personal shadow. In the third stage, we will marry the ecstatic vision of the Sacred Marriage and the Five Great Joys with the dark wisdom of the descent into the collective and personal shadow, to birth the divine human in the sacred marriage of opposites that fuels mature Sacred Activism and a radical wise commitment to transforming the planet.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

Our fundamental objectives are to give all who come to this initiation both the sacred wisdom of the Sacred Marriage and practical tools to work with in the core of ordinary life, and to be able to embody and express this wisdom at ever greater levels of joy, commitment, and inspired action.

Karuna and Andrew believe that all mystical seekers now need to fuse their inner practice with outer service, and all activists now need to marry their heroic efforts with the deepest and most practical sacred practices. The initiation they are offering can help birth both kinds of people, who are already doing such important work, into the next level of divine embodiment and its expression in Sacred Activism.

SCHEDULE:

Stage One of the initiation will be unfolded on Days One and Two; Stage Two on Days Three and Four; and Stage Three on Day Five.

Day One (morning) ~ Stage One
The vision of the Sacred Marriage
Heart Yoga
Sacred Activism
The birth of the divine human in and through our world crisis

Day One (afternoon) and Day Two ~ Stage One
The experience of the unfolding in mystical teaching and Heart Yoga of the Five Great Joys:
The Joys of Transcendence; Creation; Love for all Beings; the Tantra of Tenderness; and Service
Group meditation on and invocation of the new divine humanity and the new world it will co-create with the Divine.

Day Three ~ Stage Two
The descent into the collective shadow
The five inner saboteurs that keep us paralyzed, disempowered, and radically ineffective in the face of crisis: denial; disillusion; despair; dread; and death wish
This descent will be accompanied by a re-experience of the joys of transcendence and creation to sustain and inspire us on our journey.

Day Four ~ Stage Two
The descent into the personal shadow and the
ways it interlinks with, colludes with, and darkly sustains the collective shadow.
We will concentrate on five aspects of the personal shadow: ignorance; delusion; greed; trauma; and addiction to comfort.
To inspire and sustain us on this descent we will re-experience the joys of the Love for All Beings and the Tantra of Tenderness.

Day Five ~ Stage Three
After experiencing Stage One and its vision of the Sacred Marriage, and the descent of Stage Two into the collective and personal shadow, in Stage Three we will marry the glory of the light with the dark wisdom of the shadow, to complete our journey into divine embodiment and the full transformative power of Sacred Activism.
The day will begin with a seven-part body prayer which enshrines all three stages of the mystery of the birth.
We will continue with the Seven Laws of Sacred Activism

     - Law of sacred practice
     - Law of surrendering the fruits of action to the divine
     - Law of recognizing evil
     - Law of the alchemy of anger
     - Law of constant, humble shadow work
     - Law of joy
     - Law of networks of grace

We will end by re-experiencing the fifth Joy of Sacred Service, that will focus everything we have undergone and integrated in a blaze of commitment to going out into the world as transformed and fully embodied divine human sacred activists, to co-create with the Divine the Sacred Marriage on Earth.

FACULTY BIOS:

Karuna Erickson has lived in the mountains of British Columbia with her husband and family for forty years. She has been a devoted yoga teacher and psychotherapist since 1970. She received her bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and a Master’s in Social Work from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the director of the Heart Yoga Center, a registered yoga teacher training school with Yoga Alliance. She has trained many yoga teachers for over twenty years. She teaches yoga internationally, interweaving Sufi poetry and Buddhist practices of mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation as well as her experience as a psychotherapist into her classes. She leads annual retreats, yoga teacher trainings, and workshops in Canada, the U.S., Bali, and Costa Rica. Karuna also teaches courses with Andrew Harvey internationally. She has assisted Rodney Yee and Judith Hanson Lasater in yoga workshops and considers them, along with B.K.S. Iyengar and the Dalai Lama, to be her most influential teachers.

Andrew Harvey was born in South India in 1952, where he lived until he was nine years old. It is this early period that he credits with shaping his sense of the inner unity of all religions and providing him with a permanent and inspiring vision of a world infused with the sacred. He left India to attend private school in England and entered Oxford University in 1970 with a scholarship to study history. At the age of twenty-one, he became the youngest person ever to be awarded a fellowship to All Soul’s College, England’s highest academic honor.

By 1977, Andrew had become disillusioned with life at Oxford and returned to his native India, where a series of mystical experiences initiated his spiritual journey. Over the next thirty years he plunged into different mystical traditions to learn their secrets and practices. In 1978 he met a succession of Indian saints and sages and began his long study and practice of Hinduism. In 1983, in Ladakh, he met the great Tibetan adept, Thuksey Rinpoche, and undertook with him the Mahayana Buddhist Bodhisattva vows; later, in 1990, he would collaborate with Sogyal Rinpoche and Patrick Gaffney in the writing of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. In 1984, Andrew Harvey began a ten-year-long exploration and explication of Rumi and Sufi mysticism in Paris with a group of French Sufis and under the guidance of Eva De Vitray-Meyerovitch, the magnificent translator of Rumi into French.

In 1992, he met Father Bede Griffiths in his ashram in south India near where Andrew Harvey had been born. It was this meeting that helped him synthesize the whole of his mystical explorations and reconcile Eastern with Western mysticism. In 2005, in the historic Santuario de Guadalupe in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Andrew Harvey delivered his vision of the contemporary crisis now confronting us in today’s world and its potential solution in what he has termed “Sacred Activism,” which he sees as the culmination of his life’s work. This extraordinary occasion was made into a documentary film by the Hartley Film Foundation and is available on DVD at www.hartleyfoundation.org.

Andrew has taught at Oxford University, Cornell University, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, the California Institute of Integral Studies, and Wisdom University, as well as at various spiritual centers throughout the United States. He was the subject of the 1993 BBC film documentary The Making of a Modern Mystic and also appears in Rumi Turning Ecstatic and The Consciousness of the Christ: Reclaiming Jesus for A New Humanity.

Andrew is Founder-Director of the Institute of Sacred Activism. He is the author and editor of over 30 books including: The Return of the Mother and Son of Man: The Mystical Path to Christ, and The Direct Path.

REQUIRED READING:

Andrew Harvey, The Hope: a Guide to Sacred Activism; Hay House, 2009

Andrew Harvey and Karuna Erickson, Heart Yoga: the Sacred Marriage of Yoga and Mysticism. North Atlantic Books, May 2010

Tuition & Accomodations

Residential: $1699, early registration until April 20, 2012 then $1899
Accomodations are shared (double and triple, first come/first served) Includes 5 nights lodging, Tues – Sat, and three meals a day, beginning with b’fast Wednesday, ending with brunch Sunday.

Commuters: $999 early registration until April 20, 2012 then $1099
Includes 3 meals a day