Dear Second Birth Community,

We celebrate your passage into your second life and welcome you into the sacred journey of deepening into the totality of who you are. The second birth marks the beginning of a whole new life and an extraordinary core healing that awaits your discovery.

The shift from perceiving yourself as a merely separate individual to realizing yourself as a non-separate embodiment of Being is immense. The consequences of this shift are deep and far-reaching, and are often confusing when experienced without the help of others who can look back at it with years of perspective.

Saniel and the Waking Down teachers have long agreed that second life orientation courses and appropriate support systems are crucial factors in reducing unnecessary pain and confusion, and in promoting whole-Being ease and wellness at this stage in your process.

Our purpose is to help you complete the healing of ancient wounds and conditioning, navigate the challenges of love, mutuality, and relationship, claim your uniqueness, and express your natural gifts and genius in the world.

To help you more deeply understand and orient to your new condition, we invite you join us for a very special Welcome To Your Second Life course (WTYSL), to be held March 4, 5, 6, 7 in Marin County, CA, just north of San Francisco. Click Here to Register

This course is a tribal gathering, celebration, and sharing that inspires and nourishes all who attend. It is a deep and powerful group exploration of the many joys and challenges that all practitioners face at this stage in the journey. Engaging this exploration together is often a life-changing event  sometimes even more so than the second birth transition itself.

Here are a few of the many topics we will be covering on the course:

The Wakedown Shakedown – the Transfiguration passage:

• What is it really about?
• What’s heal-able and what’s just who you are?
• How is the shakedown different for different people?
• How can you work with extreme feelings and experiences that arise?

Waking, Down, and Mutuality …

• What role does Waking play after the second birth?
• Is there a “bottom” to all the down exploration?
• Why the embodiment process is such a powerful need
• What is mutuality and how does it evolve after the second birth?

Your Deepening Unfoldment …

• Your own Divinely human emergence
• The joys and challenges of individuating
• The fulfillment of your unique purpose
• Discovering trust in self, trust in others, and trust in Being

This will be the twelfth WTYSL course we have presented. Many of those who have attended have gone on to train as Mentors, and many have become Teachers. While WTYSL is a prerequisite for Mentor Training, we want to make it clear that this course is not intended only for those who wish to become Mentors. This course is for everyone who has transitioned into the second life and wants to benefit from the immense cultural wisdom that has been collected about it.

As usual, there will be a high ratio of teachers to participants. The course will be taught by senior teachers. Morning large group meetings will focus on topics mentioned above (along with others that are important to you); afternoon small groups are designed to assist you in your most cutting-edge personal exploration. We’ll encourage the small groups that form during this course to continue meeting by telephone for a few months after the event for the sake of deepening support and mutuality.

COST

The cost for this event is $575 if paid by December 5, and $625 if paid after that date.

If you have already taken the course, you may repeat it for $400 if paid by December 5. Each course has a different flavor, depending on the teachers and the group that gathers, so we encourage you to take this course many times, if you are so drawn.

LOGISTICS

Your Second Birth must be confirmed to attend this event. If you are needing confirmation, please contact Linda, Sandra, or Van for a Second Birth interview. For contact info: email wakingdown@earthlink.net or call 888-741-5000.

The course will begin Friday, March 4 at 6:30pm, 10 AM – 5:30 PM on Saturday and Sunday, and 9 – 11:30am on Monday
Click here to Register. If you have any questions, please contact me at: Registrar@awakenedmutuality.org or 415-234-6701.

LODGING AVAILABILITY

We have rented a beautiful home for the retreat. There are rooms available for those coming from out of town. If you have an interest in staying in the house, please let me know. Rooms will be rented on a first come, first served basis. Click Here to Register.

CANCELLATION POLICY

If you cancel by January 1, $100 of your payment will be forfeited and the balance will be refunded. If you cancel between January 1 and January 29, $200 of your payment will be forfeited and the balance will be refunded to you.

If you cancel after February 18, $300 of your payment will be forfeited and the balance can be applied toward future IAM courses or events (there will be no refund).

The Teachers welcome you and encourage you to join us at this auspicious gathering. We look forward to sharing in the exploration of your new life!
Hope to see you there!

Warmly,

Hillary Davis
for The Institute of Awakened Mutuality

Please send your responses to Registrar@awakenedmutuality.org

Testimonials from those who have taken the Welcome to Your Second Life Course:

Walking into a room full of people in their second lives brought me an incredible feeling of warmth, aliveness, and room-to-be-me! It was like we had all moved to a new universe, with a brand new perspective, but we didn’t know there were others there with us, and we finally found each other! Being held by such loving, skillful teachers brought forth more gifts, more freedom to soar, and the awakened community welcomed me home, into my own Self, my own body. — Lena O’Neill

WTYSL was just what I needed. It embraced me in the full range and expression of my new life and was a balm of “OK-ness” that I needed to reassure me that I was on track.
— Cielle Miller

I’m amazed at what I’m glimpsing of mutuality. It is multi-dimensional and alive! WTYSL was one of the most powerful times of my life. I came back home a different person.
— Susan Albers

For me, WTYSL and DSL were more profound than my second birth!
— Dave Albers

WTYSL and DSL were both a level above my usual wonderful experiences at Transfiguration Retreats. Being with only second life people is an honor and deeply catalytic. Everything moves faster. I cannot recommend it highly enough. I learned much more clearly what Mutuality really means and the strategies I have used in my life to avoid this level of intimacy and vulnerability.
— Gautama Katzman

WTYSL was transformative in every way. I had no expectations, but I got more than I could have imagined. Highly recommended!!!
– Ken Dvoren

Please send your responses to Registrar@awakenedmutuality.org

2012 Retreat Information

Our 2012 Transfiguration Retreat will be hosted at Earthrise at IONS, one of the most beautiful and inspiring conference centers in the world. Located in Petaluma California, EarthRise is housed on 194 acres of beautiful rolling hills where hiking trails meander through pristine native live oak woodlands, and the surrounding open space offers panoramic vistas of the California landscape. Special features include a beautiful permaculture garden that provides fruits and vegetables for the kitchen, a labyrinth, a meditation hut nestled in a peaceful oak grove, a huge outdoor hot tub, and multiple sitting areas and lovely gardens for quiet contemplation.

link to 2012 TR Retreat registration page

General Information

Our annual 8 day Transfiguration Retreat is held in May each year.

These retreats are extraordinary gatherings of the community of Waking Down in Mutuality practitioners, mentors, and teachers. Our group will become a sacred container for the precious work that unfolds through our collective presence.

Our focus on Individuality and Mutuality will bring us into a deep consideration of how we tend to feel we don’t belong if we’re different. Celebrating our differences is so much a part of Waking Down in Mutuality but it can take some time and exploration to find the feeling of safety and belongingness, especially relative to spiritual groups. Our aim is to make a lot of space for us all to be who we are and come together in whatever ways are natural.

In the early mornings after breakfast, you can choose from special optional sessions, such as silent meditation, dancing your prayers, shamanic work, and explorations in conscious embodiment.

Mid-morning, we’ll divide into several larger sittings for gazing meditation and conversation about your process. After lunch, small group meetings will be held. In each of these groups, one or two teachers, joined by a mentor assistant, will facilitate 5 or 6 students in deeper individual work and mutuality in an intimate, highly personalized setting. The afternoon closes with a gathering called Nectar, an optional non-verbal space to allow the day to settle and integrate into our bodies. The Nectar sessions are led by various teachers who offer gentle music. People sleep, rest, or sit silently as they bathe in this peaceful time.

On many evenings we offer special optional events – parties, a creative expression night, presentations, and sittings. Our parties are always a wonderful and deeply treasured feature of our Transfiguration Retreats, and our creative expression nights are consistently stunning.

Mid-week, on Wednesday, everyone takes a day off to integrate and relax in their own ways. You might arrange an outing alone or with others. Or, you might simply choose to stay on the grounds and rest. Meals will be provided for those staying on site.

PREREQUISITES

Because Transfiguration Retreats are such powerful events, we require all participants to have previous experience with Waking Down in Mutuality, through both direct contact with teachers and also basic conceptual knowledge from reading. Prerequisites for those attending for the first time include a minimum of 5 sessions by phone with a Waking Down teacher, and/or attending at least 5 Waking Down sittings in person.

To learn more or register for this year’s Transfiguration Retreat, Click Here.

This week-long course is designed for those who, having awakened through the second birth, are embracing the conscious wound, and are ready to explore the supreme jewel of our work: awakened mutuality.

As you deepen in the post awakening shakedown, it becomes increasingly possible to feel and deal with the conditioning and wounds that have shaped and in many ways defined our lives—the wounds incurred in relationship. Only as we encounter and heal these wounds over time does awakened mutuality start to open—and it’s a whole new mystery waiting to be explored and integrated.

Deepening in Your Second Life offers the necessary orientation toward exploring mutuality and deepening your development. It promises to enrich your ability to hold and nurture both yourself and others. It is also an opportunity to meet with others at your maturity level in the process, get a sense of the potential of your own realized condition both individually and in relationship, and learn effective interpersonal skills that can be used to help guide others, whether in the Waking Down process as a future mentor or teacher, or in your own life setting at home or work.

DSL is a prerequisite for the Advanced Mutuality Skills course, and is offered for those who want to pursue the mentor/teacher track, as well as those who simply want further skill and integration in their own lives. This course fleshes out and richly develops the material presented in Welcome To Your Second Life (WTYSL), which is a prerequisite for DSL.

We will explore some of the following topics together, depending on each group’s particular needs and interests:

• Introduction to awakened mutuality
• Stages of awakening
• Trust, mutual vulnerability, awareness of your own patterns
• How and why to speak your truth as directly as possible
• Holding and containment, listening and feeling
• Coconut yoga & serving others
• Spiritual adolescence, individuating, mutual adulthood (authority and power)
• What are your gifts? What moves your heart?
• Your own journey through stages and traditions
• What led you here
• Your participation in mutuality
• Broken zones, broken souls, and broken trust
• Encountering brokenness in self and others
• Recognizing awakeness in the midst of brokenness.
• Revisiting the structure of the ego in the second life for the purpose of healing, integration, and individuation.
• Awakened post-hypermasculine use of supportive modalities to heal trauma and facilitate deepening and integration.
• Mutuality within hierarchy: Settings where power/authority issues will surface
• Mentoring: what it is and isn’t, the difference between mentoring and teaching
• Differences between spiritual, psychological, emotional, and physical issues

Morning large group meetings will focus on topics mentioned above (along with others that are important to you); afternoon small groups are designed to assist you in your most cutting-edge personal exploration.

2011 Retreat

Sunday, December 11th, 6:30PM – Sunday, December 18th. 11:30AM. This week-long course is designed for those who, having awakened through the second birth, are embracing the conscious wound, and are ready to explore the supreme jewel of our work: awakened mutuality.

** Click Here to Register Online **

As you deepen in the post awakening shakedown, it becomes increasingly possible to feel and deal with the conditioning and wounds that have shaped and in many ways defined our lives the wounds incurred in relationship. Only as we encounter and heal these wounds over time does awakened mutuality start to open and it’s a whole new mystery waiting to be explored and integrated.

Deepening in Your Second Life offers the necessary orientation toward exploring mutuality and deepening your development. It promises to enrich your ability to hold and nurture both yourself and others. It is also an opportunity to meet with others at your maturity level in the process, get a sense of the potential of your own realized condition both individually and in relationship, and learn effective interpersonal skills that can be used to help guide others, whether in the Waking Down process as a future mentor or teacher, or in your own life setting at home or work.

DSL is a prerequisite for the Advanced Mutuality Skills course, and is offered for those who want to pursue the mentor/teacher track, as well as those who simply want further skill and integration in their own lives. This course fleshes out and richly develops the material presented in Welcome To Your Second Life (WTYSL), which is a prerequisite for DSL. We will explore some of the following topics together, depending on each group’s particular needs and interests:

• Introduction to awakened mutuality
• Stages of awakening
• Trust, mutual vulnerability, awareness of your own patterns
• How and why to speak your truth as directly as possible
• Holding and containment, listening and feeling
• Coconut yoga & serving others
• Spiritual adolescence, individuating, mutual adulthood (authority and power)
• What are your gifts? What moves your heart?
• Your own journey through stages and traditions
• What led you here
• Your participation in mutuality
• Broken zones, broken souls, and broken trust
• Encountering brokenness in self and others
• Recognizing awakeness in the midst of brokenness.
• Revisiting the structure of the ego in the second life for the purpose of healing, integration, and individuation.
• Awakened post-hypermasculine use of supportive modalities to heal trauma and facilitate deepening and integration.
• Mutuality within hierarchy: Settings where power/authority issues will surface
• Mentoring: what it is and isn’t, the difference between mentoring and teaching
• Differences between spiritual, psychological, emotional, and physical issues

Morning large group meetings will focus on topics mentioned above (along with others that are important to you); afternoon small groups are designed to assist you in your most cutting-edge personal exploration. This event takes place over the course of eight days, beginning on Sunday evening at 6:30 P.M., and ending the following Sunday, at 11:30A.M. We take a full day off mid-week (Thursday) for rest, play, and integration.

The cost is $1275, with a $100 discount for early registration. Optional follow-up phone bridges are also available at $25 per session. Participants will receive further details including the nearest airport, suggested time of arrival, course schedule, maps, meals, and other logistical information.

Tuition Support is available for qualified participants

Click Here to Apply

We encourage you to join us at this auspicious gathering and look forward to sharing the exploration of deepening your second life!

Cielle Backstrom - Waking Down Teacher

As I worked with these teachers both in person and by phone for six months, Consciousness continued to drop more and more into my body, and my experiences seemed to match what Saniel described as a Second Birth Awakening, the birth of awakening to a new level of self awareness where Pure Consciousness or Witness Consciousness is body-centered. I asked for a Second Birth interview to check the progress of my deepening into this realization.

After talking for a few minutes, Sandra Glickman, the teacher that was interviewing me, asked, “Who are you?”

I thought for a moment in silence. “I am dual, both limitless and limited.”

“Tell me more,” she prodded.

To describe my unlimited nature was easy. I had been aware of it for many years. “I am unbounded, eternal, omnipresent. At the base of my existence is fundamental non-separateness, fundamental wellness, seamlessness. There is an “is-ness” or in “am-ness” that I am always identified with. It transcends, stands apart from all relative change and yet is the basis of all creation. I am that non-separate basis of all relative existence, all fields of change. I am That.”

“Tell me about your limited nature,” she commanded

That answer also seemed easy. My hands patted my thighs, “My limited nature is my body, my ego, my mind, intellect, emotions and feelings.” Something whispered inside that there was more to my limited nature. I wasn’t sure what that more was. I paused to see what would arise. My gaze was fixed on hers. I sank deep into her eyes. Words formed around a thought in a whisper. The thought was pure blasphemy, yet True. This Truth had to be spoken, and yet it seemed so unbelievable that I could only speak in a whisper.

“When speaking of my limited nature,” I paused, tears welling in my eyes, choking back the words. Then I dared to speak the Truth so new and tender, “I am also you.”

“Say that again,” she insisted.

“I am also you.”

The tears flowed now. My body shook with this recognition. The denial that had separated me from that Truth was like a thin pane of glass. I had dared to crack it.

Kali, the very thing I had feared the most in her, sprang into action. Sandra’s words became like hammers (or maybe they were skulls) to shatter that pane of glass, already weakened, “That is the Second Birth! That is the Second Birth!” She showed no mercy. I was sobbing, hyperventilating, transfixed by her gaze. She continued to wield her hammers, “Nothing else you have spoken of up until this time is the Second Birth. This Is!”

As the shards of the glass that had separated me from this reality fell around me, I exploded like a supernova. Suddenly I found my limited nature simultaneously centered in all things. I was all things. It was awesome, unbelievable, yet True. Namaste took on a new meaning. My eternal nature bows to itself as found in you (who?). I continued to shake, cry and hyperventilate. I grounded myself in her gaze.

“Yes, yes,” her voice softened, “this is who you are.”

I started to relax into this expanded state. I had often heard the expression “holding the space” for someone going through a “process.” I needed someone as big and powerful as she to hold the space I was now experiencing while I integrated this new level of Reality. After a short time, I realized that my unmanifest, limitless ground of Being could hold this new realization for and with me.

I felt the exhaustion of both having just given birth and having just been born. I realized that the Second Birth was more than just an embodied feeling-witness consciousness. It was a true and awesome knowing that I was not just the unmanifest basis of all creation, but also that I was centered in all manifest creation, all things simultaneously. Non-separateness was experienced on the level of the unmanifest, but also on the level of manifest creation.

—Cielle Backstrom (excepted from the book, Dancing in the Fire: Stories of Awakening within the Heart of Community by Bob Valine)

Presenter: Sandra Glickman
Senior Waking Down Teacher

“Intimate Inquiry” talk and exploration, from 2009 Transfiguration Retreat

Section 1 of 3
Date: 2009
File Size: 22.5MB
Audio Duration: 00:24:34 [h:m:s]

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Date: 2009
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Audio Duration: 00:24:34 [h:m:s]

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Date: 2009
File Size: 22.5MB
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Presenter: Sandra Glickman
Senior Waking Down Teacher

“Embodiment” talk and exploration, from 2008 Transfiguration Retreat

Section 1 of 3
Date: 2008
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Date: 2008
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Date: 2008
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Presenter: Sandra Glickman
Senior Waking Down Teacher

“Toward Deepening & Awakening” talk / exploration, from 2008 Transfiguration Retreat

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Date: 2008
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Section 2 of 3
Date: 2008
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Date: 2008
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Terms and concepts commonly used in the Waking Down in Mutuality process.

Waking Down is done in Mutuality with the larger community, so that actual comprehension of it is only possible in that context.

It is by nature an experiential teaching and it is not something that can be understood simply by learning the terms associated with the process. We suggest that you use the definitions given below as starting points for explorations in mutuality with others in the process. We especially encourage you to ask WDM teachers about their own personal experience of what you read here. In this way they can pass on to you what is in essence their unique oral commentary, one which eludes the written word and can put flesh on the dry bones of concepts. This is at heart a teaching conveyed in relationship.

With that said here are some basic definitions:

Compiled and edited by Michael Sanborn and Krishna Gauci.

AMS is designed to deepen your understanding and experience of mutuality, expand your discriminative awareness, and provide training in mentoring skills, should you choose to go in that direction. Whether or not you’re considering mentoring others, the experience of being in this course and learning these skills will support your own process of integration and evolution in your second life.

Mutuality is fundamentally about the recognition that self and other are not separate. The implications of that require us to relate with each other at a level we’ve never known before. Following are some of the themes we’ll be working with:

Mentoring
We’ve long since known that mentoring helps mentors even more than students. This makes the path of mentoring one of the most accelerated journeys of self discovery and self actualization we know of. We’ll be considering:

• The differences between mentoring and teaching
• Holding others as a sacred mystery
• The challenges of dual relationships (mentor/student and friend/friend)
• Working with shame, blame, and defensive reactions in yourself and students
• Working with core issues and discriminating gifts from brokenness
• When and why to suggest other forms of help for aspirants
• The extreme importance of coconut yoga
• When and why to suggest other forms of help for aspirants
• The extreme importance of coconut yoga
• Reparenting issues and your role in healing family wounds
• Understanding the power differential between you and aspirants
• Sexual ethics in the context of our work
• Confidence: trusting in yourself and standing in your own authority

Morning large group meetings will focus on topics mentioned above (along with others that are important to you); afternoon small groups are designed to assist you in your most cutting-edge personal exploration.

This event takes place over the course of eight days.