WORKSHOPS
Healing the Archetypes within - with Alistair Appleton
Meditation facilitator with Mindsprings and presenter of BBC's Escape to the Country series will discuss self-compassion for the traumas of gay life.
Mindfulness and ayahausca have the same effect: they force us to look very vividly at the way things are, by different paths they both give us a warts-and-all look at the true state of our psyches. For LGBT people that often involves looking at damage we experienced growing up LGBT in a straight world.
There is a quality of 'covert abuse' in many of our upbringings. the very core of our identity and sexuality is not acknowledged by the people who are meant to be nurturing us. often it is demonized. some of us may have been physically or explicitly abused because of it.
This damage and the way we have learned to cope with it has to be acknowledged in our spiritual work.
One very common response to such traumatic upbringing is to self-blame and feel shame (like Alan Downs mentions in the Velvet Rage) another strategy would be to mistrust any outside support and become incredibly self-sufficient.
These two strategies - self-blame or self-sufficiency - both can be beefed up (unintentionally) by spiritual practice. Mortification through exercise, diet, punitive puritifcations are fed by self-blame. The search for a state of freedom from desire, needs, dependency is propped up by defensive self-sufficiency.
I would argue that these are distortions of our human lot. we are relating and relational creatures that express our wholeness in loving, mutually aware networks: lovers, family, friends, strangers. We are reflected, supported and held in these. The scars of childhood abuse caused by our growing up LGBT do not heal outside of relationships.
My work in Shamanic, Buddhist and psychotherapeutic circles has taught me that wholeness - acknowledging and healing the full pantheon of our archetypal energies - cannot be achieved in isolation. Nor can be achieved if those scars and defences from childhood are not acknowledged, worked-through and transformed.
Practices of self-awareness (like mindfulness or, more dramatically, ayahuasca) plus the contemporary developments in the field of energy psychology (like AIT), give the LGBT community tools to first acknowledge and then heal the damage left by growing up LGBT in a straight family. We will be exploring that in my workshop.
Alistair Appleton
It was in 2000, alongside his successful career in television, that Alistair Appleton began his serious involvement in meditation. Trained mainly in the Buddhist tradition, Alistair took refuge with Lama Yeshe Rinpoche, the abbot of Samye Ling Monastery in 2000 and sat several retreats at this extraordinary monastery in the Scottish borders and in the meditation hermitage on Holy Island near Arran. In the following years, however, it was the simpler, more direct teachings of the Thai Forest tradition that caught Alistair’s attention. He studied at Chithurst Monastery in Sussex with the sangha around Ajahn Sumehdo and completed a retreat at the famous training monastery in Thailand, Wat Pah Nanachat.He also studied with the wonderful teacher Ajahn Amaro who is abbot at Abhayagiri Theravadan monastery in Mendocino County, California.
Since 2004, Alistair has also drawn inspiration from outside the Buddhist world, working with the shamanic practices of the Amazonian Indians in Brazil. This colourful and powerful practice has brought him back into contact with the more shamanic aspects of Tibetan meditation.
And in 2004, his Tibetan preceptor, Lama Yeshe Rinpoche requested Alistair to teach a meditation course for beginners up on Holy Island: his “ABC of Meditation”. Since then he has led numerous courses on mindfulness, compassion training, self-soothing and the creation of joy - many of these weekend courses held in the beautiful Abbey in Oxfordshire.
Since 2008, Alistair has also been training in the MA in Psychotherapy at the Minster Centre in London. This is an integrative training institute which looks at combining aspects of psychodynamic and humanist therapy and wonderfully complements the work in mindfulness and compassion, Alistair has learnt through meditation.
Alistair’s lively and non-dogmatic workshops seem to appeal to a very broad audience not usually attracted to spiritual practice and his easy manner brings the techniques of meditation alive for a practitioner living in the modern world.
http://alistairappleton.com www.mind-springs.org