The final day of the Phase II training (November 26, 2014). After the final interview (gathered in “The Final Interview“), the closing — the completion ceremony — was held for about forty minutes.
Entering the classroom, the seats had been arranged in a circle, with what looked like eight gifts placed at the center.
Each person thought of two things — what to leave behind with this class, and what to take away from it — and then took a seat. Saying what was to be left behind, and then saying what was to be taken away while receiving a gift, all eight of us spoke.
For my part, what I chose to leave behind were two things: the old patterns I had carried until then, and the expert’s mind I had experienced here (meaning: not to lose the beginner’s mind). What I wished to take away, I answered, was the skill learned here.
Opening the gift, inside each one was a saying chosen by the instructors (Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Joseph Campbell, and others) along with a power stone. With the eight stones lined up, one for each person, an atmosphere settled over the room that is hard to put into words.
My saying was from Rumi:
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
As mentioned in the entry on the final interview, what matters in carrying out bodywork is turning the gaze inward rather than outward. This was surely what these words meant to convey as well, and they felt exactly right for where I stood.
At the end, a photograph was presented from the students’ representative to the instructors. It was a group photograph, with fourteen people in it, including the four who worked behind the scenes.
Phase II was thirty-three days of training, and there was so much to learn that this blog could not cover all of it. A report is now required before Phase III begins in February 2015 (the deadline is the end of December 2014). Various things will be looked into along the way, and the plan is to post them here as they come.