Staying Awake: The Ordinary Art (6CDs)

Sounds True, Louisville, CO, February 2012

Availble on Sounds True

AUDIO PROJECT DESCRIPTION

This is a set of live teaching conversations that explore the mysterious and ordinary and necessary topics of staying awake and holding nothing back. I'm excited to have this opportunity. My aim is to use this project as a way to draw on and synthesize many years of teaching, weaving together stories, metaphors, poems and commentaries into one conversational journey. As such, this experience is not focused on any one book but on a lifetime of teaching themes about the gifts and challenges of being here.

Each CD explores three topics and each topic is opened with a story, poem, quote, or metaphor that allows me the chance to offer some commentary and reflections that hopefully deepen the conversation. Each topic introduces a living dynamic inherent in being alive and staying awake. And to help you personalize these topics, to see where they might live in your own lives, I offer a variety of reflective exercises at the end of each CD, which you can explore at a later time.

In essence, staying awake is an applied art of spirit. It is not something we can manipulate, but only live into. Each of us is born instinctively awake and yet it takes courage to stay awake, to remember that all we encounter is real. As such, staying awake is a timeless practice we must ultimately enter alone, but one we can enliven together. The journey back to wakefulness is an invitation each day to delve into what it means to be alive. We all have the chance to wake and love, to welcome the gift of surprise and inhabit our time on earth. To do this, we must wake, more than once, in order to learn the ordinary art of living at the pace of what is real. Regardless of what we do or where we live, the journey is the same: How to open our pain and listen to all that matters, so we can make it through and find joy from day to day.