An Essential Conversation is a conversation that is important to have. In the Diamond Approach path, an Essential Conversation is also part of learning how to bring our spiritual development, our contact with our True Nature, with us into conversation in our daily life.

A couple times each year DAA students join with people interested in spiritual development to have an Essential Conversation together.

All topics or questions are welcome, and freely participated in. The sharing in an Essential Conversation can go quite deep. Often the exploration focuses on what brought us to inner work, how our lives have been impacted by the Diamond Approach path, or something happening in our lives or in the world that we want to understand more deeply.

We welcome you to join us in a free-flowing conversation and get to know us, both students and teachers, more personally.

Date: Saturday 3 December 2022, 9.00 am to 11.00 am (Sydney time)
Location: Online – Zoom
Cost: Free

Cost: Free
Teacher: Ashley Wain

If you slow down and notice your inner life – the reactions to your inner and outer experience as they happen moment to moment – you will likely recognise that each event, each particular thing you encounter provokes some kind of negative response, perhaps a rejection, refusal, pushing away, dismissal, or an anxious grasping. We find it difficult, generally, to accept the world as it is. We are often, in subtle or gross ways, inside or out, at war with how things are.

What would it be to know a true acceptance of reality? Would that mean acquiescing to things that are harmful? Would it mean giving up ‘the good fight’? Or is true acceptance something deeper?

In the Diamond Approach we know acceptance as presence that feels like a beautiful blessing, a kind of grace. Join us to explore this rare and wonderful quality.

How would you live if you had real courage, if you had the strength to be truthful with yourself? What would your life be like if you were connected to your natural boldness, your inherent confidence, your true aliveness?

The spiritual journey can be one of excitement, independence and adventure, a thrilling discovery of our capacities. The quality of our nature that opens this possibility is essential strength, which gives us the sense “I can” — I can be it, I can make it, I can live it.

In this five day retreat we will look at reconnecting with the fiery force of our natural boldness and strength, through questioning our old assumptions and exploring our conditioning. We will learn to open up our anger and aggression in healthy ways. As we contact our essential strength, it helps us to meet the world in a courageous and daring way, and allows us to engage the inner journey with liveliness and passion.

From your experience of participating in this retreat you may understand how:

• Turning inward and inquiring into where we are in this moment can reconnect us with the fiery initiating force of our natural boldness and strength
• This quality is necessary to engage with liveliness and interest in the inner journey
• Experientially understanding our anger and aggression can open them up and transform them
• This force helps us dismantle old assumptions about strength, and liberates us from the conditioning of our personal histories, society, and other sources
• We can meet the world’s difficulties with an adventurous spirit

This five-day in-person and online retreat uses an experiential approach that includes teacher talks and spiritual practices such as open-end inquiry, meditation and awareness practices.

Teaching sessions generally start with a meditation practice followed by a specific teaching related to the theme of the retreat. You will have the opportunity to deepen your personal exploration through experiential exercises, usually in pairs or triads and sometimes in a small group, before re-joining the large group to process what has emerged in response to the teaching.

The day is divided into two, three-hour sessions with a 2-hour break for lunch.

If this will be your first retreat with DAA, there is an orientation via Zoom on Tuesday 10 January 2023 from 6pm to 8pm (AEDT). This is intended as a welcome and to optimise your retreat experience. 

EVENT DETAILS
Teachers: Jane Armytage, Ashley Wain, Frances Haynes, Grant Trewenack (Learn more about our teachers)

Dates: 13 – 17 January 2023, (5-day retreat)
NOTE: there is an orientation for new students joining retreat for the first time on 10 January 2023, 6pm – 8pm (AEDT) 

Cost: $1,155 (inc GST)
Location: The Woolcock Institute, Glebe, Sydney NSW (or online via Zoom)

Open to: General public and those considering joining the new Diamond Approach Australia ongoing retreat group 8 (DAA8)

Cost: Free
Teacher: Andreas Mouskos

We all want to feel that we are worthy and valuable.

But most of us depend on external things, events and people to give us that sense of value and self-worth. We feel valuable if people value us, or if we do something important, or if we have things that others value. So our sense of value and self-worth can easily be taken away or get lost depending on external factors.

Is there a way that we can establish ourselves in some kind of more fundamental sense of self-worth that remains unshakeable and
constant through the ups and downs of life?

Join us in this online event to explore this question that is so essential for all of us. We will touch into that indestructible and unassailable foundation of value that nobody and nothing can take away from us.