to enjoy the pure pleasure of Paris, and *at the same time* explore 
the deepest reaches of your inner being, your desires, your path–

this is for YOU!

Join us on an adventure exploring the city. Join us in a deep presence exploration of who you are. Experience what it is to bring the two adventures together in synchronicity. Together, we will create the magic that happens whenever we take a city with presence. 

Helps you develop 6 important skills:

1. A relaxed, awakened mind.
2. The ability to fully welcome what life presents you.
3. The ability to find your inner strength when you need it. 
4. To see, hear, feel, smell, taste more subtle and rich loveliness.
5. Hear and act on what your body is trying to tell you.
6. The ability to integrate your deepest desires with meditation.

Our focus will be to create a penetrating meditation that extends to all areas of your life. In this weekend, we learn to allow our deep presence and awakened mind to take part in the way we eat, the way we talk to each other, the way we walk, the way we shop, the way we work, dance, drink tea, and every other activity that fills our lives. 

20 Results you can expect:

1. Feel free to just BE, even around others

2. Fearlessly give your gifts to the world, and reap the rewards for doing so

3. Develop skills that feed your spirit, mind, body, business and relationships

4. Possess high levels of clarity, vitality, and creativity

5. Attract inspiring and enriching relationships

6. Recognize opportunities when they are in front of you

7. Integrate your life for balance and extra energy

8. Sleep better than ever

9. Go on more daring adventures

10. Be a most valuable change agent in the world

11. Experience humanity in deeper, more meaningful ways

12. Hear music in a completely new way

13. Express yourself from your heart of power

14. Be your own teacher

15. See life like a baby without compromising your adult skillfulness

16. Tap into the secret to stay young for the rest of your life

17. Get things done with less stress

18. Trust in the invisible, unknown forces that predominate your life

19. Be at home in any environment

20. Discern how to go with the flow that is for your highest good

Weekend Description:

Day 1: Doing the City. A fun day of exploring some magic sites of Paris that take your breath away. We go on a tour of shops of master craftsmen. We eat fine food at a hidden away restaurant that offers the an extraordinary environment and cuisine. We go to ancient spiritual places filled with deep peace, walk the streets of the city, take in the different sites, sounds and smells of Paris. 
We intertwine these activities with presencing meditations so as to keep our energy powerful and our sensitivity fresh. 

Day 2: Deep Presence. This is the day when we dive deeply within. Together we go on an inner journey; using each other’s awareness to further our own sense of stillness and inquiry and heightened sense of who we are right NOW. We play with body movement, pure presence, and we develop the mind with powerful tools of inquiry. Deep Feast: For lunch, we eat a sumptuous, sensual meal as a meditation and communal celebration. 

Weekend Details
Date: June 25th, 26th 
Maximum Size Limit: 20 participants do to space limitations

Weekend Pricing
Entire weekend: Special price 145€ if by May 31st, 170€ thereafter
Day of Deep Presence (June 26th) 100€ by May 31st, 120€ thereafter

Pricing includes Deep Feast Dinner, snacks, pre-weekend assessment 

Lodging: If you are coming from out of town we have a VERY inexpensive housing solution for you. Please inquire.

Sign Up Now Seating is limited. As soon as you sign up, the weekend starts for you. You will receive an initial assessment which will get the ball rolling. This assessment will automatically focus you on those areas of your life that you wish to move forward, thus creating focus and energy in these important areas of your life.

The night involved many phone calls, coordination, alcohol, parties shut down by the police and other kinds of drama. In the early morning the drama was over, there was no need to run round and search for anything anymore and with that something changed.

The friends were finally able to simply be with each other; they had drugged and otherwise exhausted their resistance to closeness. I felt privileged to be a part of that; every space was full of unspoken love. It seemed like the whole evening lead to those moments. It was a lot of effort for lungs and livers.

It amazes me how complicated we can make simply being with each other even though it something that we deeply long for.

Many of our social rituals are habits that we have associated with allowing this state of closeness. Some of them are beautiful, elegant and relatively simple. Dance, music and campfires fall come to my mind. Others are messy and occasionally destructive like the night out I described above.

Then there are the subtler conditions we place on being. I will allow closeness if you belong to my church, religion or group. I will allow closeness if you conform to an appearance that matches my idea of what a friend looks like. I will allow closeness if you demonstrate sexual receptivity. I will allow closeness if you respect my authority. I will allow closeness if you laugh at my jokes…

So many conditions, it’s exhausting.

Not that I advocate simply getting rid of those conditions. They shape our social world with all its joy and despair. I do not think we can simply get rid of those conditions even if we really want to.

In fact it is already something to recognise that those conditions are in place.

The best we can do is to recognise that closeness, being is already there whether your conditions have been met or not. You are already intimate with the world.

When we cultivate closeness, presence, connection without agenda, without conditions then we begin to recognise the conditions that we normally place on this experience.

Then little by little we develop greater flexibility about how and where and with whom we can connect. The exhausting habits become less and less necessary.

That is what the Intimacy Experience is about. It is a minimal structure and safe space to enjoy the deep pleasure of simply being with each other, to remember how easy it can be.

Can you remember now?

It is spring in Paris and all around

Have you touched a leaf recently, felt the texture and delicacy of the unfolding life, noticed the subtle structure echo the whorls in your fingertips or closed your eyes to listen to the soft rustle in the breeze?

Perhaps you are too busy. You have more pressing engagements. You do not have time for leaves, even though their ability to store sunlight is key to our basic survival on this planet.

Most educated people have an idea of the challenges we face as a species and society. Climate change, dwindling resources, increasing consumption and growing population are at the top of a long list.

Along with these challenges there are also assumptions that to change direction and live well depends on subscribing to certain stereotypes and myths.

For example to be ecologically responsible:

• Requires painful sacrifice
• You’ll have to leave the city and live in the woods
• You’ll have to be a vegetarian
• Is unsociable, and you’ll lose all your friends
• Is depressing to always think about how the world is falling apart
• You’ll be a holier than thou asshole like many other greens you’ve met

There are probably a lot more like this that you could think of, variations on these themes, and altogether new themes.

If you’ve read this far then you almost certainly recognise that you are part of a system that does not match your desire for sustainability, for justice, for care, beauty or respect.

However what if there was another way forward that did not depend on these myths that bridges these contradictions, and opens as naturally from your own sense of fullness as the leaf opening in spring sunlight?

It is greater fullness, appreciation in a way which balances consumption with creation that interests me.

Fullness comes from the appreciation of what is already here rather than chasing goals and ideals. It does not depend on chasing bigger thrills, bigger deals, bigger homes or bigger orgasms.

The ideals, the goals that come from fullness are quite different from the ones that come from a sense of need. The moment to moment choices are different.

The interesting question is how to live with greater joy, satisfaction and fullness in a way which contributes to systems that benefit more than bank accounts?

If this questions interests you, if it is something that calls to you then let’s speak or send me an e-mail. It is close to the heart of what I explore as a coach.

You are going to make a difference anyway so make it a difference that you want to live with.

Of course I'd have preferred to get laid, but that was not something I believed would happen*…Easier to smoke (this is another kind of zombie article).

At parties you could easily find me hidden in a corner at the centre of a dense cloud. Friends and scavengers would visit me, happy to trade a bit of their cool for my charas. It became a part of my identity, Ed the head….

Parallel to this I was a keen Taiji student.  I didn't smoke before class. In some ways the two blended to gether in my identity as an alternative person. In other ways they were very, very separate.

In Taiji I discovered a deep sensuous pleasure in breathing simple air, in standing, in the dance of signals around me. I was sharp, light, peaceful, agile and alert.

Smoking usually left me sluggish, heavy, out of sync, super self conscious  and slightly paranoid.

I know that this is not everyone's experience, and some people will say I was smoking the wrong stuff…Possibly… but I smoked a lot, often at the source as I travelled across Africa, Asia and the Carribean, there were my early attempts at horticulture…not to mention my Dutch ancestry.

99% of the time Taiji felt a lot better than tetra hydra cannnabinol. It still took some time before I dropped smoking…. Who would Ed the head be without his spliff? How would he meet people without his stash? What about the 1% that was really good? What would happen to my superlative rolling skills?

I continued to smoke out of nostalgia. I smoked because I wanted the shared social ritual. 

These days when I'm around people smoking I enjoy the smell, but what I miss most is the chance to roll. The skill that was so tied up with the ritual has stuck with me the most persistently.

I did not think beyond what that social ritual was meant to achieve.

The social ritual was there to create trust, channels for sharing, closeness, wonder,  possibility. Our lives are full of social rituals that seek similar results. I lacked a way to say no to the surface ritual, and still honour the people, the hopsitality, the memories, and the desire for connection.

The Intimacy Experience is a social ritual too. It's goal is to share this quality of oppenness and wonder with a bare minimum, with nothing extra. It is not oppenness in exchange for anything. There is no need to perform, conform , worship, intimidate, seduce or be pleasing. It is a direct invitation to be with another in presence, in deep and authentic appreciation.

And in those moments of deep appreciation that cross the border between the habitual and the extraordinary something happens. The reflex need to perform, conform, worship, intimidate, seduce or please loosens.

In wonder at the extraordinary (most extraordinary because it is there all the time and we overlook it, like my old trade of Taiji for THC) there grows a subtle distance between awareness and habit. It happens naturally, without effort until that old constricting habit falls away like a snake shedding its used skin to expose the shining velvet smoothness below.

The old skin falls away because something clearly better is ready to take its place.

If you have a habit that you would like to shed contact me.  Like you I want to see the brightness beneath.

*I aplogise to any woman that I knew back then who did believe it would happen. Blinded by beliefs and hash I missed your signals, did not feel equal to your beauty, or was to paranoid to get off my arse and respond to your gracious invitation. You feature among the deepest regrets of my life even if you have completely forgotten my existence

However there are times when nothing is a pleasure. Nothing appeals, nothing attracts. You turn in frustrated circles, the taste of disillusion thick in your mouth, there is no escape from it…

There is no escape, perfect! If there is nothing you can do, do nothing.

In a society which worships more doing nothing is close to sin, with the accompanying guilt. If multi tasking is considered desirable how can there be value in untasking? At least listen to a recording, Eckhart, the radio….

It is easy to think of doing nothing as absence of action. But when you stop doing you find that there is a whole lot going on. Your heart beats, overlapping tides of hormones run through your body, you breathe, thoughts call for attention hand in hand with emotions. The ground supports you, air caresses you, light bathes you, and sounds fill the space around you. Something is aware of it all.

It is amazing really, often more than amazing, deeply blissful, it is there all the time though we often overlook it.

It is just necessary to cross the threshold between control and acceptance. For most of us that requires practise, that practise often takes the form of meditation. Then nothing becomes the most refined of pleasures.

Do not worry, however blissful it will get for you, you will not spend the rest of your life stuck to a meditation cushion with a serene (or self satisfied) smile on your face. You will get up and actively engage with life again.

If doing nothing cannot be a pleasure then life is a constant push and pull. There is no stillness.

Stillness is necessary to really make choices rather than react to situations.

If you want to change a habit, change your life do not fight with your reactions, make friends with nothing. Your desire to control may kick and scream, but nothing actually works faster.

In the Intimacy Experience we practise doing nothing in the presence of another person.

This is very practical as other people are situations that we have many automatic reactions to.

It’s more than practical, because as you know a pleasure shared is a pleasure doubled! See you there.

He’d say this regularly with increasing enthusiasm when he started drinking on a Saturday. He’d say it again with considerably less energy during his Sunday hangover with mounds of toast, bacon, eggs….

Every day you are offered pleasure. Advertisers will you offer pleasure, and I probably will too. You live in a forest of promised pleasures. Drink this, eat this, watch this, feel this…

They do not all satisfy us equally, but the people who sell them do not like to admit this.

When you pick the wrong pleasure for you it does not satisfy, however much you have.

One reason that its so easy to eat too much junk food is that provides calories, sugar, fat, taste but very little nutrition. Nutrition (which can include certain oils, protein trace elements, vitamins and perhaps something unquantifiable) is essential to real food, so you can eat as much junk food as you like without ever being truly satisfied.

I eat well, but I can watch Manga like some people eat nachos. As one episode ends in suspense I click on the link for the next one… again and again even if I know I need to sleep.

I’ve wondered why I do this. It starts with a desire to ret and relax, but the real hook for me is that I care for the characters. I want to know they’ll be ok. It’s not rational; I guess I’m a sucker for the big eyes.

Caring for cartoon characters is not truly satisfying, it’s not really care – they are no better off from my attention.  But I carry a desire to care that the stories stimulate but that they cannot satisfy any more than chips satisfy the need for protein.

The way the brain works the more you practise something, whether eating junk food or watching manga the better you get at it. The stronger the physiological response the quicker the learning cycle. Food and sex cause strong physiological responses which is why chocolate cake and porn can both be so addictive.

The better you get at your habit the stranger it feels to stop…

So if you are going to offer yourself pleasure, and I recommend that you do, consider if that pleasure will be nourishing or not. Does it nourish what is important to you, what you value?

I value care which is integral to my work as a coach.  Care is better nourished by spending a few minutes with the plants on my balcony, by cleaning a little part of the apartment, by writing a postcard, by calling a friend than hours in front of the computer watching big eyed cartoon characters even if they risk their lives for their friends. There are many ways I can express care that satisfy.

Some people create categories of desires or appetites that need satisfying. They may include health, fun, contribution, social connection, sex, creativity, expression, learning, income, adventure, exercise… This is fine and a standard coaching tool. A conscious overview of life is healthy and a useful tool in taking charge of direction.

I want to look at something smaller for now. Not a whole life but just a single unsatisfying habit.

If you pleasure yourself in ways that do not deeply satisfy, you are like most of the rest of our society who have been raised on aspirations that do not fit.

Take one of these unsatisfying pleasures. Don’t fight what you do, go deeper into it. Don't act on it or react to it. Feel the desire beneath the desire to spin your wheels in the ruts of habit. You already know where those ruts will take you, been there, done that, been left with a bad taste in your mouth. Do you want more of that or something else?

Go deeper than the desire. Feel the yearning before the habit, even if, especially if is so tender that it feels like your heart will break.  If you can even begin to sit with that then you have started opening choice as to how you pleasure yourself and how you will find satisfaction. Sit with it patiently and listen until it tells you what you really want inside, a bigger, more powerful YES.

Find the smallest action that is really aligned with the deeper appetite and take it. It may not be rational, it may not be profitable, it may not be fashionable… when it's time do it anyway. You don’t even need my permission, just fucking enjoy it fully.

Start to make this your new habit. It may fit for a long time, or you may grow out if it quickly, what is important is whether it suits you now.

If you have any questions or comments about this article please share them – below or contact me privately

*no chocolate was actually harmed or killed in the writing of this article

… and then something happens…

…Perhaps something small, a condescending plumber, an internet glitch, a child being difficult, or a boss acting like a child. In a moment the peace is gone, replaced with gut churning YOGA RAGE! The world is now brimming with incovenience and everything is in the wrong place.

Of course Yoga Rage is not quite road rage. It won't make the headlines because it rarely leads to shootings or stabbings. More likely there is  passive aggression that spills over into  sharp remarks instantly regretted, but which may have consequences that can last a lot longer.

In fact if you have yoga rage you can almost congratulate yourself. Not for losing it, but for having something to lose in the first place. If you have learned methods to quieten your mind, and you value the awareness that comes from such practise you are part of a very small but growing section of the population.

Yoga rage always comes with taking something from the outside personally. Something goes wrong and suddenly it's all about ME, and I HAVE EVERY REASON TO BE PISSED OFF. It seems perfectly reasonable in the moment.

In the big scheme of things whatever went wrong is really is not very significant, but when you are in it, yoga rage can take you a long way from your values or aspirations.

The peaceful states that come from Yoga, meditation, trance and other methods come from a concentration in which the sense of the little ME dissolves in concentration. You concentrate on yourself to go beyond yourself.

The problem is that this can be very self referential. In an extreme it can lead to:  Go to Yoga, feel good and defend yourself (savagely) against anything that brings you down.

Consumer bliss will always be brittle because it is so self centred.

One characteristic of the Intimacy Experience is that you focus your awareness on someone else. It was never about the little ME. Whenever you meet someone it is a reminder to go beyond your little self and gently invite them to come too.

Meditation moves naturally from the cushion to the street, to the office, to the kitchen and it goes without saying to the bedroom. 

It does not mean that there will not be tough days when life throws more at you than your equanimity can deal with. Still if you want to stabilise and strengthen your personal practise then the best thing you can do is include more people in it.

Of course the Intimacy Experience is not the only way to do this, service has a similar effect. I'd like to support some friends of mine who are working with orphans in Tamil Nadu. If you come to an Intimacy Experience in February I and mention Surya I will pass on any fees you give me to their humanitarian project. This applies to my self defence workshops as well.

We are nothing on our own.

There is a little insidious trap that comes from taking on acceptance as a catch phrase, or even from the direct experience of how transformation can occur naturally through genuine acceptance.

It's easy to start using acceptance as a tool. When acceptance becomes a tool to create change it is no longer really acceptance. There is now an agenda, and whatever is present is no longer as good as some wonderful projected future.

But you know that change occurs spontaneously in a state of acceptance, so you accept as hard as you can because the harder you accept the quicker the bastard will change.

It's a bit like trying to hug someone to death.

You have probably received and given smiles to and from people you don't quite like in this way. You may even have blamed them for returning your forced smile with a false smile..

You've probably also seen the saccharine sweetness of hardcore spiritual optimists determined to follow the party line and tell you that life is wonderful even when they don't feel, believe or experience it that way. It does n't have to be that way.

But if you can't fight it, and you can't accept it to death what can you do?

Sorry, there is nothing you can do which is great news because it means that there is nothing that you have to do. You don't have to accept or resist or be spiritual or aware or clever.

Since there's nothing you can do you may as well be gentle with yourself. Then you may find that things begin to transform and authentic appropriate responses come naturally.

In time you may even learn to gentle what you cannot accept to death. Then I'll have to write another article…