This is a 6 week on-line course available from Catherine Ann Jones. We will email you when your new lesson is available and you will be able to login and read each lesson on-line or print as they become available. Your first lesson will be available immediately after you enroll.
Are you merely surviving or are you living creatively?

Survival has become a dominant theme in today’s world – both personally and collectively.

One of the down sides of being locked into survival mode is that surviving sometimes takes over altogether – and the quality of living lessens or even ends. In order to live, and not merely survive, a sense of creative living must return. Creativity tends the mind and soul while survival focuses only on the body. Both are necessary for a full life.

Can one expand and no longer live solely a linear existence yet also embrace a creative journey? If so, how to step back from literal life and its daily demands, and see beyond? Can one view relationships not as possessions, but as life markers on the journey, as opportunities for the growth of the soul?

Might we discover alternative ways of creating and sustaining new forms of community which nurture our essential humanity? What are some ways of connecting us to ourselves, to each other, to the earth, and to the greater mysterious reality that is the source of all we know?

Exercises are designed to serve as catalysts in re-discovering a creative life beyond survival. This course invites you to explore within and discover a creative solution for the often overpowering problems of today. Beyond Survival is a way to return home, an invitation to the muse, a bridge back to creativity and to Self. For more info www.wayofstory.com

TOPICS COVERED
• Survival versus Living
• Letting Go Conditioned Patterns – both inherited and learned
• Accepting Dharma: Your Inner Calling
• The Many Names of Wealth
• Life as Relationship
• Create Your Life at Each Moment

“Beyond Survival is a gem! You seemed really in the flow, and the flow carries us into effortless inspiration. You took the time to give us many fascinating exercises, each one a doorway for the soul”.
- Dianne Skafte, Ph.D, Listening to the Oracle

“Catherine showed me how to write my way out of the darkness and into the Light”.
- Beth T., Athens, GA

“A spiritual experience as well as practical.”
- Gard J., Boulder City, NV

ABOUT CATHERINE ANN JONES
Catherine Ann Jones holds a graduate degree in Depth Psychology and Archetypal Mythology from Pacifica Graduate Institute where she has also taught. After playing major roles in over fifty plays, she wrote a play about Virginia Woolf (On the Edge) about her struggle with madness in a world gone mad, i.e., WWII. The play won a National Endowment for the Arts Award. Ten of her plays, including Calamity Jane (both play and musical) and The Women of Cedar Creek, have won multiple awards and are produced both in and out of New York. Her films include The Christmas Wife (Jason Robards & Julie Harris), Unlikely Angel (Dolly Parton), and the popular TV series, Touched by an Angel.

A Fulbright Research Scholar to India studying shamanism, she has taught at The New School University, University of Southern California, Pacifica Graduate Institute, and the Esalen and the Omega Institutes. Her book, The Way of Story: the craft & soul of writing, is used in many schools, including New York University writing programs. Ms. Jones lives in Ojai, California, and leads The Way of Story and Heal Yourself with Writing workshops throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. Beyond Survival is her third online course for www.dailyom.com. Or go to www.wayofstory.com

Catherine will be a speaker at GATE 2 this weekend.

In Rajasthan, India, an extraordinary school teaches rural women and men — many of them illiterate — to become solar engineers, artisans, dentists and doctors in their own villages. It’s called the Barefoot College, and its founder, Bunker Roy, explains how it works.

There are almost 1 million homeless children in this country, up 18% from the start of the economic downturn. One woman, a school principal in Las Vegas, has successfully taken on this problem and, with the help of community members, solved it. This is all the more remarkable in a city with the highest foreclosure and unemployment rates in the US. What problem can you  and your fellow residents help to solve in your local community?

A Visit to Kirina’s New Music School from PlayingForChangeFoundation on Vimeo.

The Music School of Kirina is the latest music school created by the Playing For Change Foundation. It opened its doors in October 2010. Every week more than 300 kids attend free classes in kora, balafon, djembé, talking drum, dance, musical theory, traditional History, English and French. Kirina is a village whose musical traditions have been passed down through generations since the 13th century. The school is designed to preserve and transmit a unique cultural knowledge and create a better future for the new generations of Kirina. This video invites you to visit the school, see its students and teachers at work and meet some of of the leaders of the project such as Toumani Diabaté, legendary kora player from Bamako, Mali.

In life, we often carry excess personal baggage from our past that prevents us from living fully in the present moment, accessing our creativity and generally enjoying life to the fullest. We may try reading books, meditation, attending workshops and other techniques to get free of these brakes on our life. If you or anyone you know may be in this exploration, you may want to check out the deep transformative work of Rob and Thessa Egan’s Alchemy Techniques.

Rob had a spiritual awakening at Findhorn in Scotland. He then trained as a trauma therapist, Sivananda yoga instructor and is a Chi Kung practitioner. He worked For many years, with associates from around the world, and conducted extensive consciousness research, met Thessa and together they co-founded Alchemy Techniques.

Thessa is an experienced therapist in many modalities including trauma healing, nutrition, allergy therapy and herbalism. She says about her work, ‘I see my role as teacher in Structural Self Inquiry as one of guide, and fellow traveler along the path.

Alchemy Techniques provides a set of effective tools to move from experiencing the clouds of past traumatic experiences to the ‘sunshine’ of core expression. Some of their students have described this process as being like ‘falling in love with life’.

The more advanced levels their work becomes explores the nature of experience, identity, perception and consciousness. This process can lead to an understanding and experience of who we are at our deepest levels, which is then integrated into daily life.  The experience at this level can be described as a path of self realization eventually resulting in the fusion of pure being and pure awareness at all levels of consciousness.

For a first hand experience of Alchemy Techniques training, you can sign up for free access to three hours of free online videos and a workbook on their site.

Here is a 30 minute interview I conducted with Rob and Thessa about a year ago that will provide further insights to the background and a description of their work.