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.

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.

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.

Dear Friend,

I feel very strongly about the importance of the message that I will be sharing on a free teleseminar tonight, Tuesday, March 22 at 5:30pm (Pacific).

The theme of the call tonight is Birth 2012: Co-Creating a Planetary Shift on December 22, 2012.

As you know, I have intuited all these years that “our crisis is a birth” and that we are called to “gentle” the birth toward a planetary culture, or undergo even worse catastrophes. It has always seemed to me that an actual Planetary Birthing Experience, celebrating what is working, loving and innovative is vital to our emergence now. Finally, the time has come. I am working with Stephen Dinan of the Shift Network to celebrate this process by convening, “Birth 2012″ on December 22, 2012, a live multi-media global celebration of what is working that we would like to invite everyone to contribute their energies and creativity toward to help create a new civilization. Please join me tonight for this Activation Day call.

For more info and to register for the free call go to: https://shiftnetwork.infusionsoft.com/go/2012a/FCE/

From AOL, Susanna Baird Contributor

Super Cooper cannot sling webs. He does not pilot an invisible airplane, communicate telepathically with sea creatures or leap tall buildings in a single bound.

Super Cooper does possess a guileless enthusiasm, a proper red superhero’s cape and an open-book approach to reporters not usually found in men of steel.

He readily told AOL News about his latest act of derring-do-good.

“We saw someone next door and we said hi. And we gave him flowers. And we tell him he could come to our school.”

Courtesy of Kristal Burns

Preschoolers at Missoula Community School in Missoula, Mont., perform weekly acts of kindness dressed as caped superheroes.

AOL News managed to extract the name of Super Cooper’s favorite fellow caped crusader, Eliza, before Super Cooper handed the phone to his preschool teacher and returned to his toys.

Cooper Spataro, 3, and his classmates at Missoula Community School in Missoula, Mont., are “superheroes of kindness,” performing weekly acts of good will that include cleaning school windows and delivering paper flowers to residents of an assisted living community.

Teacher Kristal Burns came up with the concept after discovering Laura Miller, aka Secret Agent L.

Miller, whom AOL News profiled in August, performs frequent small acts of kindness using her secret agent pseudonym, leaving small notes and treats in public places for passers-by to discover. She encourages others to embrace the random good deed and to share their under-the-radar benevolence anonymously via her website.

“I was intrigued,” Burns said. “We were talking about how wonderful it would be to teach the kids to do that. At the same time, we love superheroes and we want to be superheroes, but superheroes often hit and punch. Why don’t we be superheroes of kindness?”

The kids loved the idea, even after Burns explained that they would not be fighting bad guys; even after she told them that they could not “fly” on slick ice, only on dry pavement; and especially after a crafty parent fashioned capes for the entire class.

Burns’ students, who range from 3 to 5 years old, most recently took part in the mission Cooper described, an idea Burns concocted when a shop opened in the neighborhood.

“There was a new store that moved in called Upcycle that takes recycled materials and turns them into bags. We welcomed them into the neighborhood and asked them if they’d like to come in,” she said.

While the superheroes’ acts usually benefit those outside school walls, one of the primary goals of the kindness effort is to encourage development of empathy, sometimes in short supply among preschoolers who don’t want to give up their truck, their doll or their purple crayon.

Since the kids became superheroes, Burns has noticed a change.

“It has made a world of difference,” she said. Bickering is on the wane; helping is on the rise.

“We’re not telling them that they have to help someone who needs help, but now they just see it.”

Unexpectedly, the small superheroes have spawned adult sidekicks in their community.

“They’re getting these random letters from people. … Can we go on a mission with you?” Burns said.

“They’re not too small to make a difference. That’s been a really neat outcome of this. They’re just being their kind selves, and people are so thankful.”

Put more Good in your life!  Follow AOL’s Good News on Twitter and Facebook.

Another example

“I am a special education teacher in a primary school. I try to teach the children in my class about kindness and compassion. I reward random acts of kindness that happen in my classroom. When a student does something to help one of their peers, out of the goodness of their heart, I will acknowledge it and let them go in to my ‘kindness box’ to pull out a little surprise. The students get excited when someone is recognized for being kind and they congratulate that child for caring enough to help someone else. It is amazing how the children in my classroom are always well behaved and have a caring nature from just being kind.” — mpg85