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.

by Rabindranath Tagore

The more man acts and makes actual what was latent in him, the nearer does he bring the distant Yet-to-be. In that actualisation, man is ever making himself more and yet more distinct, and seeing himself clearly under newer and newer aspects in the midst of his varied activities, in the state, in society. This vision makes for freedom.

Freedom is not in darkness, nor in vagueness. There is no bondage so fearful as that of obscurity. It is to escape from this obscurity that the seed struggles to sprout, the bud to blossom. It is to rid itself of this envelope of vagueness that the ideas in our mind are constantly seeking opportunities to take on outward form. In the same way our soul, in order to release itself from the mist of indistinctness and come out into the open, is continually creating for itself fresh fields of action, and is busy contriving new forms of activity, even such as are not needful for the purposes of its earthly life. And why? Because it wants freedom. It wants to see itself, to realise itself. [...]

Thus is man continually engaged in setting free in action his powers, his beauty, his goodness, his very soul. And the more he succeeds in so doing, the greater does he see himself to be, the broader becomes the field of his knowledge of self. […]

Those who have fully realised the soul have never talked in mournful accents of the sorrowfulness of life or of the bondage of action. They are not like the weakling flower whose stem-hold is so light that it drops away before attaining fruition. They hold on to life with all their might and say, “never will we let go till the fruit is ripe.” They desire in their joy to express themselves strenuously in their life and in their work. Pain and sorrow dismay them not, they are not bowed down to the dust by the weight of their own heart. With the erect head of the victorious hero they march through life seeing themselves and showing themselves in increasing resplendence of soul through both joys and sorrows. The joy of their life keeps step with the joy of that energy which is playing at building and breaking throughout the universe. The joy of the sunlight, the joy of the free air, mingling with the joy of their lives, makes one sweet harmony reign within and without.

~Rabindranath Tagore, from “Realisation in Action”

Tagore was a legendary Bengali poet, philosopher, educationist, essayist, musician, novelist and playwright and was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913 for Gitanjali.nRabindranath loved and admired Gandhi Ji and it was he who named the father of the nation “Mahatma” which is Sanskrit for great soul.

His political views were complex. He opposed imperialism and supported Indian nationalists evident in many of his works. However, he also Rabindranath Tagore was under constant surveillance of the British intelligence of the pre-independence era that viewed the Nobel laureate as a close associate of underground revolutionaries.

In 1915, Tagore was knighted by the British Crown. He later returned his knighthood in protest of the massacre of unarmed Indians in 1919 at Jallianwala Bagh.

Tagore traveled extensively across 5 continents to more than 30 countries! Such extensive travels allowed Tagore to interact with many notable contemporaries, including Henri Bergson,Victoria Ocampo, Aga Khan III, Benito Mussolini, Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, Thomas Mann, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and Romain Rolland.

Tagore had a good grasp of modern – post-Newtonian – physics, and was well able to hold his own in a debate with Einstein in 1930 on the newly emerging principles of quantum mechanics and chaos. His meetings and tape recorded conversations with his contemporaries such Albert Einstein and H.G. Wells, stand as cultural landmarks, and show the brilliance of this great man. After seeing Tagore and Einstein in conversation, one journalist remarked – “It was interesting to see them together—Tagore, the poet with the head of a thinker, and Einstein, the thinker with the head of a poet. It seemed to an observer as though two planets were engaged in a chat.“

In 1940 Oxford University arranged a special ceremony in Santiniketan and awarded Rabindranath Tagore with Doctorate Of Literature. Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore passed away on August 7, 1941 in his ancestral home in Calcutta.

The following poem was written and gifted to attendees by Michael Hathaway at a recent community gathering at Meditation Mount in Ojai. It reflects a deep sense of communion and community. I hope you enjoy it.

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WHAT IS MY HEART’S DESIRE?

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A beautiful quiet place in Nature, self-sustaining,
Where loving people pass their time in inspiration,
Do what’s needed, living well, mastering skills
As we help each other heal this world,
Preparing still richer world’s for all who care to share:
Where the Magical breathes in every heart
And reflects through all our faces, eyes, and limbs,
Where Love and Wisdom have been discovered to be innate,
Where there’s time for wit and fun,
Where work and play and reverence are one,
Where we appreciate ourselves as Divinity that’s manifesting,
Where we create – live out – explore
the full, full wonder of our destinies,
Where we—serenely or ecstatically—
Where we—yes—truly walk in beauty
all the days of our lives.

96-10-8 MH

Screenwriter, author and playright Catherine Ann Jones is currently offering the following Daily Om courses:

Heal Yourself With Writing

The Way of Story

This is an 8 week on-line course available from DailyOM and 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 and click to listen to the guided audio meditations. Your first lesson will be available immediately after you enroll. If you have any other questions, please contact us.

Our lives may be determined less by past events than by the way we remember them. You are invited to come aboard this inner adventure that offers a step by step journey of discovery and re-visioning through focused journaling. Throughout the eight sessions, you will be engaged in exercises designed to facilitate healing and transformation. Telling stories about our past through focused journaling can help change our perspectives to enable healing and empowerment. In this way, we are able to make meaning out of memory and put the past where it belongs – behind us. Healing and transformation are only possible through changing one’s perspective from within. In this way, global healing takes place one individual, one tribe, at a time. What story are you living? How do you choose to remember your story?

There is a Native American parable about a grandfather who says, I feel as if I have two wolves fighting in my heart. One wolf is the vengeful, angry one. The other wolf is the loving, compassionate one.” When asked which wolf will win the fight in his heart, the old man replies, “The one I feed.”

ABOUT CATHERINE ANN JONE
Catherine Ann Jones holds a graduate degree in Depth Psychology and Myth from Pacifica Graduate Institute where she has also taught. Earlier she has played major roles in over fifty productions on and off-Broadway, as well as film and television. Disappointed by the lack of good roles for women, she wrote a play about Virginia Woolf (On the Edge) which 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 several 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), Angel Passing (Hume Cronyn & Teresa Wright) which played at Sundance and went on to garner fifteen awards here and abroad, and the popular TV series, Touched by an Angel. A Fulbright Scholar to India studying shamanism, she has also taught at The New School University, University of Southern California, and the Esalen and the Omega Institute. Ms. Jones lives in Ojai, California, leads The Way of Story and Healing Yourself with Writing workshops throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. Her recent book, The Way of Story: the craft & soul of writing, is used by many schools, including NYU writing programs.www.wayofstory.com