Feb 16-18, 2007
We all talk, gesticulate, make faces and sounds, and imagine we have communicated fully. We talk a lot every day, but much of the time we miscommunicate. Our misunderstandings have huge costs, creating hurt or angry feelings, conflict and enmity. If we could communicate fully, sunlight would illumine our relationships and our lives would intertwine like tropical vines. But clarity and integrity in speech don’t just happen; they require skills.
They also require the willingness to sacrifice a little self-delusion. For example, we have feelings and judgments we hope to leave hidden—not realizing they pour out of our energy bodies, and surround our listeners like a hot wind. They respond—but usually they don’t know how to make their “instinctive” reactions conscious. There is not much about us that we can hold private.
At 54 years old, I still felt unloved by my mom and resentful. One afternoon I was driving her to a park, arguing all the way. Irritated and frustrated, out of desperation, I decided to use the communication skills I had been learning for 20 years. For four hours I really listened. For the first time in my life, I discovered who my mother was. I had resented her for not being a nurturing mom, and now I saw a brilliant, creative painter and sculptor whose every breath was about form and color. She hadn’t a nurturing bone in her body, but I began to appreciate and love her for who she was, instead of wanting her to be someone else.
I was so exhilarated by this shift that I began sharing what I had learned. This workshop compresses the essentials into a few days, offerintg skill to achieve clarity, integrity, gentleness, and compassion. We can sense the energy fields and draw out the thoughts and feelings of others. We can learn a vocabulary of feeling and understand layers of tone and posture. Communication depends on intuition, energy work, sound, movement, helped by “right speech” and nonviolent communication.
Learning to communicate is like entering an opera, a form of play, of movement, and meditation in speech. When we consciously make our motivations clear and draw out a speaker energetically, conversation becomes deep, authentic, and unpredictable. We are engrossed, feel close to each other. We open doors, experience intimacy, solve problems. Our hearts open, and there is love — even with people you might never have imagined you could appreciate so deeply.
Gay Luce is a transformational teacher who understands both how energy moves through the body and how to teach it to others. She taught in Jean Houston’s Mystery School, then founded the Nine Gates Mystery School, a transformational program structured on the energy centers of the body and drawing on teachers from diverse spiritual traditions. Once a science writer with the National Institute of Mental Health and a member of the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee, Dr. Luce is author of many books, including Body Time and Longer Life, More Joy. Long an explorer of the mysteries of life and death, she is a compassionate, grounded, clear teacher and one of our favorite workshop leaders.