Principles and Practice

One need not be graced with prophetic insight to recognise that  we are living in one of those rare ages, like the end of classical antiquity or the beginning of the modern era, that bring forth, through great stress and struggle, a genuinely fundamental transformation in the underlying assumptions and principles of the cultural world view…The outcome of this tremendous moment in our civilization’s history is deeply uncertain. Something is dying and something is being born. The stakes are high, for the future of humanity and the future of the Earth. (Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche, 2006)

Principles

We work as a community and as a family, finding ways of reconnecting healing with spirit, working towards sustainable living – or living with care and mindfulness. We have some intimation of the scale of change that is taking place in the world, and the importance of relationship in bringing new forms of community into being. We understand that this is not always an easy path, and that this also requires a re-weaving of the relationship between masculine and feminine, and a healing of the violence of the 21^st century.  

So we try to keep our hearts open, and recognise the importance of acknowledging and recognising our intent  in everything we do, even, or especially when, the going gets tough. Most importantly, we recognise the importance of learning from our own practice, and strive for the humility required to become conscious participants in this period of transition.    

Aims

The East West Sanctuary offers a place of refuge, where people can find space for contemplation, joint spiritual practice, transformation, relaxation and restoration. We also seek to provide alternative educational processes that are concerned with training the body and mind, furnishing participants with inner strength and tools for their working and personal lives. We aim to provide our visitors with an experience of care, community, and discovery of alternative ways of living and connecting with one another, appropriate to the changing landscapes of our lives.   

We offer a spirit of inquiry, drawing on many philosophical, intellectual, religious and esoteric traditions, finding connections within and between these traditions and thereby deepening our collective practice and understanding. Our principles and practices are drawn from reflection upon individual and collective experience, and not merely on an intellectual synthesis.We bring our different traditions together in the exploration of healing and spiritual practices which are resonant with the emergent worldview, and are engaged in the unfolding and publishing of new ideas, providing a variety of different insights and pathways for contributions for our visitors and community.

From a place of recognition of the interconnectedness between self and other, we strive to provide the ground for the co-creation of conditions of empathetic understanding and compassion moving beyond and within our conceptual worlds, and thereby providing pathways for the creation of mindful communities. 

Spiritual Practice

Fundamental to any of the courses running at the East West Sanctuary are three related spiritual practices from ancient to the most modern understandings:

• Kum Nye Tibetan Buddhist healing and meditation practice

• Seven Worlds practice from the Hungarian Javas traditions

• Holonomic practice as encapsulated through Buddhist practice, Western hermetic traditions, core process psychotherapy and  Bert Hellinger’s work on family systems

These three pillars symbolically resonate with body, mind and spirit – psyche, soul and cosmos, uniting the old and the new, in a unique fusion of East and West. Together they provide a resource for flexible and spontaneous inquiry into how things are, and a ground for the emergence of the new. 

Our spiritual practice is represented by a team of practitioners and researchers from East and West Europe, who have been fully trained in different traditions, and who are collectively inquiring into the world as it presents itself, and finding ways of sharing these with others.

For deeper reflections and articles on our thinking and practice, go to our sister webpage, eastwestinterconnect.