"India is not a country but a mystery. A mystery of a rising lotus as chaste as the morning dew, delicate and sublime. India is the immanent and the transcendental manifested simultaneously leaving deep feelings of wonder and amazement, just as those experienced by a child. So distant and high as the Himalayas and as close and as near as our breath, ethereal like the rainbow and yet so real and alive." - OSHO: from India my Love

Come with me this year to discover Mother India in all her exoticism and learn ancient Tantra along the way. I'll be teaching some different aspect of Tantra most days on our tour of India. Imagine us doing some ancient breath technique together as the sun rises on the Taj Mahal. We'll even do sacred ritual at one of the temples in Khajuraho! What could be better?

The Heart of India Tour is Nov 19 – Dec 1. If you‘ve always wanted to go to India and just would not go by yourself or if you’d like to go and be part of a Tantric learning environment as we travel, this tour may be the thing for you. You will experience shifts in being on a daily basis. India does that to you.

 

Your cost for the tour is $2200. This includes all hotel accommodations, meals, ground transportation, in India flights, train, bus and entrance to all monuments. It does not include air travel to India, shopping, tips or alcoholic beverages. In planning the first tour in 2006, I found that travel agents could not get special deals on airfare so I decided to let you use your own mileage and rewards to select the type of travel you would want to India. You must act fast since then airlines are steadily raising their prices.

I am limiting the number of people to 16 so if you want to go, you must let me know as soon as possible. Please let me know if you are even thinking about it. And you must get to Delhi on November 19th.  The actual tour starts on the morning of the 20th.

You can see a video trailer at www.slackalicefilms.com and once you enter the site, click "view".

Call me at (202)  686-7440 or write me at info@butterflyworkshops.com.

The other day while I was driving down the highway in Florida I reflected about my life and about a few lovely men i know who seem to be coming on the market again for yet another round of singleness. I thought, "Wow, I think my old age is gonna be so much fun, so interesting!"

And since I let go of my money concerns with the refunds for the India trip, I can hardly breathe what with the opportunities coming my way.

Life is so full of cosmic jokes! It seems like my real job is to distinguish these jokes and that's all.

I know one thing - I am having a lot of fun.

I pray for more and I am open for it to show up in my life along with more chocolate.

Sunday, October 29, 2006

I went back to London after three years of being away. It was amazing to be back!

When I left back then I was heart broken and breaking up a significant relationship. I had it that all of the London experience then was against me. How dramatic! Ha ha ha. I loved drama back then.

Anyway, I returned there mid-September and had just the best time imagineable.

I went to the Yoga Show at Olympia Halls and took lovely classes in different types of Yoga and Pilates. The classes were great. But even better was running into old friends I had not seen in years. I got a great welcome from so many people - Mel Donovan, Soliman, Paul Terrell and of course Pat Sawyer and Frank Pitts. I felt just like I was home again.

I also met Seda who has a retreat center in Turkey named Surya (the sun). I really want to organize a tour to Turkey next year and check out her place. Why not?

I purposely saw my ex at the end of the show and thanked him for all the lessons and contributions. I felt so complete. London proved to be outstanding better then I can ever remember.

On Wednesday 20 Sept, I held a Tantra gathering in the flat I had in Primrose Hill. A bunch of people came to do an Osho Meditation and to meet me. We had a ball. We did dancing in place and then Gibberish followed by silent meditation. Despite the train sounds, we were able to get very calm in a limited time frame. We then had snacks and got to know each other a little better. I believe it was fun for all.

An important Tantra person who attended was Kavida Rei from www.TantraLink.co.uk. When we looked into each other's eyes, we had to laugh because we are twins in a certain way. How wonderful!

Over the following weekend, I went to Essex to a place called Alto-Sax Retreat Centre. There I led a Tantra & Bliss weekend and got to know some more wonderful people. What a fantastic weekend we had in a 600 year old farm house, swimming pool and hot tub plus fabulous food. I never imagined it would be so good.

What can I say? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all for showing up and for tranforming my UK experience.

I have just set my dates to go back there. I can hardly wait now. June 22 -24 will be the next Tantra & Bliss workshop at Alto-Sax. I will plan other events in London on either side of that weekend.

And while I'm on the subject of mentioning amazing people, acknowledging them for making my UK experience the best ever, I want to thank Kirsty Alison and Alexx Snelling who I met in Goa last January. Kirsty opened her contact list to me to help promote my upcoming book release and then together, they decided to accompany me back to India this November to make a video of the Heart of India Tour

How good can it get?. Yeah, Baby!

After all this, I went to Ireland and toured around with two of my old friends from high school Pat (Seaman) Corrigan and Tom Bechtle. How much fun we had! We laughed all the way aournd the west and south coasts probably the most beautiful country in the world. The greens are greener than anything I have ever seen. How can grass be that green? And the sky there was bluer than blue. Ireland is known as The Jewel. I can definitely see why - when you have such pure colors, why do you need diamonds? All you do is look up or look all around and you are rich.

I'll be writing more regularly again as the India tour takes off. Stay tuned.

I did not know where to put some of the other work experiences that I've had while I was writing the last entry about how I got to what I do now.  So, I figured I'd just list them here.  They have all led me to where I am in the moment:

Camp Counselor
Go-go Dancer
Shrimp Boat Cook
Candle Maker
Clothing Designer
Bartender/Waitress
Tennis Club Owner
Match Maker
Calligraphy Sign Painter

How's that for variety?  One thing for sure it that my life has NEVER BEEN BORING!

I’ve always been the type of person who wanted to help others.  I laughed when I first saw Lucy in the Snoopy comics because when she hung out her therapy sign with 5 cents I thought that was me.  From the time I entered elementary school until I graduated high school, I was the friendliest girl and the one from whom most other kids got their advice.

 

In college, George Washington University, I majored in sociology and psychology.  I got my masters in education.  During those hippie years, I participated in the first encounter groups.  I was fascinated with psychodrama and attended regularly in Washington, DC and in New York City.  I later studied both those modalities plus Applied Kinesiology, Bioenergetics and Gestalt Technique while attending GROW Institute in NYC.  Afterwards, I participated in Carl Rogers’ La Jolla Program in Sand Diego and learned to facilitate encounter groups Rogers style.  Of course, I was also experimenting with drugs and sex and proved to be as interesting to me as what I was studying in the classroom.

 

Upon leaving San Diego, I traveled around the country with a man I met in La Jolla facilitating Men’s and Women’s body-oriented encounter groups where we dealt with gender as the main issue blocking people from becoming truly free in their skins.  We used the body techniques we had both studied as well as the Rogers encounter group style.  We were invited to cities across the US for most of 1972.

 

When the tour was over, I moved to Boston and began teaching Assertiveness Training classes in Boston and Cambridge.  I also taught a Body, Mind & Sprit class for Women which grew into a weekend workshop and company Women’s Educational & Resource Enterprises, Inc. (WE ARE) offering a variety of courses, retreats and coaching. 

 

Around this time, I first heard of Osho from my father, who has been a self-proclaimed sannayasan for years.  I began reading his books and listening to tapes.  I also met Baba Ram Das, Isabel Hickey, Robert Gass and others in the 70’s.

 

Then the craziest, luckiest thing happened.  Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) called and asked if I could start teaching Assertive Communication courses in house to their employees.  Hell yes I could.  Soon, Digital wanted to know what else I could design/teach.  With the help of some friends, I crafted team building exercises, communication and risk-taking courses.  DEC used to send for me in a helicopter and fly me up, up and away to their “woods meetings” in New Hampshire.  I’ll never forget imagining I was Bette Midler flying into a concert for the evening.

 

That was the beginning of my corporate consulting work.  At the time, I did not even know what to call what I did.  I found out a year later that there was a whole field called OD – organizational development.  I continued to do my work with individuals at the Boston and Cambridge Centers for Adult Education, taught at Northeastern University and Quincy Junior College and Massasoit Community College.  I taught anything from Psych 101 to Sociology of the Family during the day and Body, Mind and Spirit for Women at the night school.  In addition, I taught at such wonderful companies as Wang, Raytheon, Hughes, TRW, and Rockwell.  Working at many military industrial companies, I convinced myself that I was bringing consciousness to the folks who produced bombs, rockets and missiles.  Maybe what I taught them would make a difference.

 

During the Regan years, my Boston-based business began to falter.  My business, which is based on human growth and development, always does during Republican administrations.  I wonder why?

 

So, I moved out to Los Angeles and began a consulting job as part of a team with Mattel until I found “in house” position in the training and development department for an international software company Informatics General Corporation.  I loved my job and created a lot of wonderful programs convincing my manager that we offered more than training – we offered OD.  She gave me free reign to design interventions and meet regularly with top level executives to see if I could bring ideas that would facilitate productivity as well as happy employees in the ranks.

 

Until Informatics got taken over by a Dallas firm, I had the best time in the corporate world.  I had no plans however, of moving to Texas.  I am strictly a one coast or the other type of girl.

 

In the early 80’s I moved back to Washington, DC where I began to write grants and develop programs for our nation’s youth who were killing themselves with and over drugs.  I won many a grant and received numerous awards for my community service. 

 

I later went to work for Landmark Education Corporation (LEC) and learned about transformation by immersing myself in the system.  I stayed at LEC until my body rebelled from lack of attention and exercise.  The staff position involved many long hours each day and I reversed my habits of regular exercise - running and tennis to exercise of talking on the phone - doing the work of enrollment into the popular Landmark Forum.  Although, there were things about working here that I loved, the lack of exercise took its toll.

 

By the time I left LEC, my body was broken from lack of use (even lack of sex) and I was in desperate to get in physical shape again.  I was bleeding on the inside and I had torn a ligament in my left knee.  Mentally, I was a mess needing to find out who I truly am again if not a part of the Landmark community.  I was lost to myself.  I was on my knees. 

 

In late 1996, a friend suggested I take a Tantra course.  She thought it might be a good experience for me, help clear my head, get me in touch with Spirit.  I don’t know why I agreed to take it, but I went off to it with trepidation about imagined orgies and such. It was nothing that I imagined.  Believe me, I lost and found myself again during the experience.  After doing the breathing exercises and allowing myself to cry and cry about the betrayal of my body, I remembered who I was as a human being (rather than a human “doing”).  Even further than that, for an instant, I remembered on a primordial level, like a cellular memory, who I am and why I was put on this earth.  For as long as I can remember all I ever wanted to do was make a difference in the world and this memory shook me to my bones.  It gave me a new raison d’etre. Cobra Breath gave me the way to move into it with zest!

 

I am here to promote spiritual well-being, to transform people’s lives with the appreciation of their beautiful bodies, senses and feelings – unite body, mind and spirit. What a revelation!  Just as my body was recovering from only focusing on the mind, I discovered that this is the lesson I was put here to share and teach.

 

During this same time in the late 90’s I was awarded grants from the federal government and state and local governments to train people coming off the Welfare rolls during the Bill Clinton Welfare reforms.  I trained hundreds of people to get and keep employment and received national honors for the results.  This work became the basis for the training my current company Butterfly Workshops still offers - Leadership, Integrity and Service (LIS).  It is both a corporate training program and a means for training people who wish to work/volunteer with the Tantra programs offered. 

 

With the election of George W., any government contracts I had disappeared as is predictable so I set out to offer Tantra programs full time.  I now teach internationally and Butterfly Workshops offers three levels of Tantra training as well as an ongoing Tantra series.  Tantra has proven to be my true spiritual path.  I am honored, privileged and grateful for the knowledge I have received.  I love my life.  I love my job!  What a joy it is to teach people transformation through pleasure!