What Is It Like Doing a Six-month Course?

Back to myself...

Wake at 6.30 in the old stone farm steading. Shower and up to the main house. Mist hangs in the valley below. The air is crisp and cold.

Group meditation is at 7 am, followed by hearty breakfast together round the big dining table. Clear up and its nearly time for study.

Now the chance to read and discuss, the words and wisdom of the great mystics of the ages. Question, penetrate meanings, ponder, exasperate, surrender, aaah! so that's what it means... but then, from another point of view...

Meditation again, then Lunchtime... a hive of activity, setting the table, serving the food, pouring water, sharing bread, passing the salt, wholesome nourishment for the body.

Then, it is digging the garden, mending fences, building a house... together... in the kitchen, by the lake, out on the hill, deep in the forest, working with our hands and with our hearts, under the open skies,  feeling the wind.

Afternoon tea and studying again... 'I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be known...' The chase is on, and there is no end to this quest, but the object is love itself. Digging for treasure in ourselves, we enter the third period of meditation.

After supper, coming together again for devotional practices, and then a short walk back to the farm steading, the night is so still, an infinity of stars. Surrender into grateful sleep.

Autumn becomes winter and then spring. Six months...

Christopher Ryan
Winter Course 1975-76

Taking the 6-month course was for me the next step in the growth and awareness-increase process which I practiced on different levels during the recent years of my life. It turned out to be a huge leap in that direction, and, in some aspects, the ultimate one. As genuine spiritual journeys go, despite being overall demanding at times, it offered some of the most incredible and eye opening experiences of my life.

The love, compassion, acceptance, serenity and more that the place has to offer enable these experiences to be made real. The extreme care for clean and clear environment, on all levels, truly enabled and encouraged each of us to know ourselves better and bring each of our own unique beauty to its fullest expression.

The course has an incredible positive impact on my life, in the deeper sense of the word. Externally, all remained pretty much the same, but internally I am much more peaceful and together with myself than previously. Knowing myself better enables me to make better choices in my life and be more familiar and aware of the different levels in which my life, in the broadest sense of the word, can be lived. The course assisted me in getting my priorities straight and finding and focusing on what’s really important to me. The course provided a wonderful and positive reassurance to thoughts and feelings I had throughout my life, and offered an all encompassing approach to these fragments of glimpses of reality.

Tamar Cohen, Israel
 2005/2006

I thoroughly enjoyed the six month course in all its aspects and everything we were given to experience.

What I really wished as the outcome of the course at the beginning, as I remember stating on the application form, was the firm establishment in my self of the constancy of awareness of the fact that there is only one unique absolute infinite existence. I feel that every opportunity was provided for me for this purpose whether or not I was able to know, accept and work on it.

As created being, we respond to Beauty when we experience it and we are guided towards Beauty if only we learn to let this happen. For me that is the most precious, in fact the only education there is. And how that is possible is through grace, which is the unmerited mercy of God.

I need to thank all people involved, the Principal, supervisors, staff, co-students and my family for being the instrument for this education.

Perhaps what for me was the most difficult aspect of the course was to do with my children. I was the only parent on the course with children present (daughter 8, son 7 years old). In order to meet their physical and emotional needs, there seemed many decisions – both small and large – which I had to make for them, which seemed were outside of the course structure, although I knew really that this was not the case. Again I am grateful for all the support my children and I received on this matter and I trust that future students on the courses who are parents coming with their children will receive the right care and attention and guidance that they require.

Hiroko Apthorp
Winter Course 2005/06