In the past, CCEC has offered a broad selection of CEU Classes in the lovely retreat setting at La Casa de Maria. This afforded participates a unique opportunity to learn first hand from seasoned practioners.
Gradually more adult education and online classes have offered a broad range of learning at minimum cost. While we may return to the La Casa de Maria format currently our CEU Classes are offered during the summer as part of our community presentation. Periodically we will offer CEU Classes to the community depending on our areas of interests and what is already being offered in the community at large.
Upcoming CEU's
David Richo, Ph.D., Saturday, June 2008 for more information and registration
805-962-3363.
Everyday Commitments |Choosing a Life of Love, Realism, and Acceptance
To set our lives on a positive course, many spiritual traditions encourage us to live in upright ways and to show loving-kindness toward ourselves and others. In this book, we consider fifty-two commitments we can make to ourselves in order to set our lives on a new and healthier course, one characterized by greater kindness, compassion, joy, and composure. We begin by taking small steps that lead to the expression of wholesomeness and loving-kindness. Interior shifts follow and soon we find that we are acting with greater love and virtue without having to put so much effort into it. We are living our lives at the heart level. Our destiny is to display in our lifetime the timeless design of love and wholeness that has always been inside us. Choices and attitudes that show integrity and loving-kindness help us do that.
Intimacy & Acceptance in Relationships - David Richo
(Excerpts From Fundraising Workshop at Jefferson Hall June 9th)
What we give and receive in an intimate relationship exactly matches both our earliest needs and our adult spiritual practice: the five A’s: attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, and allowing us to be ourselves and make our own choices. We give to the other and receive from her the very same love we instinctively required in childhood. The difference is that now we see it as an enriching gift, desired instead of required. It helps us increase our self-esteem now, just as it was necessary for establishing a self-concept in early life.
How exactly do we give and receive? The first way is a simple/difficult technique: Ask for what you want and listen to your partner. Asking for what you want combines the most crucial elements of intimacy. It gives the other the gift of knowing you, your needs, and your vulnerability. It also means receiving the other’s free response. Both are risky, and therefore both make you more mature. You learn to let go of your insistence on a yes, to be vulnerable to a no, and to accept a no without feeling the need to punish.
To listen intimately to a partner asking for what he wants is to pick up on the feeling and need beneath the request. It is to appreciate where the request came from. It is to feel compassion for any pain that may lurk in the request. It is to give the other credit for risking rejection or misunderstanding. We hear with our ears; we listen with our intuition and our heart. Giving and receiving entail the ability to accommodate the full spectrum of a partner’s fears and foibles and to distinguish between needs we can and cannot expect to see fulfilled.
We give and receive by granting equality, freedom from hierarchy, to our partner and ourselves. Only the healthy ego, and not another person, is meant to preside over your life. In true intimacy, partners have an equal voice in decision-making.
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