Opening to the Ground

Course Description

John Prendergast shines with life. He teaches from his own sense of aliveness. He asks sharp questions with soft subtlety. 

Participating in John’s classes is an experience that helps the mind move into the heart.

Being grounded is both a whole body felt-sense and a metaphor for being in touch with reality. In this course John will explore the ground, the alive body and our responsiveness to life  through its different levels; personal, archetypal, and universal.

This exploration requires a willingness to relax into “not knowing” conceptually. At the same time we allow a different way of knowing to spontaneously unfold. It also requires self-honesty, vulnerability, and a love for the truth. As we face our personal and existential fears, we find our ground.

John describes how we project our fearful early family and school experiences onto our adult realities.  We organize our current experience around an old, contracted somatic state. This becomes a familiar, but false ground for us. 

As we let go of trying to control what we can’t, we discover we can see through false ground and let true ground unfold.

Ancestral behavioral patterns and collective images may appear as we slowly step out of the protective armor that served as our false ground. This archetypal ground is more fluid, filled with primal sensations and images. It is a kind of energetic field that all of the natural world and humanity participate in. The lines of the separate self get blurry.

John then invites us to open even further beyond the archetypal field. This deepest ground, even beyond the field of people and creatures, is a boundless mystery, yet we can enter it and feel safe and refreshed in it. John describes this as a place of vibrant silence, dynamic stillness, and luminous darkness.  It is here that we find our essential aliveness, and the authority that comes with inner knowing. This is our homeground that can never be lost. 

This course is ideal if

• You miss an enduring stability that doesn’t depend on your circumstances
• You want a deep way to approach your fears and anxiety
• You’re moved to explore your inner experience
• You have some energetic sensitivity and want to develop it
• You have a sense of some unseen homeground that feels within your reach

Course Overview

Class 1. Introduction and Overview

In this class John asks key questions. What is the experience of fully landing here in the middle of our challenging, precious, and poignant life? Of being in touch with our inner authority and essential aliveness? Of being so grounded in our body that we are open and responsive to life as it actually is?

John will explore how being grounded is both a felt-sense and a metaphor. He’ll discuss how the ground is multidimensional with personal, archetypal, and universal (Ground of Being) levels

John invites us to sense how our body is surprisingly open. As we land in it, we discover an inner authority and essential aliveness. As we face our fears, we find our Ground.

Class 2. Recognizing False Ground

When we are raised in a safe and loving family and culture, we feel relatively grounded. However, if our upbringing was marked by poor attunement, neglect, abuse, or trauma, we feel ungrounded because it did not feel safe to be present in our body. When we feel unsafe, unseen, unfelt, and unheld as a child, we armor ourself by clenching inwardly. We then identify ourself with and organize ourself around this familiar, contracted somatic state. We mis-take it as our true ground and fear letting go of it and opening to the Unknown. We also project our childhood fears of being abandoned, attacked, or invaded onto our adult relationships and onto life itself. However, as we begin to recognize these patterns and welcome them into Presence (awake awareness), our inner clench relaxes, our false ground dissolves, and we are increasingly more open to deeper dimensions of our authentic ground.

Class 3. Archetypal Ground

Regardless of our positive or negative self-image, who we imagine and feel we are as a separate self is inherently shaky. Any deep self-investigation requires that we face the impact of our early conditioning and question the reality of our apparently separate self that is cut off from the whole of life. As we sense and see through our constructed ground, it is common to feel both disoriented and liberated, as if the bottom is dropping out from our conventional way of living. We can sense that our body-mind is remarkably open, more like an energetic field than a solid object. It is not unusual for ancestral lines of conditioning or primordial sensations and images to appear – the realm of the collective unconscious and the archetypes that Carl Jung so intimately experienced and described. This underground dimension of our life is deeply rooted in the natural world and in our shared humanity. 

Class 4. The Ground of Being and the Current of Life

Beyond both our personal and archetypal ground, our deepest ground is unfathomable and universal. The mind cannot grasp it; no idea can describe or contain it. It is prior to all experience and thought. To the ordinary mind, it is the Unknown or Great Mystery. Yet we can knowingly be this ground of being, or groundless ground. When we do, it feels like our homeground – a non-place where we can most deeply rest, and the source of life, filled with potential. Relaxing into the ground of being, we land in the very center of our life as it is. We sense that all is well and are able to embrace life as it is, responding creatively. 

By the end of this course you will

• Trust the aliveness of the body
• See how we’ve made our old, fearful patterns into false ground and that facing your fears helps you find your Ground
• Sense the open, energetic field of our ancestors and all of nature that we are in
• Have a glimpse of the ‘Ground of Being’, a feeling for our essential aliveness, the source of life in the center of our own life