Awakening 2 is, as its name implies, the second in the Awakening series of workshops designed to help participants “awaken” their intuition. We had both taken Awakening 1 more than once. Our review of that workshop covers the fundamentals of intuition and its development in that workshop.

Awakening 2 builds on Awakening 1 and is open only to those who have taken the earlier workshop. Many of those who were in the second workshop had been in one of the previous workshops with either Debra or me, and we were already a relatively comfortable group when the workshop began.

The Workshop

The Awakening 2 we attended was held in St. Joseph, Michigan. A second workshop was held in Michigan City, Indiana, the next weekend. The second workshop in the series followed the same basic schedule as that for Awakening 1. It began on a Friday at 9:00A and concluded with a late potluck lunch on Sunday. In between we had two and a half days of exercises using intuition to read others and using a variety of techniques to clear blocks to intuitive abilities. Several of the techniques were similar to those for similar purpose in NLP for reducing the impact of birth trauma and trauma in early childhood.

In one of the exercises, the “The Brain Defuser,” for example, each of us selected a word by choosing a number between 1 and 30. Gail had previously listed key “issue words” to correspond with the numbers. Each of us was to devise a way to clarify the issues the word represented and a way of reframing the word or experience in a way that would diminish any negative influence, thus “defusing” the impact the experience of the word might have had for those in the group. Joel’s word was initiation, and Debra’s word was identification.

Starting with conception, Joel covered the gamut of initiations, including birth, starting school, moving, changing schools, high school athletics, dating, college, marriage graduate school, the military, fatherhood, and on through life. The theme was a sense of not feeling ready for each of the initiations. The reframe was the recognition that the sense of not being ready is always the case, or the initiation would not be necessary. Debra covered the sense of identification in a similar way, focusing on the ways in which identification can empower us as well as limit us.

As we explored some of the goals we had set in childhood, we discovered that we had actually accomplished them, perhaps not in the way we had originally intended but in a meaningful way. We also discovered that many of our early goals had fallen away as we matured and had been replaced by goals that better served our purposes. The exercise allowed a sense of completion on disappointments from the past and renewed focus on the future.

Other words we ran through the “The Brain Defuser,” included expansion, with a focus on the way we often expand the negative rather than the positive; relationships, including both the relationship with the Self and those with others; separation, and barriers. For these words and the rest on the list, participants explored the way in which they had been influenced by events symbolized by the word and created an activity or a reinterpretation to defuse any limiting influence that might be associated with the word.

One of our last assignments was to create a “A Recipe for a Delicious World.” Joel, for whom 2 minutes on high is the standard recipe, found this a challenge. Most of the participants wrote poems about those things worth savoring in life, awakening us to remembering that which makes the experience of being a living, breathing, eating, drinking, laughing, loving human an adventure worth savoring.