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John Stone |
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In 1994 I took my first intensive. I was training martial arts with a
man named Peter Ralston. He spoke quite openly about his enlightenment
experiences and how they had transformed his martial arts ability. I
had been studying Aikido at this point for about 20 years and I was deeply
impressed with Peter's ability and understanding. What he said about
enlightenment intrigued me. I had read about Zen and other
enlightenment traditions but had never found anything that clicked for me.
Peter led retreats of the same kind as the ones on which he had experienced
enlightenment and I decided to take one from him. The retreat - an
enlightenment intensive - was, well, intense. But I hung in there and on
the last day I had an enlightenment experience that literally blew me away.
I had never experience anything like it before and yet it was completely
familiar, because it was me and yet I "saw" it everywhere and in everything.
It felt at the time like being reunited with something I thought I had lost
forever. Because of that taste I took many other intensives in an
attempt to understand more fully what I had seen. I now know it was
what I had been looking for all my life and, in a way, what had been looking
for me.
It is because of that, of what I have seen, that I decided to start offering intensives here in the Midwest: I want to give others the opportunity that was given to me to discover for themselves who and what they are. So in 2003 I started training with Lawrence Noyes and led my first intensive in 2005. |