Philip Shepherd – Reclaim the Lost Art of Wholeness for a Fully Embodied Life 2022

During this transformative 7-module course, you’ll:

• Learn to awaken your pelvic floor on a journey inward, where you’ll come to rest in the present moment
• Allow yourself to surrender to your natural fluidity by relaxing into your breath and softening into tender currents of life
• Learn to embrace whole-body breathing, where your entire body engages as if a wave were traveling through you as you breathe with ease and grace
• Feel how the anxieties churning in your body are just unintegrated energies, and learn how to integrate them in just a few simple steps
• Discover the healing power of receptivity and presence — where you fully embody the present moment as you heal the wound of self-consciousness
• Release yourself from living in the prison of presentation mode where you’re unconsciously trying to earn love, approval, and acceptance
• Re-embrace the glory of sacred groundedness to feel securely supported with strength, confidence, joy, and clarity
• Realize that fear, worry, anxiety, and depression are all characterized by a sense of feeling alone, yet aloneness is a fantasy created by contracting your body and disconnecting yourself from the world
• Learn to let go and soften to the world and land in a place of spaciousness, grace, and harmony
• Discover how to feel the currents of the present unfolding like a wave that can carry you like a surfer
• Learn how to balance your masculine and feminine energy so that you can renew a healthy relationship with the natural world

In this session, we’ll go back to the beginning and reassess on a grand scale where we are and how we got here. We’ll delve into how we ended up living in our heads rather than in the felt-present moment.

The clarity you’ll gain during this process will provide deep insight to activate your path forward. What you’ll discover is that your true path will always lead you more deeply home to find yourself held in the embrace of the present. The paradox of this process is that following that path is as much about undoing what holds you back as it is about discovering what carries you forward.

In this session, you’ll:

• Learn powerful insights about why diaphragmatic breathing can disrupt your wholeness
• Discover the intelligence that resides within your pelvic bowl, what some scientists are calling “the second brain,” and how to use it
• Experience how it feels to come to rest in your body’s intelligence by attuning to the world
• Understand how to connect with the world by feeling the world flow through you
• Experience your natural state of breathing, in which you feel the breath filling your body from the pelvic floor up

Because we live in our heads, we have developed a top-down relationship with our bodies. As a result, this has created an unnatural, top-down approach to breathing that makes the body feel mechanical and leaves it in a perpetual state of stress. Our true nature is fluid. Living in our heads has interrupted our natural flow.

Up to 60% of the adult body is water. Your body is literally an ocean of energetic exchanges. And when you experience that ocean within you, you can return to the present moment and feel each breath move through the entirety of your body like a wave. When the whole of your being is available to the breath, each breath reveals your wholeness. And when you can feel your wholeness in the world, you will truly come to rest in it.

In this class, you’ll explore:

• How the practice of Top-Down Breathing holds tension in the body
• The fluidity that lives through your back, your legs, and your whole being
• Your breath softening your body into its true, fluid nature
• The ease and presence of a whole-body breath

If you are not present in life, you are missing it! You’re missing the rich, subtle juiciness of all your personal relationships. Being present can seem like a shimmering oasis, just out of reach for many. You start to wonder… “What’s wrong with me?”

The problem isn’t with you, it’s with our culture. So in this module, you’ll learn a new approach to becoming present that allows you to find presence in the world in a natural and easy way, as it should be.

In this module, you’ll:

• Learn how to step out of presentation mode
• Discover the root of our culture’s obsessively driven nature and how you can disentangle yourself from it by fully embodying the present moment
• Understand why it’s impossible to be present while you’re living in your head
• Experience a simple method for letting go of judging yourself and others
• Learn how we unknowingly withhold from people the one gift they most desire — and how to give that gift to the people in your life

When you are not grounded, your energy gets trapped in your body. It moves around and around, keeping you in a low level of anxiety or uncenteredness.

One way to understand this is to look at the lightning rods that barns use to carry the energy of the sky safely to the earth. Learning to ground yourself is like installing a lightning rod so that the charged, frenetic energy we carry within us can settle and reach a place of neutrality where it no longer triggers us.

This will have a transformational effect on your body, because in our culture, our legs get treated as nothing more than prosthetic limbs to move us around, rather than being felt as living conduits to the earth that hold us in its loving embrace.

During this session, Philip will help you:

• Unlearn the dysfunctional messaging from our culture that tells you not to trust the earth
• Feel how coming to rest on the earth brings you to rest in the present moment
• Understand why the true nature of intelligence is different from what you might think
• Heal your relationship with an aspect of your body that you rarely notice
• Discover that to raise your consciousness, you must first learn how to lower it
• Feel the field of your body’s energy brought into harmony with the present moment

Self-consciousness is much more than that uncomfortable feeling that happens to us when we stand up to give a speech. Sadly, it’s the normal state we live in. We supervise, judge, and monitor ourselves all the time. And it feels natural to live in this divided state because it’s the approach of division and control that’s encouraged in our culture. But when we live in a divided state, we live at odds with ourselves. We become mired in an internal struggle that’s exhausting and anxiety-producing.

Ultimately, we face a choice: to live in the depleted state in which most of our waking hours will be spent thinking about our thoughts, or to come out of our heads and back home to the companionship of the present moment.

Wouldn’t you like to know how to make that choice for yourself?

In this module, you’ll:

• Learn why self-consciousness is inevitable when we live in our heads
• Discover within yourself the neglected intelligence that reveals the oneness in which we are all held
• Understand and experience what it means to come to rest on the ground of your being
• Learn to move out of your head and into your body — grounded and at ease in the world
• Move from a place of disconnection and aloneness into a realm where you feel the easy companionship of the present alive within you

We’ve been led to believe that our wholeness is something we can achieve by organizing and controlling parts of ourselves — body, mind, and spirit — so that they each flourish and come into balance with one another.

That approach is entirely mistaken. You can’t achieve wholeness because the truth is you can’t escape it. Wholeness is all there is. It is holding you now — your life indivisibly belongs to it. But you can lose sight of it when you live in the head, because the whole isn’t something that can be known. It’s too subtle and transformative.

All you can do is feel it — and that requires the thinking of your whole being. Yes, the body thinks, in ways more fluid, subtle, and attuned than the head could even imagine. This module is where you’ll learn to experience that.

In this class, you’ll explore:

• How to distinguish the difference between thinking in your head and thinking in your body
• The wound between your thinking and your being — and how to heal it so that every sensation in the body is recognized as a form of thought
• What it means to think with the whole of your being
• What it feels like to center your thinking in your body

The qualities we most yearn to feel in our lives aren’t things that can be achieved. Harmony belongs to the present. As does spaciousness, peace, grace, presence, clarity, and companionship. It’s when we join the present that we partake of these qualities.

But, you cannot think your way into the present. You join it by surrendering — surrendering all the resistance that holds you back from it. And with that surrender, you come into attunement not just with the ordinary grace of being, but also with the clarity, vitality, and resolution of your life. You experience your communion with the mindful present.

In this session, you’ll:

• Discover the path to wholeness, which has nothing to do with fixing or overcoming your problems
• Learn how energy is orphaned in the body, and how to love it back into wholeness
• Experience the one thing the body most deeply understands
• Learn to discern the difference between analog knowing, in which the body attunes to all the cues from the world around it, informed by its reality, and digital knowing, in which we freeze the world’s energy into facts that we accumulate and organize
• Explore how analog knowing is embodied knowing, and yields the most powerful knowledge you can possess
• Feel what it means to attune to wholeness

Each class builds upon the previous one so that you’ll build a full foundation and develop a holistic understanding of the practices, tools, and principles you’ll need to move out of your head to live once more in the spacious present.