From Barbara
February 11, 2010

William Brugh Joy, our teacher died peacefully on Dec. 23, 2009.  Kent and I were moved and invited to go to Los Angeles four days before he died. We spent three hours with him as he sat in his favorite lounge chair, swathed regally in a red velour comforter.  He looked radiant and younger, very present and clear-minded as we laughed and talked with him.

We will always remember Brugh and his teachings.  For this reason, I feel him very much a living part of me.  Since that time, we have had a Memorial gathering in the Guest House, and attended a United Joy’s Jubilation Memorial at Rex Ranch at the end of January.  There is one more large gathering Feb. 27-28 at Grass Valley, CA and we will be there too.  I have nothing but smiles for Brugh’s memory.  He would have know that all the fuss about his memorials was really about the Heart-Center and honoring his willing sacrifice to bring forth Source’s teachings.  Namaste, Dear Teacher and Friend.

From Barbara…                                                                                     
November 20, 2009

A series of events began at a recent workshop on the Persephone myth.  One of the participants in his introduction said, “And in the aftermath of being pulled into the Underworld as we live life, we struggle to regain our bearings.”  I heard this phrase and it penetrated like a knife through soft butter as it folded and mixed wisdom pieces deep within to create a new awareness for me.  After years of feeling that a tremendous change was coming soon, I had Life happen to me.  In its inordinate wisdom, I began the Dark Night’s Journey of the Soul accompanied by a showering of Shadow material.  Recently, a relative sense of stability has come in to ground me further, and I realized that I have surely been “struggling to regain my bearings” for quite sometime.  For me, this meant struggling to get back to what I knew myself to be…a loving, caring person who was compassionate to others, a person with enough energy to do most everything…all at the same time.  My memory has been clouded with romanticism and illusion.  During the tumultuous times, I felt myself to be only Shadow as I discovered its presence, not noticing that my psychic grove of trees had turned into the whole forest.  I expended much energy in trying to feel like that imagined person once more.

And then as the Fates graced me, I found myself perceiving the Persephone dream as a collective dream.  It went as follows: Persephone is a metaphor for the American Dream…it having lead a most abundant life since birth, innocent in many ways, and now it is being pulled down into the Underworld by Hades which appears as great disruptions in religious institutions, government, family, legal system, education, medicine, and values.

At this point, I will digress a little by telling you part of Homer’s version of this myth. It includes a piece about a family who take in the mother-goddess, Demeter, as she wanders the world despondently, looking for her daughter, Persephone.  Demeter agrees to take care of Metaneira’s son while the whole family gives her food and shelter in exchange.  Each day, the young boy advances in skills and wisdom.  Curious, Metaneira covertly watches to discover how Demeter is encouraging this growth.  She is horrified when she observes Demeter holding the young boy in a fire, and without knowing that it is Demeter’s method of imbuing the boy with immortality, Metaneira orders Demeter to stop and orders her from the house.

Before I lose you as my audience, I will say that, through looking at this piece as part of a collective dream, I realized that Metaneira is the Fundamentalist part of every person; that part of us that has a singular perception and preference for any situation, and of what has worked well in the past.  So much energy can go into activities that  “regain our bearings”, and take us back to a psychic container that served us well at one time.  We essentially use our energy to go back to “what was” instead of using energy to acknowledge “what is” and through the exploration of Now, be led to “what will be”.

I hope that the telling of these events stirs something in your unconscious that will make its way into consciousness through dreams or meditations or other forms of soul expression.