Learning to access guidance – in a weekend

Beginning Friday evening Aug. 26 and ending after lunch Sunday Aug. 28, Bob Holbrook and I will again be teaching people how to access guidance without prior experience or preparation. The weekend course is being given at The Monroe Institute, in Nelson County, Virginia, and unlike many TMI courses has no prerequisites. For information, call TMI at 434-361-1500. As a sort of teaser, here is a little article I wrote for The Echo, a local free-distribution monthly paper, after our initial course in April

Learning to access guidance – in a weekend

By Frank DeMarco

It’s a big thing to go from being a participant in a residential program to being one of the trainers. I suppose it’s like moving backstage for the first time, after always having been in the audience. There is a difference!

For more than 23 years, I have participated in programs at the Monroe Institute in Nelson County. This past month, for the first time, I was co-facilitator of a weekend workshop. Fortunately, and by design, I worked with Bob Holbrook, a veteran TMI trainer. From previous courses, I knew Bob would be organized, calm, funny, and accessible during the program, with tons of practical experience and helpful suggestions. He was all of these things. In addition, he developed the audio frequencies designed to assist the process.

We named the program Accessing Inner Guidance (which resulted in the unfortunate acronym AIG). The idea behind it was that everyone is born with access to guidance, and experiences it continually, consciously or (usually) unconsciously. We set out to demonstrate to our participants that they could experience it consciously, continuously, in ordinary life.

You might think that a self-selected group would already know this, and, in theory, they do. But in practice many who believe it possible for others aren’t sure it is possible for them.

We already receive. The problem is, we don’t always recognize the fact. We set out to prove that it is not only possible, but inevitable, and set out to do it in little more than a day and a half.

In this we had the advantage of the logistical support offered by the TMI environment. When someone else is taking care of your physical needs (preparing, serving, and cleaning up after meals, not least), this frees up great amounts of psychic energy. And beyond that are the mental and emotional support offered by trainers and, often enough, your fellow participants.

So, it was up to us to use that environment to help deliver the message, that guidance – intuition, call it – is a natural ability that can be stifled or encouraged. I regarded it as my job to demolish the reasons why people think there is no such thing, and let the participants see for themselves.

Access is easy. But people tend to cripple their access in various ways: by going about it the wrong way, by pre-determining the form in which it may come, by trying to answer what I call the useless (because unanswerable) questions.

So, we showed them how to do it the right way, how to be ready for guidance in unexpected forms, how to answer the right questions instead of obsessing over the wrong ones. To devise the exercises that would do these things, we put in a lot of preparation.

We had beginner’s luck, too, though, and I always say, it’s better to be lucky than good.

We had luck in our 17 participants, for one thing. They came from all over, from as near as Nelson County itself to California and Oregon. They brought a wide range of life experience, and came with serious intent and light hearts. Best of all, they bonded with each other, and amazingly quickly. That suited me just fine, because psychic abilities thrive on openness and connection.

We used that group energy to good effect. For one thing, we debriefed every exercise, and so everybody got the second-hand benefit of everyone else’s experience. When you hear more than a dozen other people reporting experiences, it makes it more real, even if they themselves are no more certain of what went on than you are yourself.

There’s more that I could say, but this is what I can say now. In the week after the course, I reviewed my notes for talks and exercises, getting ready for our next go-round in August. Hopefully it will go as well as this one did. Hard to imagine it going any better!

It is nice – after years of searching — to finally know something well enough to be able to teach it.

And ah, beginner’s luck!