June 18-24

It was a full week for the participants in the Therapeutic Touch mentorship program as they met throughout each day to hone their skills as healing practitioners. All in all, it was a very harmonious week that also saw the arrival of summer.

The program ended on Friday and as the last participants were being driven to the ferry at midday, raindrops began to splatter on the windshield of the camp van. The rain continued to pour from the sky throughout the rest of the day and on into late Saturday afternoon.

Leonie, Clair, Jen, Cathy, Cedron & Ruth

Program Organizers Julie & Cordy

On Sunday,  the clouds departed just as participants began arriving for week two of the June therapeutic touch programs. It was an amazingly beautiful sunny day that also included a memorial gathering in the grove for Kamala Harrison. Kamala was an Orcas Island resident who was quite involved at Indralaya for several years in the 1990’s. She did a lot of trail work in the  forest and also helped in the library. She and her husband Kiko regularly attended the Wednesday night study group that meets at the Indralaya library during the off-season.

June 11-17

This was a full week of comings and goings. As the days went by, fellowship staffers Jerry (Tuesday), Jennifer (Wednesday), Collin (Thursday), Bonnie and Craig (Saturday) all took their turn and departed.

On Friday, Leonie and I headed to Seattle just as Cordy Anderson and Julie Benkofsky-Webb, the coordinators for the Therapeutic Touch programs, were arriving. We were on our way to a busy Saturday in town, composed of an Indralaya Board meeting in the morning and a memorial gathering for Linda Jo Pym (see April 23-29) in the afternoon.

Leonie returned to camp on Saturday evening, just in time to do the orientation for the nearly 40 people who had arrived during the day for the Therapeutic Touch mentorship program. I stayed over until Sunday to visit with family and run some errands.

Dora Kunz

The last half of June at Indralaya has been devoted to the teaching and practice of Therapeutic Touch for nearly 40 years. Therapeutic Touch developed out of the shared work of Dora Kunz, Dolores Krieger and the experience of hundreds of interested students and practitioners, both here and at Pumpkin Hollow Farm in New York.

A key impetus for the development of this healing modality was Dora’s insight that the capacity for healing is a human quality that can be taught. In her book, The Personal Aura, Dora shared the following thoughts on healing:

Healing is the reestablishment of order within the body’s systems. I perceive its accomplishment as due to a universal energy which springs from the tendency towards order that is at the heart of all living processes... 

Healing involves forces and agencies which we do not fully understand, and certainly cannot command. Rather, we seek to be instruments of the power of healing which exists everywhere in nature. Even in the orthodox sense, medical procedures do not cure the patient; they merely remove the impediments to healing, which the body itself must accomplish...

Since the healing energy is a beneficent power available to all living beings, the ability to draw upon it does not depend upon religious belief. Every person who practices healing may conceptualize it differently. I personally feel that since this healing power or energy is available to everyone, it is essentially the same, no matter how it may be described. 

June 4-10

Indralaya in the Mind

How many of you remember your first visit to Indralaya? Over the years there have been quite a few memorable stories of that first visit. For many there is a sense of having come home, or of feeling a different sort of noticeable energetic in the atmosphere.

For most of us, it is perhaps not so easy to know that we have been here for the last time. There is always the likelihood or at least a possibility of returning at some future point. Nevertheless, that last visit is an inevitability once one has discovered and experienced this special place for the first time.

At the Awakening Kindness program with Nawang Khechog a couple weeks ago, the final session on Sunday morning was composed of program participants offering their thoughts on the experience they had shared over the course of the weekend. One participant, a person who has been here many times, said that she was so glad she had come. She is older now and a little bit unsteady. She hadn't been sure that her knees would be up to the challenge of navigating the terrain. She concluded by adding that she felt that this could well be the last time that she came to Indralaya.

It was a poignant, yet also beautiful moment. It occurred to me at the time that it was quite a gift for her to carry this knowing with her while she was here because it allowed her to be present with that knowing and thereby live into it more fully.

Over the years, there have also been many stories of how the reoccurring memory of a particular special place at Indralaya helped to provide a sense of calm and stability in sometimes chaotic situations. As an example, aid workers in trouble spots around the world have told of the solace and comfort that memories of Indralaya have given while they were immersed in extreme situations.

Each of us carries some aspect of Indralaya with us in our hearts and in our minds. Each of us has the capacity when we are not here physically to return to those places that are special to us during our meditations as well as in the course of daily life. And in this way the presence of this place ripples into the world in subtle ways and helps provide some semblance of balance amidst the turmoil of an oftentimes chaotic world.

May 28 - June 3

MAY ALL BE KIND TO EACH OTHER

This was something of a family week at Indralaya. Leonie’s brother Peter arrived during last week’s work party and stayed the week with us in the RMC. Our niece Collin arrived to begin a two week fellowship mid-week and Arthur Van Gelder, another of Leonie’s brothers, was co-head cook (with Peter) for the weekend program. There were also several Levey family members here: John & Shelagh, sisters Susan Huotari (all the way from Finland) and Andrie Levey-Bates, as well as Andrie's daughter Kelsey.

Arthur arrives by seaplane to meet his head-cooking responsibilities

Collin whips up a batch of oatmeal cookies in the kitchen

Peter with Nancy Lehwalder

The program leader for the weekend was Nawang Khechog. Nawang was born in Tibet and is a world-renowned musician and former hermit monk who teaches about Awakening Kindness. Nearly forty people were here for the program, which also included a free Saturday night concert for the Orcas Island community.

Nawang Khechog in concert

Sunday was our 17th wedding anniversary. We were married one week before we arrived at Indralaya in 1995 and began what was to have been a one or two year stay at camp as resident managers. If we knew then what we know now ... we wouldn’t change a thing!

wedding party members, 17 years later