A big part of what attracted me to teaching Turning Point and M&S was the honesty and integrity people demonstrate as they discover more of themselves. This is about reality rather than the games. It can seem at first that we don't want to know what’s inside but as we do turn and face the truth it’s not so bad after all. In fact, the deeper we go the more we find our own magnificence.

When I was a student in The Turning Point and the many courses I did following that, I wondered what it was that kept the teachers going. I imagined it must be impossibly wearing on them to be so fully present not only for the long hours of one course but for course after course. Now here’s the curious thing. As a teacher myself, sometimes I can arrive quite tired early on the Sunday morning of a Turning Point, for example. But the moment I go up front my body is filled with energy. My mind is clear. And the one thing I want to know is how you are doing. By the time we have reached Sunday morning on The Turning Point we are open and have discovered the beauty and the fascination of the simple truth. When people are willing to just say how it is, to move past the cover-ups and defences, what we also have in the course room is connection, caring, compassion, love. You’ve felt it. You know exactly what I mean.

Life is a journey of countless lessons – but lessons to learn what? The many lessons come down to one thing in the end, love. We learn that we’re not alone. We learn that we really are all in this together. We learn that the isolation we put ourselves into in order to be safe is the real source of our suffering. Coming out of hiding is liberating, energising and fills us again with a passion for living. When this happens in the community of the course room everyone is affected by it. Students, service team, teachers. We are all uplifted. And that’s how the teachers do it. This is the answer to the question I had as a student. How do the teachers manage the long hours, course after course? Where does the energy come from? It’s liberated from it’s hiding place as we choose to move toward each other instead of away. The energy is liberated not just for one person alone, because what we are doing is not about one person alone. The energy is liberated for everyone who is present. In one moment, one person is open and honest and we all feel the benefit. This energy is not body energy, it’s aliveness energy – something special, something important, something quite essential to our enjoyment of life – a passion for life and all it holds.

If we can do that much on Sunday morning in The Turning Point what can we do with five big weekends and nineteen Tuesday nights?

The answers are as numerous as the students who take the course and yet there is one answer that’s in common for all who take this path. One thing we all get from M&S is enough personal mastery to be able to go out into the world and make these transformations permanent.

There’s a momentum from the past that is difficult to move through. What we hold inside wants to stay as it is. Our ego does everything it can to keep itself intact. We’ve been practicing our hidden defences for decades and they don’t want to dissolve overnight. For brief moments we can taste what is good but this better way becomes illusive when we try to have it in the midst of life’s major challenges. Personal mastery is about acquiring the necessary experience and skill to shift gears permanently. Would that be a good thing? Well, you can have it and even from this brief written message you have some clues as to how we do it. In case it’s not yet entirely clear this journey is not one that can be taken alone. The required shift in consciousness is about coming out of isolation. So it makes sense, does it not, that this is done in partnership, in community?

Let me be your guide in this journey. We all need someone to help us who knows the way, who’s been down this path before. Come and join me on this magnificent journey. Let me get to know you.

Richard