Enlightenment Intensive a success!

Karen and I mastered an enlightenment intensive in May, located in Indianola, WA

We had incredible people attend and hope to see you come to our next intensive in October. For more information see www.LivingAwarenss.org.

Seattle Area Enlightenment Intensive in April

Living Awareness (Kurt Treftz and Karen Lynn) announce an enlightenment intensive in April to be held across the Puget Sound from Seattle. Dates are April 11 - April 15, Starting Friday evening at 7:00 pm and around 11:00 am morning, Tuesday.

The SettingEnlightenment Intensives are basically several day "retreats" where a monastic setting and a specific contemplative discipline is followed. It is fully residential, starting with an introductory evening, 3 days of intensive dyadic contemplation and other activities, and then an integrative morning. During this time a disciplined life style is strictly adhered to, including a vegetarian diet and a very specific schedule of contemplations done in tandem with a dyad partner, where turns are taken between contemplation and communication of one partner and attentive listening by the other. It is intense, not necessarily easy, but the breakthroughs, insights, and most importantly the opportunity for enlightenment experiences are more enhanced in this discipline and technique than anywhere else.

For more information see http://cascadepest.com/about/index.htm

Proud of my company!

I'm delighted to announce that my company, Cascade Pest Control, received the Angie's List Super Service Award! Few pest control companies in Seattle have achieved this status and it's great because Angie's List is consumer driven....where Angie's List members--all of them consumers--rate companies they encounter. Over time Cascade earned many good and great reports placing us in good standing.

Enlightenment Intensives

My wife, Karen, and I have found Enlightenment Intensives to fit well with our spiritual lives... And, so, in 2005 we entered training from Lawrence Noyes as well as served with various masters and immersed ourselves in the whole enlightenment intensive community and various trainings. The enlightenment intensive, started in 1968, is roughly a blend of Zen practice (the sesshin) and modern psychology--particularly the dyad communication format. For information on enlightenment intensives in general and our schedule in particular see our site LivingAwareness.Org. Enjoy!

Celebrating the Workplace

A bright spot in my life is my business, Cascade Pest Control, where I've devoted much of my life. Cascade was started in 1979 by my wife-at-the-time, Diana, and myself and we've grown to nearly 20 employees. What's fun and a bit amazing is that we were inspired to work with various environmental groups and governmental bodies that oversee enivornmental affairs and in the process we were the first company to win a host of environmental awards. This was a first for the pest control industry. From there we went on to win a couple Better Business Awards and other recognitions.
While the subject of pests may seem "icky" to many, the impact of pests on our health and welfare is huge so providing pest control--and doing it in a manor that is safe for people and the environment--is a more important issue than is widely known. Plus the study of pests--entomology--is fascinating.
Cascade has developed into serving the greater Seattle area, including all of King county, the Seattle-Eastside and south Snohomish county. Cascade Pest Control specializes in residential pest control--particularly rodent pests, carpenter ants and others. We also specialize in the repair, cleanup, decontamination, and insulation repair as the result of rat infestations.

Lastly, I want to mention the employees of Cascade who work hard to help create the company that we can be proud of: Cascade Pest Control

Shame, not on me but in me

During the last practicum I started with how difficult it is for me to cry. I've long admired, even envied, women who could access tears so easily. And then there I sit. For years.

I've learned in childhood not to cry..."please don't cry"
I learned as a boy and young man that "men don't cry" and plenty of times it wasn't safe (accepted) OF course my golden hot button around acceptance sealed that one.
Then in a cult I learned to be happy, be full of joy, be in the joy of the Lord. So greiving was not allowed, let alone crying.

So when my fiance said, "I think I'm not sure that I want to marry you," I bucked up and I believed in a fantasy-faith that we'd come back together. Within a couple of weeks, while she was on a date with another guy, a drunk driver in a station wagon veered over the steel grated road bed of a bridge and slammed head on into the Volkwagen they were driving. The guy she was with died immediately having had the steering column driven into him. Kathy didn't die on the scene. In a hosptial she laid for days in a coma, her face so swollen that it was hard to know it was her right away. She had dried blood from her ears and moaned from time to time. I, still very much "in love," "bucked up," had to be strong and tried to comfort her, calling her by my nickname for her, "bunny-bear."

After 10 days she died. I went into some place between genuine faith--transcendent of the temporal world--and fantasy, that God would bring her back to life.

It was nearly 10 years later, after adding my father's death, and many other painful episodes that I had a very strange experience...or series of experiences...that were nothing less than miraculous. For a number of days I watched God's grace and love and I was a pawn (seer?) in the midst of it all. And in the love and in the grace my hardness thawed. The grace of God was greater than any possible idea of right and wrong I could have imagined.

And in my thawing all the pain came up at once. I call it a thawing but it was really a battle between the grace and the hardness I'd held. All the grief and suffering that I'd put off came up and I was beyong disoriented. Everything I believed in was up for grabs. So much so that I didn't know what to keep and what to throw out. It got to where I even started to wonder whether I could trust myself that a wall in front of me was really there.

I took a couple days off work. I couldn't really function. Then one day while staying home with my kids. I took a bath. I could keep an ear out for them in the back yard. They were fine playing and I allowed myself to take care of myself with a hot bath.

I turned on a radio and listened to a Christian music station. A song came on about a boy, now grown up, who'd lost his dad in Vietnam. He sang about how his dad would sing he and his brother cowboy stories, then in the corous he'd sing that in Vietnam his dad had, "laid down his life for his friends." In my hardness, my bitterness, I became cynical thinking, "how do you really know that? Maybe he was shooting up heroin. Maybe he did something stupid. How do you know?" My hardness was a protection--or so it would seem--from vulnerability. But I didn't know that. I was finding this song pathetically naive.

Then the lyrics changed. It told of how the wife, his mother, and these two little boy got word that their father was dead. The pain of that snuck up around my cynicism and reached into me with a smash. It didn't matter what had happened in Vietnam. What happened to this woman and her little boys was tragic. And it was undeniably painful. I started to cry.

I sat in that bathtub, on my knees in a fetal position crying for two hours. I would cry about all kinds of things. At times it mutated into a prayer for some friends who were in greater denial of pain than I'd been in.

At some point, my son--maybe 5 at the time--came in and asked if I was laughing. He looked a little concerned (what a heart!) I let him know that I was crying and that it was okay, no, it was good, for men to cry. He left and I continued to cry for some time. Eventually, I felt "clean" and asked God to take me. I didn't want to remain in a world where I could get "dirty" again with hardness of any kind.

Needless to say, I wasn't taken. And I'm not always sure remaining was the best thing. By the time I got out the water was completely cold...and I couldn't have cared less.

Over the years I would love any movie I went to that I could loose myself in it, suspend any disbelief, and get so in it that I could find my self and cry. If I left the theater with tears down my face...into my beard, it was a great film and I would either seeing again or buy the video.

My first wife of 25 years didn't see me cry until we were parting. The pain of it for me, even though I was insisting on the separation and eventual divorce, was overwhelming enough for me to cry. More to the point there was some combination of feeling safety/trust with her at the moment, and somehow moving beyond any notion of shame.

I could cry in a darkened theater. Or, very rarely I could cry alone. It wasn't until I was with Karen that two things happened. I started experiencing a phenomenon where I'd laugh in my sleep, usually waking myself up (or if not waking me I'd wake up Karen.) I'd laugh like a little boy, even giggle.

The other thing is that I would occasionally cry. IN the most momentous occasions I'd get edgy for days or weeks before I'd finally go over the ledge and cry. Karen would witness me with her compassion and empathy, but I'd be in the grips of painful shame, unable to look her in the face.

I held a post as volunteer "botha." A botha is dressed in black, padded, huge thick helmet and groin protection and assume the attitude of attacker against workshop participants for an entire day. All I gave any of them was a stare of disgust, or worse. And in my "method acting" state my words were poisonous. It was my job.

And as I did this job I would watch them. Some had little problem seeing through what I was doing. But there were others, usually those who'd been brutally attacked or systematically abused in their past, and they were utterly terrified.

And my job was to help them go back to the place they'd lost themselves, right to that very place, and find a way to connect with their power and ability... But until then I would watched them shrink, and I would up the ante. It was my job. Sometimes I made my self sick. It was my job to serve them by being their worse nightmare and all the time, beneath the mask I wore for them, I was paradoxically more in touch with empathy than ever before. Sometimes I'd barely have my helmet back on before I'd start to cry.

Without disclosing all the details of the finale, by the next day each of the participants would have seen me crying openingly in public, flooded with empathy for them...having held it in so long. And they--yes, even the one who while watching me stand off with another participant had shaken to the ground and wet herself--would come up to me full of gratitude, understanding who I really was and fully understanding that it was my intent that in the midst of each scenario we'd set up, they'd find an opening, get a bit of space and kick me in the head until I was dispatched. For some, truly reliving their nightmare, they went to places where they'd have killed another attacker. And that was okay with me. Rewarding in fact. They'd found a measure of their power again.

So, here we were starting our 3rd practicum and I'm very aware of how much I need to cry...Robert notes my flagility, but I can't cry. I half joke to Robert about males and their corpus collosum...you know we men are brain damaged prior to birth. okay, we're not, but it seems a good excuse. Males do in fact get an acid wash that limits the corpus collosum, that part of the brain that communicates between the two hemipheres. ...Robert didn't buy it. "Blame biology" he jokes with a knowing smile."

So all I'm left with is the teaching on shame...how it hurts with searing pain and how it binds me from releasing the searing pain. I can't readily cry because I'm ashamed to, and ashamed to admit that I'm possible defective. Vulnerability, the higher road to health, is not trusted in a world of shame...vulnerability is shameful.

And as I went through the curiculum weekend I would find where shame was intertwined withing me, layer upon layer, going deep, and parhaps back to the womb.

The legacy of our last practicum weekend for me is my ability to sit in the swiming head and searing pain of shame as it comes up here and there, amazingly--I'd been so blind to it--nearly everywhere in my interactions with others.

I need to cry. But I'm too bound by shame.

Paradox of Marriage

In going over my notes I read my notes of Karen's account she shared in practicum group of the couple weeks we'd gone through. This is when I "held onto myself" (self-soothed, feeling fragile myself) while listening to Karen's account of the 2 rough weeks we went through. I had experienced her as falling apart, blaming our marriage, and me--caught in my hot button of "shame based exclusion" fell down trying to have her see me for who I am and trying to reach her. I lost myself trying to "show" her either myself or herself. It can't be done. So I followed her falling apart. Interestingly, when she left in the middle of it to spend a couple nights at a gals birthday party overnight (rented home on waterfront) I felt instant relief as she left. I regained myself...the self I'd lost trying to see myself in her. I think I was tasting a morsel of what she was probably going through in large doses. Within minutes of her leaving I felt settled, felt in my body again, and had my creativity and sense of humor return big time.

Enmeshed? You bet. What was different, however, between her and myself is that I could quickly relocate myself. I think this points to the depth of her process. Nevertheless, it was painful to watch Karen continue to not differentiate her experience...her feelings...and me. This was why I "held onto myself" (around the pain) of hearing Karen's inner experience in our practicum group.

My opinion in retrospect is one of paradox. When a committed relationship provides safety and heart we open up to what we haven't been willing to face before. The sludge from childhood, perhaps abuse (or in my case, neglect of parents who are stuck with very limited capacity), may now surface. And when it does--I've experienced this firsthand at certain crossroads in my life and somewhat this past weekend around shame--it returns as the shadowy mess that we once had to force into the recesses in the first place. When the sludge arises--certainly for me--it is experienced from within the sludge.

For example, on Saturday night when Karen helped me with some breath-work I returned to elementary school and all the shame I experienced. As it came up I felt as it I was there again...just as ashamed as I turned to Karen to tell her the truth of where history intersected the present: "I don't know how to need another." "I am fucked up such that I either become ruggedly independent or I get "fuse-y," either aggravated with expectation from another or clingy. Both loaded expectation and clinging are dependent in such a disgusting way." At this I felt extreme shame and had trouble looking Karen in the eyes. Fortunately, she called me to look at her. She loved me enough to see me. Although I was experiencing myself in horrible, black and white terms, Karen could see my heart and courage to go to this place and own my shadow. Trust was, paradoxically from my perspective, greatly enhanced.

You see, in my opinion our marriage was healthy enough to allow our crap to surface and be dealt with. And that doesn't necessarily feel great at the time. In fact, we may become scared and get lost for a while. I think that Karen's stuff around an abusive mother surfaced, I was clueless as to how to help and instead made things worse, and Karen couldn't differentiate between what was surfacing from a horror in her past and the present. That's my best take on it. I can say for sure that I've done it myself--collapsed distinction in the midst of surfaced old stuff--many, many times.

And Kurt, this guy who was up against challenges in his life, feeling overwhelmed with performance anxiety all out of the fear that "failure means exclusion." Fearing shame, perfection had raised it's head. And Kurt could not differentiate between his surfacing past--some emptiness around sense of self confidence--such that he could not differentiate between his shadow and the present. Karen's process, requiring her to pull in, to re-establish independence, looked, smelled and tasted like distancing...exclusion, Kurt's perfect trigger.

It seems to me that this trust and heart and opening of real relationship that paradoxically leads us through the shadow-lands is not for the faint of heart. I'm thinking that what we see everywhere is the immature notion of the perpetual honeymoon. And that is why marriages fail, or become completely stale-mated.

Case # 061106INT At Large (debatable say some)

RCMP most wanted list. All points bulletin: This person last seen stealing linen napkin from resaurant in White Rock. Armed and dangerously good looking. May toss napkin at you without notice! Not known by name or alias, but rival gang leader, Cindi Kanz, while fleeing to Alberta, said this: "I'll get even with him! I'll scream while squeezing the living daylights out of a pillow!"

Telling on Myself

I watched subtleties where I get my sexuality mingled with emotional pursuit. It isn’t clean, it doesn’t work. I so love it when it’s free and open for whatever form of sweet or powerful passion that shows up…but it’s authentic!

It’s so nice to be able to have Karen tell me that she needs me to just hold her. I can’t imagine anything I’d rather do.
Then after so much relational maneuvering—and going to “love me” at our practicum, it is so nice—even if I’m still uncomfortable with it—to simply tell Karen that I need to be held.
Silly me…so many times I get anxious or grumpy or whatever when all I need is to be held.

I need to slow down, quiet down, and trust my intuition more often.

It’s so easy for me to sit in judgment of Karen, her places of “fusion.” Then, months later I wake up to find that I’m fused around Karen’s fusion—real or perceived.

I’ve been so judgmental of “needy” people, of showing up myself “needy.” Now I’m beginning to see—with compassion—that “neediness” is legitimate need under pressure, where someone never got to be in need or have them met. “Neediness” is what you get when your not sure anyone will catch you when you fall.

Sometimes at the verge of breakthrough I am alternately “messy” and “raw-clean!”

I ran the Bare Bun Run, a 3 mile foot race in the nude! What I love is the innocence and openness—not just physical openness, but heart openness—at the nudist camp. It’s as though the lack of clothing drops pretense and defenses. So much friendliness and no perceptible sexuality. Children and obesity and the sagging skin of old folks. The freedom is truly amazing.

When I ask to be loved I face shame, embarrassment, shyness, then rationalizations that I am inconveniencing Karen…that she couldn’t love someone, particularly a man, who actually, outwardly needed and asked for love.
But then I sit quietly, knowing that Karen is still there.
Amazing. I was able to cleanly ask for what I needed and got it. And she sat with me, loved me, enjoyed loving me because it was so clean and pure and raw and open.

One morning of late I got up before Karen and found my way down the stairs an into the hot tub, sitting with the morning as it unfolded. My mind/emotions were quiet and when a bird sang it was as if I was within the bird’s song, within the sound and the joy itself. Pure joy. Then I looked up to see an airplane in the morning sun. My mind didn’t label it or anything about it. Instead I had a oneness with the sunlight on it and the air that flowed over it. Incredible.

When Karen opens up and tells me of her hidden places I melt. I don’t remember being so trusted. Dropping into compassion, dropping, allowing my heart to expand like a cloud of moisture. I couldn’t be more fulfilled.

Poem of the Dammed

Poem of the Dammed

I am hardened, reinforced with steel
I span the banks
Never moving, never compromising my
rigid boundaries

I arch my back to
Hold myself against the flow
Closed, not allowing,
Not opening, not open

Behind me builds this
Vast pressure, this
Great unrelenting burden
Yet I hold fast to my anchorage
Trusting my foundation
Unwilling to venture a peek, a spout
That would surely result in
My painful death

Holding fast, the rain
Continue to fall
And my burden grows daily
Straining me, torturing me

Though the reinforcement of fear
Is great
The strain-full suffering
Grows greater
Oblivious to myself I am parched, a desert
A living dilemma
My convicted contractions
Meant to protect me
Now hurt me with unbearable,
Strain-full suffering

Oh, that I were not
So strongly hardened
Oh, that I knew my gateways
Oh, that I were not a dam at all
That I might discover
My dreaded shadow—that
Ugly, filthy, dangerous and disgusting beast
To be no less than the
Waters of life

Oh, that I might break
The concrete and steel that
Surrounds my heart
Burst forth
And see myself for what
I was meant to be—
A part of the River of Life

The deserts and wastelands
Before me would again
Spring forth in abundance

Oh, that I might have the
Strength to let go of
What I take to be my strength
And realize the power and glory
Of my flow


Kurt Treftz 1999, 2006

Dream: My Grandson, Me, and the Warship

I have a sense of this being THE dream for me right now. Here we go:

Both I and my grandson (13 year-old Brennan) are in the navy and serving on a warship. The ship is big, complex with many decks and equipment. It is heavy, huge, massive and powerful, armed with great guns.

Brennan and I are both in service within the ship and it—we—come under attack. The ship is wrecked, not sunk, but ruined and we are among the survivors who have to struggle to escape the torn metal and flames.

I know I’m out, but for some time I can’t find my grandson, Brennan. I feel desperate and helpless. Later, he is found.

Much later we are assembled and waked through a ceremony to be awarded medals for our honor, our valor. I look at Brennan, both of us conscious of each other and the ordeal, we weep bitterly, amazed of the immensity of what we’d been through, the suffering, and the absolutely amazing relief. In the end we’re both okay, and more than okay. We’re together, we’ve made it, and we’re free.

At first I saw this literally. My grandson, Brennan, and I had always been close. I was the only one who could settle him, we were tight, we respected the sound of my voice. Six years ago I was married to Diana, and in our household we had 3 kids and two grandsons (from the eldest daughter.) Then, between launching a kid, a divorce, then seeing who could handle what teenagers, it was soon only myself, my son, Joseph, and my grandson, Brennan. After launching Joseph—by the time Karen came into my life—it was just Brennan and I and he’d had quite an emotional ride watching the family fall apart (not that it was really “together” before that.) But he and I had watched the destruction, if not sinking of the ship—our family as we’d known it.

But then Karen offered something that I missed entirely. Something that connected perfectly within me as I heard it: In the dream Brennan represented me, my child within. And I, as witness, watched the rescue and saving of my own “child.” The ship was my old “way of being,” with all it’s grand structure, bulk and momentum. I have been feeling so open and vulnerable lately. I’m out of the ship. My freedom is my reward for the valor of “holding on” and making it. Right now I just want to cry.