Secret Garden

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You are vast, boundless, empty fullness, unconditional love unfolding. What is, is perfection. Including suffering and challenge and delight. When oneness is seen, the ordinary is a miracle. The most mundane thing we can ever do is truly extraordinary. Love is what you are. You are light. You are life. You are intelligence. This radiant and absolute joy is immediate and quietly underpins and embraces all pain and separate self. On top of this joy is ‘you’ in existence, the world, all your circumstances, challenges, mistakes, self-doubts and achievements. The world cannot give us freedom. Your roles are not what you are, your self-judgement is not what you are. This is a human journey and all the choices are ours. Life accepts them unconditionally.

For those who wish it, here is the art of living happily, whatever one’s apparent personal circumstances. This work is natural and profoundly humane. As a by product, the rewards are greater freedom, ease, effectiveness, joy and happiness in relationship, work, life. However the message is that there is nowhere to go, nothing to get, nothing to become. And to love what is, love yourself like your own best lover. Love what you feel right now. Let what is, be. Rest in the silence beyond stories and time and discover that you are endless joy without reason. Give up the fight with yourself, with your responses, with your nature. Working on yourself doesn’t work!

Every experience, every feeling, every circumstance, is an invitation to let go, and be the love, the aliveness now. This realisation is always new. Dogma and belief are nothing to do with this. You are not required to give anything up, though things may fall away.

For 18 years I have been sharing with others the joy of being, beyond the separate sense of self, and beyond the mind’s ideas of identification with world and cause and effect, in residential retreats, day gatherings, evening meetings, and, most richly, in ongoing groups. Join us and discover the truth of being or deepen that Self-realisation.

Let the circles give you space to explore how to live a spiritually awake life that is also an embodied happy, authentic, earthly, natural one. Enjoy!

I would be delighted to meet and work with you if you are new to these explorations, and to see you again soon if you are an old friend. It’s my privilege and profound pleasure to walk with those who love and value beingness.

In endless gratitude to all my teachers and guides and to all those friends who bring their own particular beauty to our circles and with all love to you

Aloha is inner silence, empty of belief, story, judgement.

Sunshine sings it, rain falls through it,

winds breathe it, trees are moved by it, the earth rolls with it,

children grow with it, the ocean churns it, bodies may love it into beingness.

Aloha is Spirit beyond form, the soul of creation.

Aloha is silence, potential,

the ground of being which brings fulfilment and peace, It is passed on and celebrated in love.

Joy Hicklin-Bailey

Secret Garden circle work and shamanic work are a profound call to stillness, silence, deep work and self-inquiry for those who are looking for deeper fulfilment in their lives and an awakening of or deeper realisation of the truth of who they are. This is spiritual work that is authentic, sane, potent, grounded, and full of passion for Love and Truth. Gatherings and circles happen in a spirit of not knowing what will be, in openness and willingness to be with the aliveness, the extraordinary. ordinary miracle of life unfolding between us.

Here, we can love and nourish, parent, celebrate ourselves on our human journey and find connection and intimacy along the way. We can learn how safe it is to open, and to love to be full-bodied, to breathe, and to feel and to make mistakes. Spirituality is otherwise a tool for the ego to avoid dealing with these wounds, a way to separate from ordinary life and even judge others. Secret Garden is a way to materialize the spiritual, to integrate body and soul. To acknowledge the past and be more and more fully present, here, now, alive in this body, this man, this woman that we are. Life is no longer tragic or a chore, frightening or lonely.

The rewards are joy, true community, authenticity, sanity, spiritual discernment, integrity, love and fulfilment, whatever we choose to spend our time doing on the planet (footballer or executive, mother or drama student, healer or artist, father or carpenter)

Secret Garden gatherings inspire and en-courage you to live this essence in your ordinary life and offer a refuge to which you can bring your deepest questions, your yearning for connection and, if it is there, your pain, where they are received by unconditional life, here now.

The choice to live consciously and with love is a tough one at times and will be challenged in the world every day. Circumstances arrive beyond control and we can only face these and do our best. It takes fire, discipline and courage to accept the full responsibility and maturity of this task. It requires patience, willingness, humility, vigilance, focused self-inquiry, study, self-honesty, and unusual integrity.

Secret Garden offers a direct invitation to let go into the love and aliveness that you are, into the truth of life, the essence , the aloha, the joy, the endless love, in manifest creation. This way of being grows compassion, and at the same time, freedom to be in all the facets of our humanity. Old patterns are seen clearly and dissolve gracefully. Spiritual kinship becomes a delight we wish more of for ourselves. We become love in all its ways of expressing, and let go of trying to get love and joy from outside.

You are all that is, the source and appearance of all that rises and falls in awareness, empty fullness, nothing else is ever happening. Life’s dream is the expression of wholeness, of aloha unfolding, there is nothing to search for.

There is an energetic field that supports freedom, beingness whenever we come together. These circles are without end because there is always more, each time a different colour of one’s being unfolding. New insights, new awarenesses, new shifts, new breakthroughs. New life!

Let the circles give you space to explore how to live a spiritually awake life that is also an embodied happy, authentic, earthly, natural one. Enjoy!

All love,

Joy Hicklin-Bailey