There is No Rule that You Have to Be on Time, but…

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In our groups, we try to be flexible. When someone arrives late on occasion, we welcome them. However, it can become a problem when someone starts making a regular habit of it. This page explains why it’s important to always be on time—or at least 99.9% of the time. If you arrive late, it affects everyone, and not just you. This page explains why.

Here are the sections of the meetings that you might miss:

Checking In

We all like to have a moment to say “Hello,” and to share what has happened in the past week or so. This seems to be an important part of being a community. But this type of sharing is confined to two periods: Checking In at the beginning and The Parking Lot at the end.

The reason for this requirement is that we have intense sessions; checking in during the other sections of the meeting interrupts the flow and disturbs the entire experience for everyone. If we’re in meditation, it interrupts the meditation and sometimes destroys it. In the Chrysalis, it breaks the flow of magic that grows throughout that dialog.

If you have to arrive late, please do not attempt to check in when you arrive. Checking has its time, and if you arrive late, you’ve missed that time.

The Heart Chakra Meditation

We have a deep, community-building process that extends through our entire meeting. Many of the skills we use work towards this, but especially inner silence and sharing heart chakra energy.

The meditation begins by activating the heart through breathing, and then proceeds to sharing it with more and more people. At the end, this entire flow of heart energy is brought back to the group. Over time, this builds a strong sense of connection between the people in the group.

If you arrive during the Heart Chakra Meditation, do not say a word, because everyone else in the group is already deep in the meditation. Saying “Hi” will interfere with their depth.

If you already have a connection with the group, missing the Heart Chakra Meditation a time or two will only interfere with your connection in the moment. Your historical connection will reestablish itself within the group. But it won’t be as strong, because it’s not based on a current practice.

However, every time you miss this meditation, you dilute and weaken the chi connections that you have with the group.

The Practice

Immediately after the Heart Chakra Meditation, we go into the practice for the week. Sometimes, this is a guided meditation, and if you arrive after it starts, you’ll need to just try to create a context in your mind in which you can make the guided imagery work. If the practice is a meditation, you should enter without even saying, “Hi,” because doing so would bring others out of their meditations.

But the practice can also be a complex journal technique or dialogue technique. If so, you can join in easily if you arrive at the very beginning. But if you arrive late, you could only participate if I stop the technique to explain it all a second time, since I’ve already given the complex instructions once to everyone who was on time.

In the past, I’ve tried to do this, but I’ve learned that this seems very unfair to the people who arrived on time. For this reason, anyone who arrives late will simply have to listen carefully and see if they can figure it out. I can’t explain everything a second time.

The Chrysalis

The Chrysalis is usually about what people learned in the Practice. So if you arrive after the Practice, you may participate in the Chrysalis, but you’ll be placed in the rotation last, so that you can get some idea about what people are talking about.

It is possible to participate in a Chrysalis about a Practice that you didn’t try, but your challenge will be to listen carefully and fit in to the themes that other people are talking about. It is not appropriate to ask people to explain the Practice if you were simply too late to participate in it. So just fit in as best as you can.

Similarly, the Remembrance Round and the Intention Round of the Chrysalis may be less meaningful to you if you haven’t done the Practice but you’ll just have to do your best to fit in.

The Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements are about the person involved, though they also often involve insights that the other person shared about the Practice. However, you’ll still be able to acknowledge the people that you know from previous meetings.

Boosting

Boosting is an energy practice that targets the skill or quality that you worked with in the session. It employs the energy that was initially raised in the Heart Chakra Meditation and was then refined during the Chrysalis

If you only arrive at the very end, when we’re about to do the Boosting, you can take part, but your levels of chi may be lower than they could be. You can get some value from it, but you’ll have to create your own focus.

Using Alcohol before Our Meetings

You can attend most other types of meetings in the world after having a drink or two, and still get value from the meetings. However, I’ve had experience on multiple occasions with people attending our meetings after drinking. The short answer is that in our meetings, even one drink can prevent you from getting any value from a Joyful Wisdom meeting. Here’s how it inhibits your ability to be part of the process.

Alcohol numbs the senses, which is why people have accidents when they’ve drunk too much. Numbing your senses with three drinks is enough to get you arrested in many places. However, driving is a completely different activity from tuning in to the subtle energies we work with.

Our meetings focus entirely on very subtle energies which are invisible to most people. If you numb your senses with even one beer, you’re very likely to completely numb your senses to the subtle experiences of energy that you might experience in our groups if you abstain from all alcohol.

  1. The Heart Chakra Meditation is not just an imagination exercise, though we use imagination. It is also a direct manipulation of chi energy, and if alcohol has numbed your ability to perceive chi energy, you can still go through the motions, but the experience won’t be there.
  2. The Practice sometimes works with psychic energy, which you may not be able to sense as effectively if you’ve even had one beer. Sometimes it’s complicated and even one beer might prevent you from appreciating it; complex instructions are hard to follow when you have any alcohol in your system. Several beers, and you might not be able to understand the purpose of the exercise, much less integrate it into your daily life.
  3. The Chrysalis depends on everyone entering into Inner Silence, which is almost impossible if you’ve had any alcohol at all. Without Inner Silence, you won’t be able to experience the empathy or insight that you would otherwise experience. This can be the result of a single beer.

In addition, if you’ve had even one beer, you’re more likely to interrupt the Chrysalis process by speaking with it’s not your turn, and the Chrysalis depends on everyone involved following the formula. Without the formula that enables everyone there to tune in to their deepest selves, there is no Chrysalis, and the magic it creates is nearly impossible.