Speakers - Path of Transformation Conference 2008

… what is it and how

to travel it wisely?

Preface

All of the presenters at the Path Of Transformation Conference have 'credentials'. Some have Ph.D.s or other titles; they've all written books, of which we only name a few in some cases, and been acknowledged in important ways. However, we feel that perhaps what is most important about them is that they have risked; they have been tested; they have sacrificed; and they have risen above the challenges and circumstances of their lives. In this spirit, we begin introducing them with what maybe is more important than their accomplishments in a worldly sense.

		Tessa Bielecki Earthy Mystic I grew up in New England, a countryside of lush green hills, singing streams, and verdant forests of oak and maple. In springtime I picked bouquets of wildflowers and in summer romped through the tall grasses full of daisies. When the trees turned red and gold in autumn, I gathered bundles of leaves and pressed them between the pages of my beloved books. In winter I built bonfires, skated on the ponds and went tobogganing down the steep hills. ... read more

		Bert Hellinger The Reconciler “In my life, there were upheavals where something old was suddenly over and something new started. “One of these upheavals was my escape from war captivity. Suddenly something was over and I had a future. “Another time was that I was a missionary in South Africa for a long time. My vision was that I would live there my whole life. I had even taken the South African citizenship. However, very suddenly some things started to move, because there was an opinion that I was too progressive. There was a controversy and that lead to my leaving South Africa. I was displaced to Würzburg and became the principal of the priest seminary there. ... read more

		Nigel Hamilton The Dreamweaver A toilet is not necessarily the place one would associate with having an extraordinary spiritual encounter. But that’s exactly what happened to Nigel Hamilton when he first met his teacher Pir Vilayat while both of them were peeing together side by side in a public restroom. Pir Vilayat said “A lot of people don’t brush their teeth”. And since then, Nigel has learned and now teaches to keep one’s eyes on the ordinary, rather than the extraordinary. read more

		Malidoma Patrice Somé The Shaman When he was five years old, Malidoma Somé was kidnapped by Jesuit priests and brought to their seminary far away from his home in the Dagara tribe of Africa. For fifteen years, messages of being a ‘good Christian’ were forced upon him along with emotional, physical and sexual abuse. One day Malidoma found himself in a fistfight with one of the head priests and threw him out of the window. read more

		Barbara Märtens The Warrioress There is a saying which is: "When the student is ready the teacher appears" For Barbara Märtens, the teacher first took on the form of a book. It was a full moon night in 1976. She was sitting with her boyfriend on the top of a roof, philosophizing the night away, drunk on love. When she went downstairs, she fell on the staircase and to regain her balance her hand reached out to a little shelf and grabbed the book “Meditation In Action” by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche... read more

		Lee Lozowick The Alchemist In 1976, Lee Lozowick met his spiritual Master Yogi Ramsuratkumar of Tiruvannamalai, India. Lee was a spiritual teacher in his own right with a large following of students. This first meeting was auspicious and filled with love and communion, as was Lee’s second visit in 1979. In between his trips to India, Lee was writing extensively to Yogi Ramsuratkumar and there was a strong flow of relationship between them. In 1986, Lee took 26 of his students to visit his Master who acted as if he’d never seen or heard from Lee before. ... read more

		Véronique Desjardins The Noble When I was a teenager, I thought I would be interested in wisdom someday, but my thoughts were that this would happen “later, when I am 40 years old.” At the same time, I was strongly convinced by this idea which I had read in Gurdjieff’s books that “Your being attracts your life.” At the age of 21, after a weekend with friends which made me once more see my difficulties with relationship, I suddenly realised that my whole life would be a failure if I did not change now … read more

		Purna Steinitz The Cowboy Yogi “When I was about fifteen years old, my English teacher asked our class to write an essay on what each of us would like to do after we graduated from high school. So I went home and wrote an essay about how I wanted to go to prison, because I felt that people incarcerated in prison had what we call in English ‘street smarts.’ From the movies and books I had read, I sensed that they knew things about life that were absent from the white, middle class world that I grew up in. A few days later I was called into the Headmaster’s office and my mother was sitting there, and I was confronted about how I could possibly write such a terrible thing. But, I had a destiny. ... read more