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More About Rose Diamond and Woods Elliott
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ROSE DIAMOND: Life threads leading to a Whole New World
I’ve always been a teacher and a lover of Whole Person Experiential Learning and I’ve come to see the two as inseparable. I learn so that I can teach and I teach in order to learn. This philosophy of seeing life primarily as a journey of learning has carried me through some of life’s inevitable dark passages and led me to pursue a conscious life.  I'm an inside-out learner. I read a lot and have been inspired by many wonderful authors but mostly I've learned about human nature by studying my inner life and the effects of my behaviour and by keenly observing others. By my early 20's a longing for freedom led me to a lifelong inquiry into what freedom really is and to the Path of Liberation. The Women’s Movement was just begining as I grew into womanhood I immersed myself in feminist writing and particulatrly understanding women's psychology for more than twenty years. The women’s movement gave me wonderful tools for understanding the politics of power and how different groups of people have been suppressed and dominated throughout history. I came to realize how “the personal is political”, how oppression is internalized within the psyche, and the liberating power of collective consciousness-raising. This fueled my determination to free myself and grew my empathy with the plight of oppressed people around the world.
In the early '80's, I discovered my gifts for community networking and for supporting other people's development by identifying emerging learning needs in the field and creating learning resources to meet those needs. In 1983 I left a full time job in adult education to create my own Personal and Professional development business, Teamwork and grew this to a six person business: I left in 1991 but the business is still going today. I had discovered my love for working freelance and living from my own authentic creativity, and this became my passion.
I was attracted to Gestalt Therapy as a means to transform my old conditioning. This is an emotionally powerful, experiential, whole person method which focuses on being present and bringing awareness into bodily experience and the unfolding creative process. With its here-and-now spontaneous focus it can cut through ego and mind chatter and take one straight into soul connection. In a group, the experience of interwoven stories and the underlying oneness of experience was like poetry-in-motion to me; profoundly transformational. I participated in Gestalt learning communities for 20 years as learner and teacher, healer and healed, and it gave me basic skills in presence, awareness, contact and visual imagination, which are invaluable in my life and in all my work.
Yet beyond a certain point psychotherapy couldn’t shift my old patterns. In 1991 I was introduced to a system of meditation, Sahaj Marg, which focused on cleaning the heart. This profoundly and immediately changed my life and initiated me into fifteen years of intense Spiritual Practice and study of the Soul Journey. At the same time as I embarked consciously on my spiritual path I made the decision to follow my creative process wherever it led me, and in particular to make room in my life for my passion for writing. From that moment my life became and has remained a creative adventure. I drafted my first book, Women and the Creative Process, and then set off to New Zealand which became my home for the next twelve years. Here I wrote and published my second book and soul journey story, Migration to the Heartland and birthed my vision for A Whole New World.
Then in 2006, I reached another point where I needed something different: a Conscious Relationship. I miraculously found my soul friend Woods Elliott through the Internet and together we began to live life as a Consciousness Practice, applying spiritual understandings in a very practical way and as a process of Deep Discovery, allowing life to reveal the answers we need.
These skills, experience and inner work were combined with a strong desire to empower others to fulfill their potential, through:
- A natural ability to initiate educational projects, design educational programmes and support them with written materials.
- A burning desire to write and to master the art and craft of writing, and pass these skills on to others.
- A keen fascination with the creative process as it unfolds in the individual and in the collective, and a desire to support the creative empowerment of others.
- A love of conceptual big picture thinking (global and cosmic)and an ability to synthesize different viewpoints.
- Participation in and facilitation of diverse learning communities: educational, therapeutic, spiritual, dialogic; gatherings and retreats.
- A love of creative conversation, dialogue, and making deep spaces for soul work.
All of this has resulted in thousands of creative hours developing my own approaches to transformational learning, as well as delivering a multitude of workshops, courses, seminars and coaching programmes. I’m an Aries Ox. Aries = quick, fiery, intuitive, initiator, catalyst, visionary; Ox = slow, grounded, thorough, strong, tenacious and persevering.
The Evolution of A Whole New World
The seed vision for A Whole New World was planted in the soil of personal, professional and political disillusionment. My unhappiness in the midst of the human madness and greed, which became very evident in the '80's and is now coming home to roost in our current global crisis, emerged in me as a classic mid-life crisis in the early '90's and prompted me to take a series of leaps of faith in the direction of deepening my authentic self. This led me to New Zealand, a land which I came to see as a potential role model for a new peaceful, sustainable culture. In 1995, three months after arriving in Aotearoa, I received the seed vision for AWNW and it took another fourteen years for the seed to germinate and to be fertilised by creative work and community.  Phase One: The work began in earnest in 2006 and has been a full time occupation ever since. Here in Golden Bay at the top of the South Island, the vision developed around a plan for a Transformational Learning Community in NZ, linking transformational initiatives around the country and supported by an e-learning publishing business. I started a newsletter and a blog, wrote and published the first e-book and piloted several introductory Transformational Learning Catalysts events. Phase Two: 2007/8, with Woods Elliott in Virginia, USA, I wrote “ Living your Passion: How Love-in-action is Seeding a Whole New World” based on interviews with 25 (mostly) New Zealanders who are creating the new peaceful culture. We incorporated Fire Seeds Publishing (now integrated into AWNW). In 2009, we wrote the e-book series, Awaken the Whole New Human and created the website. Woods published Dazzlephrenia and I spent 6 months in England connecting with people on a similar path there. In 2010 I launched into the world of virtual learning and ran several exciting, soulful and successful learning experiments, reconnecting with my gifts for interviewing, creative conversations and inducing states of presence and visionary imagination. Phase Three: And now, back in New Zealand, the whole new world is starting to unfold beneath our feet and we’re ready to share the wisdom and resources we have been gathering. It’s been a long journey to reach this new beginning and we look forward to meeting you on this evolutionary adventure! Click here to read testimonials about Rose Diamond
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WOODS ELLIOTT: Life threads
Existential Wonderment: I don’t know for sure if it’s relatively true, but I’ve always regarded myself as an old soul, thrilled about being mystifyingly alive. Seemed no one knew why or how we’re here; so you could say all my life I’ve been inordinately surprised and curious about basic mystery over why existence is all that it is. There’s a certain existential shock with all the beauty, extravagance, and bewilderment.
Exploring Human Nature: I found people a fascinating life-form, I’m sure being a human critter had something to do with the attraction. Self exploration naturally spread to people in general, and I loved the opportunity to explore human nature and be helpful to others at the same time. I often mused what it would be like to move the challenge of counseling into a more creative rather than healing focus; to bring my listening and facilitative skills to bear on helping people to evolve into higher beings, live their passions fully, and actuate their highest potentials for evolutionary development.
Mother Nature Love: During my love affair with Mother Nature in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, and the series of high adventures I embarked on there, at times I missed my psychotherapeutic work and fantasized become The Walking Therapist, who would counsel people on special walks in the foothills and help them to find ecopsychological remedies in the marvelous views and soulful scenery of the region. During the wonderful years of alternative life style and radical environmentalism I was removed from the human community and found great solace and enrichment in lovely wild lands that fed my soul.
Writing and Discovery: My love of writing began with personal journals and I had a flare for writing long expressive letters. Always loved the way ideas arose mysteriously as receptions from another dimension. You could call me a kind of idea junky. If I go too long without a fresh discovery or two, I dry up and wilt. I crave insights. They give me a needed jolt. I find the best way to have insights is either through a discovery-centered discussion with an interesting soul friend, or to do a kind of Tolle-esque automatic writing practice, a basic writing meditation in a state of Presence. I’m very fascinated with this, and the larger question of how close relationships and their dialogues will be modified and evolved more by the increased consciousness and awareness in people as we evolve as more conscious beings.
Creative Relationship: I surely feel forever grateful for meeting and joining up with my very special soul friend, Rose Diamond, whose openness, brilliancy, and love for depth has brought me back to life and hope and meaning. In some sublime creative relationships, aspects of collective or transpersonal wisdom are realized and there’s a mutually enriching exponential effect for both. Relationship energetics haven’t been figured out yet. I cannot wait to see how far, and where, this special creative alliance will lead.
What do I contribute? Love of life and heroic humans; love of depth, discovery consciousness, enlightenment quester; ultimate self actualization and sentience seeker; background wonder and awe with existence, wish to help, en-courage, empower, awaken, enliven, and enloven. We are becoming more trans-cultural and trans-religious beings, becoming whole earth, global, planetary beings. A Whole New World has a Utopian spirit at its heart. Rose and I want to do what we can to be helpful, encouraging, supportive. We hope to help a little toward building the whole new world we desperately need; one person at a time. The world has never needed more conscious, loving, caring, unified, tolerant beings than it does this very moment.
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Only a transformation of consciousness will safeguard life on Earth.
It’s time for the most soulful transformation of our individual and community lives we can muster.
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