Kit Laughlin has been a meditator for 30 years. The Deep Well Being (DWB) stream brings methods out of Buddhist monasteries into ordinary daily life, for anyone to use.
Cultivation of serenity in the body as a direct physical experience is what most of us need, and DWB starts there.
You will be introduced to Yoga Nidra, a deep relaxation and visualisation practise brought to Australia by Swami Satyananda, in the 1950s. The brain controls the level of involuntary muscle tension (tonus), yet few people have the capacity to access deep relaxation at will. You will be given the tools to develop this capacity in yourself, and the practice sessions will give you the experience of being deeply relaxed. Once the body and the mind know how to do this, you can allow this state to return in your daily life. Immediate benefits are better sleep and increased concentration for any activity.
Kit will show you how to sit still for meditation – if you have ever tried this, you will know how difficult this can be. Once you can get comfortable, though, alertly sitting still can assist you to become more strongly aware of what is happening inside your body and your mind. This is one of the gateways to increasing awareness itself, a perspective that allows you to see that the activities of the mind are but one part of the experience of being fully alive.
Even though everyone knows that ‘breath is life itself’, the act of breathing is usually ignored and rarely is examined or refined. You will learn what full breathing feels like, and experience the deeply calming effect that breathing with awareness can have. This will be presented and practised each session.
Kit has been meditating since 1983, beginning during a four-year stay in Japan. He has studied with a number of teachers, and has co-taught a number of workshops here and overseas on this subject. His major influences are Buddhism (Zen), Swami Rudrananda (Rudi, author of “Spiritual Cannibalism”), and Lawrence Graziose (Zen and Enneagram).
I had the great fortune of being able to attend the inaugural Deep Well Being courses put on by Kit Laughlin at the ANU. These courses were serendipitously timed and had a profound affect upon me. I had just commenced my study of stretching and re-patterning methods with K, after coming off the back of seven years of martial arts and strength work. I was ready to look deeper into the methods of human transformation. The course was the perfect transition.
Deep Well Being is a bridge. A wonderful and direly needed bridge. It forms a link between body work and contemplative work. Between body and mind. DWB is where Kit’s work shines brightest, unbound from the chains of therapeutic models and into the alchemical realm of re-patterning. The methods learned in the course are survival skills for the increasingly chaotic 21st century.
Combining the stretching, neural re-patterning, breathing, relaxation and contemplation into the one course finally gives an authentic portrait of the method as a whole. In Deep Well Being Kit combined the scientific and philosophical work of his university studies, the spiritual work he has been blessed to have received from a number of great Teachers, and the deep body re-modelling methods he is famous for. It was this auspicious combination that broke a number of incorrect belief systems coagulated in my mind and allow me to study the Dharma. If you understand what this means you will know there is no higher praise I could give.
Dave Wardman – Sydney, 2016