George Dewolfe: My second conversation.

The way of things
As mentioned in a previous post, I was considering doing mentoring with George Dewolfe. I saw “was considering” because I am no longer considering it … I will be doing it at some time in the future. I just have to get the money together. I believe that it will be a worthwhile journey and fits in perfectly with my learning and belief system at this time. I don’t think that I could have found a better teacher, truly.

George’s mentoring is unusual, as compared to the classic way of thinking about teaching, but I certainly understand and agree with it. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that I like to read and contemplate on The Tao Te Ching (pronounced dow de jing). Here is a small sampling of the books that I have read or am reading. This is important to explain George’s mentoring and why I think that it fits with me. The books:

• Tao Te Ching: Derek Lin translation.
• The Tao of Pooh. Benjamin Hoff – A great place to start off understanding Taoism
• Chuang Tzu: Thomas Merton translation
• Meditations in Tao: Osho
• A New Earth: Eckhart Tolle
• The Power of Now: Eckhart Tolle
• A Thousand Names for Joy: Byron Katie

Those are just a few of the books. The Tao talks about the natural way of things, whatever it is. Flowing with life. A New Earth places a great emphasis on realizing the traps that the ego provides in our daily lives. If there were any one thing that all of these books have in common, it’s about removing masks and rolls that we’ve become associated with. Our thoughts about ‘who we are’. OK. That’s a enough book review.

Back to my conversation: George’s program involves working with a student to first find out how they see the world and how they organize things visually. Then, the real work begins. Over the next year, there is an attempt to help the student remove all of the layers of other people’s work that they’ve seen and get down to their true essence. To get down to showing the world as they truly see it, sans ego (story) about who they think they are or how they think things should be shown (unquestioned beliefe in thought = story = ego).

Without getting into specifics, because you should really contact him if you think that you might be interested, the year sounds supremely challenging and is will worth the price, in my opinion; however, it would not be for everyone. This mentoring will test you to question your very core, as do the above list of books. Many, many, many people are not ready to let go of those thoughts of who they believe themselves to be. This is called becoming conscious. Others will call it cult thinking, new age rubbish, etc. I started down that road about 3 or 4 years ago. George has been on his journey for greater than 20 years! I’ve a lot to learn.

He asked me where I wanted to go with my photography. My answer was: I don’t know. I’ll see when I get there. As I said my post about passion: Sometimes I come back with a photo, or photos, so sublime, I wonder if I took it. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be sublime to anyone else, but that I will recognize it as the work of ‘self’. That, I think, is a glimpse of my authentic self peeking through the layers. The idea here, is to be able to access that more often.

So, I will be working with him, but not immediately, though I want to. There are a number of things that we need to accomplish this summer with regards to helping our friends and, of course, Tony’s never-ending basketball. So now is not the time, but it is on the top of my list.