Project Sanctuary

A Virtual Introduction Evening

with Silvia Hartmann

3 Steps To Sanctuary

A marketing man once pointed out that “Project Sanctuary doesn’t have an introduction product you can give away for free.”

Now, there are many free introduction products for this manual, such as The Gift pattern but I still dutifully sat down and thought about what you could do in the way of such a thing.

Eventually, I decided to write a “Virtual Introduction Evening” for Project Sanctuary, following pretty much what I do when I am given a couple of hours and a group of interested folk to allow them to have a first experience with Project Sanctuary.

If you run personal development practice groups, meditation or healing circles, have a go with this. It really is the most fascinating experience to find out what people do when you give them the basic tools and it is always a mind-expanding experience for the facilitator, too.

Welcome To Project Sanctuary!

If you are fascinated by dreams, symbols and metaphors, you’ve found the perfect place.

I am very pleased to be able to introduce you tonight to Project Sanctuary.

I could tell you a lot about why it makes you more intelligent to have better understanding and communication between your dream mind and your waking mind, but the best way to understand Project Sanctuary is to do it.

Any questions before we start?

Q – Is this hypnosis? Do I have to be in a trance?

A – Oh no. In a trance, that’s where you are your dreaming mind. Or when you are asleep. We want to do this whilst we’re awake, seeing everything, noticing what is happening so we can talk about it, understand what goes on, learn from it. I often say PS is a meeting place, not quite in here and not quite there, so both partners can step up and have a conversation.

Q – How is this related to the sort of thing where you go to a special place in nature for your Sanctuary?

A – That’s a guided meditation – you go to a place you are guided to by an author, or a speaker. In Project Sanctuary, the one who guides you is your own unconscious mind. You and it create the Sanctuary together but that is only the starting point, like a base in a foreign country. When you are on holiday somewhere new, you have a base – a hotel or something. You make excursions from there and return there so you have a place of rest and safety in between.

Q – I’m not very good at making pictures. I can I still do this?

A – Oh yes. Whether or not you make pictures is neither here nor there, although doing Project Sanctuary does make you get better at it. As long as you know if something is green it doesn’t matter how you know that – often it is just a feeling.

Alright, so now let’s get started.

This is not something where you have to try really hard, or even try at all. It comes quite naturally. Now me, I really like the thought of “a Sanctuary” – that’s why I called it that. Not everyone likes that word, so you can think instead of a perfect place, or a haven, or your dream home, or where you’d really like to be if you could be anywhere you wanted to be in a world where dreams are made real.

Some people like certain landscapes, certain times of the year, so we’ll do it step by step and all you have to do is check inside whether something feels right, feels good – that means you’re going in the right direction. If it feels wrong or not good, that’s the wrong direction. This is how you know which way to go when there’s a decision on something, it’s not a question of thinking about it or arguing with yourself this way and that. In Project Sanctuary, you can have what you want, eat your cake and never get fat, really everything and you can afford it all.

Exercise 1: A Landscape

Ok, first of all, let’s think of a landscape that really pleases you, an environment you would really feel at home, where you would breathe a sigh of relief and have this sense of homecoming and perfection.

If you get many choices in your head, either go with the first one or just choose one, if you could only have the one, forever.

Don’t worry about choosing now. This first one is a start, nothing more. All of those other ones are yours too later on and you can move between them as the mood takes you. For now, just pick a one that makes you go, mmmmhhh .... it feels so good to be here.

Exercise 2: A Time of Year, A Time of Day

What time of year is it in your favourite place? Spring, summer, autumn, winter? And as you are there, what time of day is it? Morning, noon, afternoon, evening, night? Or more specifically, an hour of the day?

This place of yours is in a true sense outside of time and space, but by giving it this shape and a time you are fixing it. This is important because it is a meeting platform as we said and you need to find it again easily later on.

Now, and for the first real Project Sanctuary exercise, I want you to go and just be there for a time. Walk around if you will and sense the place, make yourself known to it and have it know you in return. Find out what there is, how big this area is, and what kind of boundaries if any exist around this your Sanctuary space and the outside universe.

Take your time to do this – I’ll give you about five minutes – and when you are done, turn to your neighbour and briefly tell them about your Sanctuary. I know this is exciting but we don’t have much time, so please just tell them a brief outline so they get some idea, then hear what they discovered in turn in the same way.

If you are doing this by yourself, please stop afterwards and just tell the room you’re in in your own words briefly what happened. Saying it out loud makes it more real, connects the reality of the physical world to the system too to make it really span across the layers of all-there-is.

About Change

A lot of people are a bit wary of making a decision about their first Sanctuary one way or the other – what if I get it wrong? Won’t I be stuck with something that wasn’t as good as it could have been and everything will go horribly wrong from thereon in?

The space of mind and energy where Project Sanctuary lives – at a meeting point between thought and reality, here and there, now and then – is fluid, as fluid as our thoughts and as boundless.

You can change anything at the expense of a single thought. You can reverse things, turn back time, re-shape things literally endlessly and until you are satisfied. You can erase things and start all over with something different at any time.

This is a truly amazing space to learn and try out all kinds of things because you simply cannot make mistakes here at all and everything you do is perfect. Even the things that are not perfect are perfect for teaching you something about understanding perfection and yourself better.

So go ahead and do and dream and make whatever you would like.

Are you ready for Exercise 3?

Exercise 3 – Personalising Your Sanctuary

Now, and as you have become accustomed to the space to a degree, the next question is, if you are to spend some time here on a regular basis, what would you need to have here to be truly comfortable in all ways?

Shelter, support, company perhaps? Do you need entertainment, stimulation, what do you personally need and want around you to be really happy, really feel fully supported and so you can let go totally in trust and relax into enjoyment in all ways?

As you consider these questions, and in response have your first attempts at manifesting these things in your Sanctuary space, you get to practise one of our first and most important principles.

With each new creation you add on, always stop and check back how this changes things and take a moment to consider how your feelings have changed, deepened, become different because of that addition.

It is also very interesting and important to check out how the addition has affected the Sanctuary itself. As you are here and doing these things, your dreaming mind is on the other side and it is watching with interest. At some point it will come forward and make changes from their end – perhaps not right away but soon enough, you might find a structure, plant, part of the Sanctuary that you didn’t put there!

Your dreaming mind put it there for you to see and to show you some of it’s desires and ideas – and this is the magic of Project Sanctuary.

This is when the process becomes interesting and takes on the life of a conversation, played out by two who are not yet talking properly but who are engaged in a mutual landscaping and design project.

To proceed with give-and-take when this happens, to try all sorts of things until a compromise and satisfactorily outcome has been achieved, and, in doing so, learning about this other you never see and can’t talk to in words directly because they speak a different language, is perhaps the most central point of Project Sanctuary and this is where it’s potential for true magic, healing and restoration lies.

When the two of you have learned to co-operate, have found out how to speak to each other so you can understand each other, and when you can come together to co-create with all your many and varied resources shared, you will have access to levels of thought, effectivity in the real world and abilities you can’t even imagine as yet.

This is only an introduction, and time is pressing on, so let’s get to our last exercise.

With these few basic tools, you have a beginning in that realm. If you like the ideas behind Project Sanctuary and feel this might be something that could really enrich your life across the levels, help you with topics such as “self sabotage” and “unconscious resistance” and all of that, I’d encourage you to go on to the full Project Sanctuary set.

But even if you choose not to do this, I would strongly suggest that you use the basic Sanctuary we have established today. With the fourth exercise in place, there is a tremendous amount you can already do with this – from a “time out” by thinking about it and going there for a while, a storage place for favourite items that can never be taken from you, to a  place to have fun in mind for a while. You can also share these basic four steps to Sanctuary with others, even young children; it is an easy thing to do and comes natural to most humans I have ever met.

There is a deep yearning, a deep desire for more unity, more communication and understanding within ourselves; for why we do what, why we don’t do things we should or thought we wanted, and the answers to these kinds of questions cannot be had in any other way but to go to the dreaming mind and know what it knows, get to understand what it can see, feel and experience – we are truly bereft if we remain with what our conscious mind alone has to offer. It has much to offer, for sure, but to ask it to truly give us everything we need in this life and give us all the answers is an impossible demand. Our logical mind has only access to half the pieces of the jig saw puzzle.

Exercise 4: The Emissary

Even if your Sanctuary is not ready yet – and indeed, it could be said that it is never ready as your time of life moves along and your desires and needs change from day to day! – with the landscape set you can invite an advisor to come and be there with you.

The purpose of the Advisor is to have an ambassador, an emissary from your dreaming mind with whom you can start to have communications and conversations, or interactions if your emissary won’t or can’t speak in words that make sense to you.

In order to do this, all you need to do is to have a space in your Sanctuary, to go to it and to invite a first emissary to come and be there on behalf of your dreaming mind.

Try and accept what comes to you without reservation.

Some people hope for a wise native Indian guide and are most disappointed when a small off-yellow duck turns up instead.

Emissaries come in any possible shape and form, and some come in impossible shapes and forms, too. The important thing is that they are and that they have come. I know there are some amongst us who are hungry for immediate success and utter perfection on the first try but lay that aside in Sanctuary. It doesn’t matter if your first emissary appears as a lump of coal, your Aunt Betty or a floating angel – there is no-one here who gives prizes for “the most worthy emissary”. Indeed, and if such things are generally a consideration with you, I wouldn’t be surprised if your dreaming mind would test you by sending an emissary that is absolutely not what you would have chosen for yourself, just to check out if you have at least learned enough by now to be worthy of giving you it’s time and attention.

Also note that I said, your first emissary. There will be many more manifestations as the system comes into operation more properly, and what I would call true spirit guides come quite a bit later and no sooner than you are ready from your side to cope with them.

Try to find out what you can about your first emissary. Just learn about them and your responses to them. Say something and note what they say or do in turn.

Lastly, you can exchange gifts with your first emissary.

This is a time honoured strategy when dealing with the messenger of a powerful kingdom – to give them something unique and very precious as a token of trust and the desire for mutual co-operation and respect.

We will close with this exchange of gifts now. You start by offering a gift from you to the emissary and when this has been received, just extend your hands and wait if they will give you something in return.

Try and expect nothing, and prepare to be surprised.

This concludes our first experience of Project Sanctuary.

Three Steps To Sanctuary

Here are the basic 3 steps to Sanctuary once more in brief to help you remember:

1. You create a space time place for yourself that pleases you immensely.
2. You personalise this space to your likings, wants and desires.
3. You invite a First Emissary to be there with you so you can learn about your dreaming mind.

If the experiences you have had during this introduction were such that you are now finding that this is something that excites you and you want to explore your fascinating mind further, I am looking forward to welcoming you to the Level 1 Project Sanctuary course when you are ready.

Either way, I thank you all for your attention and your time tonight.

Remember what we have said, and what you have learned.

There may well come a time when you or someone else requires this very special form of integration and exploration and when it does, come along.

It is a unique journey for each individual.

With best wishes for your road,

Silvia Hartmann
 

© Silvia Hartmann 2001