This year’s theme of exploration was designed to meet us exactly where we are – amidst the very human challenges we face every day. Escalating conflict, an epidemic of disconnection, global instability – everywhere we look we see the unconscious expression of our primal animal instincts playing out in harmful, distorted ways. When these powerful forces constrain the human heart, they cause personal suffering and societal polarization – even for those genuinely committed to spiritual growth.
To support humanity in freeing up the energy trapped in these habitual distortions, Diamond Approach founders A H Almaas (Hameed Ali) and Karen Johnson focused our community’s 2024 teaching theme and explorations on learning how to harmonize our animal and spiritual nature.
“Liberation doesn’t happen by moving away from the animal part of ourselves. It happens by liberating the animal to develop into what it means to be a real human being in the world. This development takes our work, it takes attention. We are really opening up the package of ego and how it is sealed off from the true understanding of what it means to become more spiritual in our human beingness.” – Hameed Ali
To introduce the relevance and importance of these teachings in our daily lives, Hameed and Karen kicked off the year with the Realization in the Rough webinar. More than 4,500 participants from around the world joined them in January to discover a fresh outlook on how the powerful and polarizing forces within and around us can be transformed into fuel for the spiritual journey.
Then, over the next five months, an international community of 1,100 people continued the exploration with Hameed and Karen in the Human Instincts on the Inner Journey course – where the Diamond Approach teachings on the instincts were made available to the public for the very first time. Participants were guided through deep inquiries into the social, sexual, and survival instincts, opening up the package of ego, and learning what it means to become more spiritual in our human beingness.
As Hameed and Karen worked with participants throughout the course, they recognized the need for people to learn how to work with these powerful forces as they arise in their direct, embodied experience. To address this need they invited Linda Krier and Jessica Britt, long-time Diamond Approach teachers specializing in how consciousness is expressed through the body, to create a programs that explicitly help us discover the ways each of the primal instincts – social, sexual, and survival – live in our body now and can be portals to fulfilling our potential.
Jessica and Linda initiated these brand new, timely and critical teachings with the Instinctual Alchemy webinar in September. Over 3,000 participants learned how our deepest nature can be experienced and expressed in our physicality, allowing us to be more authentically available to life in the modern world.
Five hundred people were drawn to continue with Linda and Jessica for the body-centric deep dive – Embodying the Divine Animal – where we learned to hear the stories of our bodies, discover the true nature of our instincts, and experience the rich inner resources that lie dormant within us so we can touch the world from the wisdom of our full-bodied spiritual nature. We just completed the final weekend of the course with numerous comments from students about the unique value of this course in creating new openings on their inner journey (note: the on demand version of the course will be available in the early part of next year).
Also this year, Roger Walsh & John Dupuy from Deep Transformation Podcast produced a rich and inspiring conversational podcast series with Hameed about the Inner Journey Home. Hameed has authored over twenty books describing his teachings – and now, for the first time, he offered an oral and conversational overview of his work. According to Roger and John, this series provides “a marvelous opportunity to hear one of our greatest sages describing, in his own words, a major integrated spiritual teaching that is deeply loving and rigorously discriminating, throwing down the gauntlet that challenges us to pay attention, look deeply inside, and wake up.”
May your practice support you in walking in the world anchored in the depth of what you are. May it deepen throughout the holiday season and turn of the year – amidst and through these evocative times. In January, we look forward to introducing you to our 2025 theme and newest inner explorations for the coming year.