By: Chun

As the assisting staff person, the Sedona Meditation Tour (April 8-14, 2006) was a joyous, stimulating and inspiring experience for me, and, as I observed, for the 18 participants too. The Tour was a self-reflective journey in the extraordinary setting of Sedona’s sacred landscape (full of Earth vortex energy). Guiding the Tour was a gifted trainer and team to help each participant become more healthy, happy and peaceful. Interacting closely with the other participants, who were fascinating individuals, helped make the Tour even more valuable and enjoyable. Six of the participants were well-behaved, fun-loving children, which added spice to the experience.

I sensed that the Tour provided a meaningful experience for participants new to Dahn holistic fitness practices, as well as for long-time Dahn center members. It surprised me that each group got what it needed from the same Tour. For the newcomers it was a see-beautiful-Sedona and sample-Dahn-training experience, while for the Dahn Yoga members it was a deepening journey of spiritual transformation.

While it is called the Sedona Meditation Tour, actually it is much more. It includes visits to many sites in Sedona, but it also had a day-trip to the Grand Canyon. We did Meditation in a variety of forms and mostly outdoors, but also engaged in a series of holistic exercises to relax, strengthen and heal the body, to calm and clarify the mind, and to get to know our true self (soul). It was a Tour of many beautiful, powerful and sacred sites – most with vortex energy – but the essence of the experience was using these places as gateways for participants to go inside, feel, learn, heal and grow their true self. And it really worked for me, with more renewed energy, precious insights, and inner-peace flowing.

Sedona is blessed by the Earth in terms of exceptional red-rock beauty and vortex power, and of rich high-desert flora and fauna. Right away, Nature started to weave its spell to put us in a here-and-now mood, reduce stress levels, and infuse us with our Mother Earth’s unconditional love. Thanks to the contribution of an expert on this Tour, Dr. Barbara (Doc Rock) Frank, Myungsahnim and accomplished Earth educator (geologist by training), we were often treated to vivid and amazing stories of the Earth’s physical body. We heard about the Earth’s elements – rocks and minerals, magma (from volcanoes), water (streams and oceans), and air (weathering and wind) – and about over vast time spans the dynamic interaction of these elements to change the Earth’s surface again and again. And especially to shape the Sedona area into the scenic wonder of the world it is today. Much of the Tour experience focused on getting us in touch with the Earth’s soul in order to access, explore, heal, celebrate and grow our own soul. Whether for a human being or the Earth, a soul must occupy a body.

Because of Doc Rock’s articulate and exciting explanations of the Earth’s body – alive over billions of years and sustaining our life with food and air – I was better able to comprehend and appreciate the Earth as a living planet – with a physical body, energy body and spiritual body (or soul, which in Korean is Mago). The power of water (rain, rivers and streams), output of volcanoes (producing new rock that turns into rich soil), erosion of mountains, effects of earthquakes, and how human beings have been altering the terrain all opened my ears and eyes wider to the world I have lived in without this awareness for many decades. This experience in turn created in me a sense of awe regarding what has been happening on our Earth, what is going on in very slow motion now, and the eternity of the Earth, its soul Mago, and therefore my soul.

I had experienced vortex energy before, as I currently live in a vortex-rich area called Mago Garden, home of the Sedona Ilchi Lee Meditation Center and base for the Tour. Mago Garden is a 160-square-acre campus surrounded by National Forest and mountains, on the other side of which are the renown vortexes of Sedona. A vortex is a place where unusual amounts of energy leave or enter the Earth. While spiritually attuned persons have long sensed vortexes, NASA now has a scientific test for verifying their existence. Of the Earth’s 21 known vortexes, five are found in Sedona. I had visited most of them, but only briefly, or had seen them from afar. On this Tour, I had the good fortune of spending hours at each vortex and engaging in body-and-mind meditative exercises.

The goodness of my fortune was greatly expanded by the meditations being guided by Chung Hae Nim, whose life exemplifies a meditative state of vitality, power, focus, joy, love and peace. Her interpreter from Korean to English was Jin Kim Nim, who was exceeding sensitive to the substance and nuance of Chang Hae Nim’s lively energy and deep wisdom. Also, the strong and gentle leadership of Youngjae Byun Nim made the Tour a smooth-running and delight-filled experience. He gracefully juggled the many details of this type of Tour and the needs of a group of individualistic-oriented Americans.

The net effect was that meditating at site after site seemed to make it easier for me to go more inside in order to ask questions of my brain and listen for answers from my true self. My imagination became more enhanced so that I could have more illuminating internal conversations. One of my biggest insights, heard as a message while meditating at the Bell Rock vortex, was that my essence was pure love and that this is how I should be in the world, with people and the Earth. This message resonated deeply in me so that I know with confidence that its source is my soul. Weeks after this message was received, it remains an anchor for my being, which I have returned to repeatedly to reinforce how I want to be and what I want to do in this life.

There were many highlights for me during this Tour. Each place was selected for its special setting and story. Mago Garden, while one large vortex area, actually has 12 component vortex sites, on and around its property. We hiked to several of Mago Garden’s seven smaller vortexes, which correspond to the seven human chakras. I became more aware of how everything around us was alive with energy and connectedness. One day, the theme was water energy, so in the morning we went to Montezuma’s Well, a large spring-filled lake in the dessert, where Native Americans had lived, farmed and built an irrigation system in ancient times. The physical exercises got me ready to fly like an eagle in my imagination in order to explore my life’s vision. Next we traveled to the stream below the soaring heights of Cathedral Rock, a mighty vortex, were we had our second water experience of the day. The energies of vortex and water poured down on me as I saw others go deeper into HSP (Health, Smile, Peace) Breathing practice.

We climbed half way up Bell Rock, perhaps Sedona’s most famous vortex, known for its speaking answers inside of us to our heart-felt questions. I worked expansively with the eagle-metaphor meditation and then went deeper into Bell Rock’s mass and my own self. For the other participants and me, soul-touching answers were whispered. The next day was devoted to our three-hour trip to the uniquely magnificent Grand Canyon, honored in a slogan on Arizona’s license plate. Water and wind are still sculpting the Grand Canyon. Its mile-deep scale enabled me to see into the Earth and into my self. Our meditation at the Canyon’s rim was amplified by the setting and meaningful for my life. The last journey from our Mago Garden base was to Mago Celestial Valley, a half-hour hike away. In the shadow of an overhang filled with the prehistoric glyphs of Native Americans, we did a meditation focusing on gratitude. To live from a place of solid gratitude in daily life is to be authentically alive to our soul, connected to what is around us, and to the oneness of it all.

The great moments of time were also witnessed and celebrated over the course of our six days. Meditations at sunrise, sunset and under a star-studded, full-moon-lit night sky generated for me special feelings of recognition, magic and profoundness. Indeed, what a glorious show the Earth, our solar system and the cosmos put on for us – every day! How small and humble as a human being I felt in the presence of these spectacular events, yet how large I felt I loomed to behold them and sense that their eternity is my soul’s inheritance and destiny.

It was not at all easy to say good-bye to the people, with whom I had shared so many rides, meditations, meals, dances, conversations, tears, laughs and insights. The mix of ages, ethnicities, individuals (several related to each other) and their stories, styles and issues created a unique time-and-place feeling to the overall Tour experience for me. Whether we tried or not, in large or small ways, fast or slow, we all touched each other’s hearts, learned from each other, and together grew our humanness and spirituality. How wonderful for me to be nurtured and inspired by the combined energies of the fantastically generous Earth/Mago, Mago Garden’s masterful leadership-training team, and this caring-and-fun Tour family.

To sum up the Sedona Meditation Tour for myself and to share my exuberant feelings with the other participants, I wrote a song about our collective experience, borrowing the tune of Row, Row, Row Your Boat (itself an essentially spiritual song, with its message of “gently down the stream” and “life is but a dream”). Here is the final verse of the song we sang at sunrise on the last day of the Tour:

We now see how to meditate
Living life from the inside out
To listen deeply to our true self’s voice
We know what our soul’s about!