Ruth Anne Kaur

Your Host, Facilitator & Coach
pictured here with husband, Amarit Singh

Dear Friends,

We are here to uncover and experience our truest nature, to discover who we are beyond our mind's constant chatter and life stories. We are here to know and mature our sense of the divine mystery of life, and to deepen and integrate a wiser way of seeing so that it cannot be so easily forgotten when we need it most, leaving us subject to the volatility and havoc of strong emotions like fear and anger.

Life is constantly offering us opportunities to develop beneficial habits that help us overcome our negative tendencies and heal the grief that fuels them. As we grow and mature, we can either become stuck, clinging to old coping mechanisms, suffering and becoming more despondent each year, burdened by all that is wrong with the world, or we can finally reach our limit and determine to suffer less.

Looking deeply into the mirror of life, we can begin to see suffering's true function. The trying situations we find ourselves in can be the most precise, benevolent, and direct way that Life can show us where we are offered growth, better ways, and new understanding. Our suffering does not have to be absurd and meaningless, leaving no refining effect on the consciousness. It can be used to cultivate clearer sight and the compassion and skillful means to help others.

As our 36 weeks together in The Vessel, 2024 unfolds, we will benefit from the resonance with one another's presence, our shared curiosity to explore these 12 focal points, and the pure intention to grow stronger and more sensitive to the subtle at the same time. We will lose our loneliness, even as we leave behind common ways of thinking and being that cause great suffering yet are constantly reinforced by the culture and conditioning of the world we live in.  

Together, we will follow the breadcrumbs in the poetry of mystics, verify scriptural wisdom in our own experience, and expand our ears' capacity to hear by being in a space where the more subtle is discussed. Together, we will nourish the seeds of wisdom and peace, and practice accessing insight from the inner quiet. As your host and facilitator, I will share from what has been proven in my experience. I will carefully curate what I put before you, honoring your consciousness with what is worthy of your sacred sight and consideration.

Conceptualizing The Vessel, 2024 and materializing this intention has motivated me to study and increase the time set aside for meditation and devotional practice, so there is gratitude in this space before we even step in!  Thank you to my clients, who have courageously voiced their questions, their longing to transform, and their desire for company on the walk. Thank you to the process of trial and error, for the feedback I received from my own and others' actions that directed the course of my life to be just as it is. Thank you to my teachers, whose kindness to teach me in light and in shadow has graced my way of seeing so that I suffer less and can talk about why that is. 

In our weekly Zoom meetings, written materials, and the meditations you receive, I will be speaking to your heart, while compassionately relating to your mind. My hope is that this will help your mind gain peace while losing restlessness. Together, we will experience how the mind is transformed and able to support positive emotions and states of being when it is taught how to be a good servant of the soul-- when our gross and subtle faculties are balanced by communing with God.  We will lose our fear of this word, 'God,' and stop trying to put such a notion into limiting boxes that only trap and frustrate ourselves in the end. 

God is the life and awareness that quietly sees through our own eyes. God is our feeling of connection. God is within each and every heart, and we can bring our minds to abide with God. When we do, we become durable, and new qualities and understandings emerge from the same world and the same experiences that would have overwhelmed us before.  

In The Vessel, 2024, we will practice simple, effective techniques from the body of humanity's wisdom and yoga (unity) systems. In this lifetime, I have been very fortunate to experience an education and immersive practice within the Protestant Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, and Sikh learning communities. And from the time that I was young, I have deeply felt and wanted to express that these are all One in essence. For example, back in 1996, when I was 16 years old and we were given an open-ended assignment in English class, allowing us to do a project of our choice as long as it involved over 30 hours of work, my classmates pursued passion projects like building benches to donate or making short films. For this task, I gave myself the unlikely assignment of a 20-page research paper on comparative religions, which I titled, "Collective Conscience." After researching, contemplating, and following the spirit in a flow of deep curiosity, the thesis emerged: each of the major world teachers is a different expression of One voice, speaking in a manner, through stories and metaphors, that would make the most sense to the minds of a particular geographical region and culture.

In other words, God has been compassionately speaking to us through many forms of Himself and seeding and developing the human consciousness around the world to make a way for His lovers to experience His support and a deeper, more direct knowing of Him across time, as if plucking different notes of a harmonic chord. In The Vessel, 2024, we will hear and feel some of this harmony together.

As the weeks unfold, I will listen to who shows up and give helpful pointings from the store of experience and education I've had in this School of Life. I will draw from experience in these different learning communities and their sacred texts. I have also been blessed to study philosophy and education, and to have a career as a teacher of young people and founding leader of schools. I will draw from what was gained as a student and a teacher, as well as the the angle on life I was given as a daughter, sister, single woman, a wife, and a mother. Finally, I will draw from what was gained in the years of wearing love lenses, of carrying this longing to live a good life, of living this fundamental "Who is God? Who am I? What is real?" question, and this wanting to understand and return the Love I've known. 

On February 19, we embark fearlessly in pursuit of deeper saturation in divine love, clearer sight and unobstructed hearing, motivated by a love for Truth and a respect for our God-given human capacities. We will read, write, listen, contemplate, and verify timeless truth for our very own eyes, and with God's Grace, open our ears by removing the narration of the ego to hear instead the soul songs and celestial music enlivening this divine play. Grafting our branch on the divine vine, we will taste and see that the fruit of knowing the Divine is dwelling in an Eden of our own hearts.

Be with us!

Love,
Ruth