March 2010

IIT EUROPEAN PROGRAMS 2010

Upcoming Workshop

Opening Your Heart Through Movement

Dates: Saturday, March 6, 2010

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Time: 1:00 – 4:00 pm

Location: The Studio at Oshun House

Saskatoon, SK. Canada

Fee: $33

Facilitator: Laura Harris

To Register: Laura Harris

306-374-4161 lauraharris@shaw.ca



This is a workshop for women who want to be confident, happy, and graceful in their bodies. Laura will be your guide as you explore techniques from improvisational dance, yoga, and other movement arts for a fun and healthy afternoon. No dance or yoga experience is required. All activities are appropriate for women of any level of fitness.

Bonus Feature: Presentation on how live organic vegan foods can energize and compliment your lifestyle, by Deanna Litz (Light Living).

Please enjoy this month’s article excerpted from the preface of the new book

Pilgrimage with the Leprechauns:

A True Story of a Mystical Tour of Ireland

A Pilgrim’s Heart

Some years ago I lived in an old cottage in the village of Keel on the west coast of Ireland. I shared Crumpaun Cottage with a leprechaun and his family who had lived there for a very long time. The leprechaun befriended me and taught me about elementals, and especially about those, with whom he works, who are committed to co-create with like-minded humans in order to heal the Earth.

I was surprised at how deeply Summer with the Leprechauns, my book about that experience, touched the hearts of so many people who are interested in, and believe in nature spirits. Some have seen them, and many more have seen signs of them, or have felt them near. Thirty people from Europe and North America who believed in elementals, and wanted to experience them personally, registered for the Mystical Tour of Ireland, which I was leading. They and I both received an inner call to journey to Ireland and none of us realized, in our outer world, that we were committing to a deep inner pilgrimage. Quite the contrary. I have conducted three other mystical tours to Ireland, and had spent a year and a half organizing the tour, so I expected everything to run smoothly, almost like having a vacation.

Very little happened as I had planned, and by outer standards the Mystical Tour of Ireland was an unmitigated disaster. However, in terms of deep personal transformation, it was one of the most significant events of my life. Although each of us underwent a different inner journey, I can only relate my own personal experience, and some lessons I understand, only now, through writing this book.

I began, over twenty years ago, after living with the leprechaun family, to lead tours and pilgrimages taking people to sacred sites of the world to assist them with their transformation. These experiences remove us from the world of work, paying bills, and old ways of thinking. They even remove us from clutching to a past, or hoping for a future.

Pilgrimages are not meant to be easy, for if they were, no transformation would occur. The pilgrim is, in fact, often confronted by an ordeal, or a series of difficulties. Blisters on our feet, no food, or not seeing the sacred sites we yearn to visit are all outer ordeals. Just as important are the inner ordeals of frustration, anger, self-pity, and sadness that accompany our unravelling. In this way, we learn non-attachment to having things our way, as well as forgiveness, acceptance of what is, living in the present moment, and finding joy and peace in whatever happens.

Ultimately, the goal of pilgrimage is to arrive at our heart’s centre. What do we find there and how do we interpret the answer? This answer may be profound, life changing, and so dramatic that we can no longer return to the life we led. The answer might as easily be a simple knowing that a mother’s kiss, a sunset, a playful puppy is as important as a vision of Christ. Whatever the answer, we need to fully embrace and assimilate the inner and outer journey, while at the same time realizing that the pilgrimage never ends and that different lessons reveal themselves at different stages of our life.

It is not the destination so much as the focus of the journey that defines a pilgrim and, if you are travelling with a leprechaun and an assortment of other elementals, as we were doing, having a good sense of humour and a light heart is essential. The key to our pilgrimage in Ireland lies in understanding what the Irish call ‘The Craic.’ We journeyed through the Craic, with the Craic, and were having the Craic. Only the Irish can really understand the Craic, and I often think that they invented it. It is hard to give you a definition of the Craic, but a few words about it might point you in the right direction. The Craic sums up all life’s experience—the good and the bad—that which can be understood and that which cannot.

The Craic cannot be pinned down and, when you try to do so, it joggles you out of your comfort zone and laughs at you. It is both the great cosmic joke and cosmic joker. The Craic is what lies between the ‘this’ and the ‘that.’ I often think of it as the crack—Craic—between the worlds, between the three-dimensional reality, in which humans spend their waking hours, and other dimensions. The Craic is magic. The Craic is unpredictable and certainly not dependable. It comes, whenever it wants, and does, whatever it can, to move us into deeper knowing and truth. The only approach a sane person can take towards the Craic is to surrender to it, as any resistance is futile.

The Craic is a mind-set that can be applied to almost any situation. I remember the occasion when my great-aunt Boots died after lying in a foetal position in bed for some months. My father, in a serious tone, was telling his brother Wilton the news when the Craic took over the conversation.

Asked by Wilton how Boots had died, my father replied, “Boots died of the crouch.” Hearing these words, my ninety-year-old Irish grandmother started cackling, which my Dad did not appreciate. Trying to recover his balance, he fell deeper into the Craic with his next words, “Boots will be married Monday.”

It’s very Irish to be able to laugh at death and my grandmother completely broke up at my father’s last verbal error. This black humour is the Craic. If we love the Craic, we can find something amusing in uncomfortable, or even traumatic, events. When we flow with the Craic, we are not victimized by a bad situation. The Irish have had plenty of bad situations throughout their history with famine, wars, and being regarded as lesser people by conquering races, so perhaps that is why they are able to laugh at the Craic.

Leprechauns, and elementals in general, excel at living and playing in the Craic and find joy and amusement there. Most humans, save the Irish, do not. The humans, who accompanied me on the Mystical Ireland Tour, received the experience of elementals that they had requested, but not always in a way that they, or I, could control. The leprechauns took us on a mighty journey with great Craic, and I, for one, will never be the same.

Ah, but perhaps I should back up and tell you a wee bit about leprechauns and elementals, the race to which leprechauns belong. Elementals, otherwise called nature spirits, the little people, and faeries, are real and every country has its stories and myths about them. For example, there are leprechauns in Ireland, trolls in Scandinavia, gnomes in Germany, patuparehe in New Zealand, kappa and tengu in Japan, and the aluxuses of the Mayan people of Central America. Mind you, elementals can travel around and even live outside their ancestral country, much as humans do, so you could see a troll in Canada and a gnome in New Zealand.

Sometimes, people see and hear elementals in the real world, and I receive countless letters and emails from countries around the world from individuals, who have had these real-life encounters. However, because elementals, like angels and ghosts, are found in a lighter dimension than what most humans perceive, people more often see them with their psychic-sight.

I have been able to see beings in other dimensions since I was born. These include, but are not limited to, elementals, angels, and people who have died. In Ireland it’s called having ‘second sight’ and this gift runs, by way of my mother, through the Irish side of my family. My family never spoke about our second sight and treated it matter-of-factly. It is a secret that we hid by calling it a ‘good guess’, or a ‘hunch.’

I mention this ‘second sight’ now, as the story I am about to tell you will only make sense, if you realize, that I am conversing with a leprechaun that most people can neither see nor hear. The tour I’m describing in Pilgrimage with the Leprechauns: A True Story of a Mystical Tour of Ireland is one of great Craic, and can be enjoyed as an amusing Irish travel story, as a fount of information on nature beings, and as an inner journey of transformation.

I hope you enjoy the pilgrimage and have good Craic!

You can order Tanis’s new book Pilgrimage with the Leprechauns (not yet in bookstores) from her website www.iitransform.com/PgBookstore.html

Tanis Helliwell M.ED, the founder of the International Institute for Transformation, is the author of Pilgimage with the Leprechauns, Summer with the Leprechauns, Take Your Soul to Work and a book of poems Embraced by Love.

Our IIT German website.

http://www.iitransform.com/german