Before We Begin

I want to tell you something before you start.

This is not a course in the way you might be used to thinking about courses. There are no modules to complete, no boxes to tick, no certificate waiting at the end. What is here is something quieter than that, and something considerably more demanding.

What you are about to learn is a practice. And a practice, by its very nature, is never finished. You don’t graduate from it. You simply get better at it, and as you do, it gets deeper, and as it gets deeper, you begin to understand why it couldn’t have shown you that depth at the start.

I found this practice inside the writing of So That We Can See. Or perhaps it found me — that feels closer to the truth. I was struggling, as I had struggled for years, with questions I couldn’t answer, with something I knew was there but couldn’t quite reach. And then one morning, in that soft and unhurried space between sleep and waking, something arrived. Not an answer exactly. More like a door opening.

I have been walking through that door ever since.

The original idea was to begin the Kjrsos experience with the book. Read So That We Can See, then come back and we’ll talk. But I came to understand that the book needs you to arrive at it in a particular state. Not informed, not prepared in the way we usually prepare for something. Open. The controlling mind quiet enough that what the book is actually doing has room to do it.

Because the book is not trying to give you information. It is trying to give you an experience. And an experience requires a certain kind of availability in the person receiving it. You cannot receive something while your hands are full of other things.

That is what this practice is for. It is how we empty the hands.

I want to be honest with you about what this asks. It asks you to slow down in a world that is not designed for slowing down. It asks you to find mornings where you have nowhere to be and nothing to prove. It asks you to value the half-awake, drifting, seemingly unproductive state of a mind that is not yet fully conscious — which feels like the opposite of what we’ve been taught to value.

It also asks you to trust something you can’t quite see yet. That beneath the surface of the busy, categorising, controlling mind, there is something that has been waiting to speak. Something that knows things the waking mind doesn’t. Something that, given the right conditions, given just enough quiet and just enough time, will begin to surface.

I can tell you that from experience. I cannot show you until you find it for yourself. Which is the nature of everything at Kjrsos, if you think about it. We can create the conditions. What happens inside those conditions belongs to you.

There is one more thing I want to say before you begin.

What you are learning here is not only a tool for accessing your own deeper mind. It is a practice for getting the controlling mind out of the way so that something else becomes possible. And that something else is connection. Connection to what you are reading. Connection to what is in you that you haven’t met yet. Connection to the life that is present in everything around you, if we only stop long enough to let it in.

That is the lesson at the heart of So That We Can See. That is the lesson the horses taught me, and that life taught me, and that this practice teaches in its own quiet way. Connection to all. Every awareness you cannot find connection to makes what you can experience less. Every connection you do find makes more possible.

You are beginning a practice that will make you more capable of connection than you have been before. That is not a small thing. Take your time with it.

Go slowly. Be gentle with yourself. And let what is here find you.

Nadja