Wherever in the world I teach, my commitment is to move everyone forward as much as possible.  Helping to wake up Celestial Perception is the biggest fun imaginable, but I also feel it to be a serious responsibility.  Giving time and money for a workshop constitutes a big commitment, so I feel I must do more than simply present my students with information.  It is a sacred responsibility, helping each one to move forward as the unique individual he or she is.

Yes, each individual comes to a workshop with a distinctive set of gifts.

Plus, students come from different levels of spiritual experience and development.  Teaching The Rosetree Method, along with sharing information (like how to do specific techniques), I'm holding the group in my consciousness, facilitating this deep aspect of growth.

Doing this with my first Japanese students was the thrill of a lifetime for me.  Sure, I'd taught personal development for 33 years, but never before had I seen students come so beautifully prepared.  Usually it takes 30 minutes or longer to pull a class together.  It can be very heavy lifting indeed.

One time, in America, I did a favor for one of my clients, a politician.  She asked me to volunteer and give a workshop for some young women in prison.

This politician sat in on the group and afterwards she complimented me on how well I handled them.  I just laughed.  They were no more difficult than many groups I've taught.

For the totally opposite experience, how easy it was to teach for VOICE.

With all four of my Japanese workshops, each person came totally focused, wonderfully respectful.  This helped my heart to open up for teaching.

And either VOICE attracts the smartest people in all of Japan or there is just a huge number of really bright people in your country.  Either way, I was so impressed at how fast and well people learned what I had to offer.

Still, during my first Japanese workshops I felt awkward in many ways.  My jokes didn't make people laugh, whereas usually students laugh a lot at my silly jokes.  Also, in the U.S., I use funny voices with accents from different parts of the country, but these vocal jokes disappeared in translation, too.  And the shy part of me was worried that I'd do something really offensive through my ignorance of Japanese culture.  Still, students didn't seem too appalled at my personality.  And my skills developed with each of the four workshops, so I'm expecting to come back as a more effective teacher this time.

Doing personal sessions for VOICE was, if anything, more surprising than teaching workshops.  Everywhere in the world, clients are individual, which makes a face reading or an aura transformation session a unique experience for everyone involved.  If I may generalize, however, three things were distinctively Japanese:

1) Spiritually, people tended to be very awake.

2) Aurically, a far higher percentage of people naturally are empaths-1 in 5 Japanese compared to 1 in 20 Americans.

3) But, oboy! Compared to Americans, so many more Japanese carry a lot of pain in their throat chakras.

This is not to say that Americans never have this problem.  Actually I spent six years (1980-1986) where the main focus of my personal growth was freeing up my throat chakra.  A couple of times my voice wouldn't work for weeks.  I literally couldn't talk, despite there being no medical reason why.  By working diligently with holistic healers, I gradually overcame pain related to being a writer, a teacher of New Age material, and other stuff.

Thus, it seems perfect to me that, in Japan, I've been able to do so many sessions that helped people free up their throat chakras.  One of the techniques that I use in sessions is especially helpful for this: Cutting cords of attachment.  Oftentimes, someone in the family has an astral linkage that causes long-term problems with communication, and it is such a delight to facilitate removing this part.  The unconditional love remains, the other person isn't altered (due to a process I call Divine Homeostasis) but, for my client, the psychic drain can end.  Phew!

Whether doing sessions or teaching workshops, I'm delighted to be able to facilitate spiritual growth for my Japanese clients.  Sessions help to clean up someone's aura, validating gifts of the soul and releasing old stuff that doesn't belong.  Workshops provide the tools and techniques for becoming skilled with Celestial Perception, with all the benefits for relationships, career, creativity and so forth.  With the open-heartedness that feels so natural in Japan, all this flows in a way that I absolutely love.  It's as though I can go instantly to the more advanced version of The Rosetree Method.

How about what I, personally, have learned from teaching for VOICE?  Japanese language is way too complicated for me to try learning right now.  It would be more than a full-time job.  What seems more manageable--and interests me more--is learning about the Japanese qualities of silence.  Yours is fascinating, very different from what I have known elsewhere.  Having done media interviews on five continents, I'm used to moving into different qualities of silence and space.  Japan melts my heart with the softness of silence combined with the insistent pace of intelligence.

And here's one more way that teaching in Japan has changed my life.  You may know that, for a country that's relatively small geographically, Japan has had huge cultural influence on the U.S.  Having been to many Japanese restaurants, celebrated the famous Cherry Blossom festival every year in Washington, seen Japanese films, etc., I thought I knew at least a bit about Japanese culture.

Hadn't I known many Americans of Japanese heritage, including some of my friends from grade school on?  Didn't my only nephew study in Japan during college?  Hasn't my best friend from college dated a Japanese-American for the past 20 years?  And hasn't another close friend studied the Tea Ceremony for 30 years?  We won't even begin to count the number of Pokemon cards my son owns....

So how much did I know about Japanese culture really?  Nothing!  Though I still don't know much, at least I'm starting to have a clue.

Since first teaching for VOICE, I light up inside now when I'm with people of Japanese origin.  I think, "I just may know a little something about your silence."