Cauldron of the Weekend: A Man's Healing Adventure

by Jeff Foster

Cauldron of the Weekend is the story of how a unique and little known men's organization helped a man heal his emotional wounds, and thereby gain control of his life.

258 pages, Paperback

First published July 6, 2001

About the author

Jeff Foster graduated in Astrophysics from Cambridge University in 2001. Several years after graduation, following a period of severe depression and illness, he became addicted to the idea of "spiritual enlightenment", and embarked on an intensive spiritual search which lasted for several years.

The spiritual search came to an absolute end with the clear seeing that there is only ever Oneness. In the clarity of this seeing, life became what it always was: spontaneous, clear, joyful and fully alive, and Jeff began to write and talk about "nonduality" (which he often calls "the utterly, utterly obvious").

He holds meetings and retreats in the UK and Europe, clearly and directly pointing to the frustrations surrounding the spiritual search, to the nature of mind, and to the Clarity at the heart of everything. His uncompromising approach, full of humor and compassion, shatters the mind's hopes for a future awakening, revealing the awakening that is always already present, right in the midst of life.

"

Reviews

[Dare Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I began reading this book shorty after my own initiation weekend into The Mankind Project, wanting to compare my experience with the author's and to consolidate my own transformative experience. I found his style extremely intuitive and New-Agey, for lack of a better term (lots of talk about Spirit Guides and too-amazingly coincidental discoveries and dreams and mysticism), and to be honest, this turned me off; not to say that his autobiographical approach wasn't valid, but I found myself writing "WTF?!" more than once in the margins.

That being said, the last 20 pages of summary were the most valuable part of the book for me. The author recognized that his own healing process was happening in layers, from easier to more difficult, "the difficulty probably related to consciousness, the less conscious it was the more difficult it was" (p. 219)—and a large part of being conscious means being aware what I am feeling in any given moment or situation. I was struck by the author's assessment that addiction is actually the polar opposite of consciousness, and that many men use addictions to counterbalance their own numbness and pain. And I will end by quoting the author's penultimate statement about the kind of personal change that occurs during the course of the MKP Weekends: "To become conscious is to change, and change means dealing with fear. Men with deep wounds create behavior patterns to cope with the wounds. To heal the wounds is to let go of the behavior patterns, and the letting go means change, means stepping into the unknown". (pp. 229-230).

I suppose every single man who experiences these weekends could write his own story, and each story would be different. We each have a "Shadow"—the parts of ourselves and our early experiences that we hide, deny or repress—and the voyage towards wholeness involves facing and confronting that of which we are most afraid.