In this workshop, Bartholomew returned again and again to a single inner landmark — a place of safety within, found by diligent asking, into which one learns to fall a hundred times an hour. From it flow real healing, steadiness amid the world's changes, and the courage to imagine boldly.

Context: This was the second of three tapes from the 1986 Malvern Workshop. Responding to a stream of questions, Bartholomew wove nearly every answer back to one theme — the discovery and inhabiting of an inner place of safety — and closed with two guided exercises, one releasing what is no longer needed and one lifting the heart toward its source. Along the way he addressed healing, the so-called earth changes, the terror of the void encountered in deep meditation, the forming of a leaderless spiritual group, bodily pressure and expansion, and how to choose among life's many openings.

Healing From Your Own Ground: Bartholomew opened by warning against promising others a safety one cannot guarantee, as a parent falsely tells a child "you are safe with me." One is not another's place of safety, he explained, but having found and grounded one's own — knowing exactly where it is, what it feels like, and how one reached it — one can guide others there as a friend who has walked the road ahead, rather than the blind leading the blind. He noted that healing recedes from memory much as childbirth does, so that only by standing in that clear, safe, connected inner space can one raise the frequency of a room and offer another the road. He cautioned that much group healing fails because many present remain in their minds rather than in that place, and that one should never attempt to heal someone toward whom one holds no genuine love and compassion. No healing can be forced; one is responsible only for the vibration one sends out, and the other is left free to choose.

The Earth Changes as Inner Movement: Asked about the predicted earth changes out of which a new consciousness was said to come, Bartholomew replied that it did not finally matter whether such events occurred. What mattered was that those compelled by the prophecy use it as a summons to become so centered that they could aid others in any chaos, since one cannot help within chaos unless one can step out of it. He observed that people drawn to future catastrophe and people indifferent to it each serve a valid inner need — some must prepare, others must stay wholly in the present moment. Saying something he claimed never to have said before, he described the axis shift as the outward projection of a necessary inward movement, the flow of consciousness stopping and turning upward like a spin lifting everything an octave. If the shift can be accomplished on the inner plane, he suggested, it need not happen outwardly; beneath every version of the question lies one truth — that consciousness is about to move upward.

The Void and the Warrior: A questioner raised the account, drawn from a book on gnosis, of a meditator of Catholic background who entered a state of "no self" that felt not like God but like dissolving into nothing, attended by fear. Bartholomew affirmed the experience as a genuine passage beyond finite limitation, into a territory that has no central perception and that the mind simply cannot cope with — which, he said, is precisely its delight, for the aim is to get beyond the coping mind. He likened it to living one's whole life inside a beautiful hut and then having its roof and walls fall away, leaving one exposed for the first time to the vastness of the night sky in terror. The remedy is the warrior's patience: returning again and again, trusting, until the vastness grows familiar and one finds a home within it. Many meditators, he lamented, stop forever at just this threshold, and here again the established place of safety is what allows one to hold on and go through.

The Channel and the Base Camp: To one who asked how to build a clear channel between earth-grounded and vast consciousness, Bartholomew answered first and most insistently: find your place of safety. He compared it to a base camp that must be readied and known before one ascends the Himalayan heights, and urged the seeker to demand of consciousness itself, in meditation, "where am I safe?" He pointed to the Buddha, who sat beneath the tree resolved not to move until he knew the truth, and drew from that record the lesson that austerities are not the road; what is required is the steady, waiting awareness that turns inward toward the place of connection while one walks, talks, and lives. Once found, one falls into it and remembers. These two things — finding the place of safety and falling into it constantly — he named the key that makes one a clear channel. He added that a place evoking overwhelming God-consciousness does so through the meeting of expectation, memory trace, and a moment of synchronicity when all the elements come together, and that such a state, rightly remembered, is never merely past but can be entered and deepened again and again.

A Group Without a Leader: When a participant explained that the couple who had begun the local group had moved away, Bartholomew proposed that a new circle form freely among the like-minded, with the fewest possible rules so that its life force could arise spontaneously. Such a group needs no leader, he said, only a rotating servant to tend the practical things — the house, the tea, the coffee — and, for each meeting, someone to direct the flow of talk so that no one dominates. He counseled brevity and honesty, the willingness both to tell a member gently that they are talking too much and to draw out the one who never speaks, since a whole group needs everyone. Most striking was his method for guidance: at each meeting's close, rather than debating, all should grow quiet, let the deep self indicate what it wishes to work on next, and write it down; the notes, gathered and read by whoever serves next time, would reveal a remarkable convergence, because the group's own energy knows what it needs.

Lifting the Heart and Expanding the Self: Bartholomew then led an exercise, naming himself a safe bridge for the moment: participants imagined a boundless circle open to the vault of the sky, sent out of it any word or thing they wished to release, and felt a magnet high in the heavens tugging upward on the feeling of the heart — the ancient act of lifting up the heart unto the Lord, moved from idea into experience. Turning to a question about pressure felt around the head and body, he taught that such pressure is something vaster than the small persona trying to get one's attention, a sign that one has defined oneself too small. His counter-exercise was to expand — to sit in one's safe space and "caress the walls," growing large enough that headache, past, and pain all fit easily within one, breathing with the trees, mountains, and sky. To one who found that old pleasures no longer delighted, he explained this as a soul's unfoldment calling for a wholly new nourishment, available only by expanding beyond the physical body into a different quality of energy, where the waiting teacher within can at last begin to move.

Following the Pull: To a young woman with many openings before her, Bartholomew said the true path is the one the heart most yearns toward regardless of outer obstacles — a genuine calling felt as a pull, like the magnet on the heart in the earlier exercise. He urged her to sit with each possibility fully imagined and see whether her whole being rose toward it, and insisted one need not choose between deepening an art and deepening a love when both are appropriate. Above all he pleaded, "dare to imagine boldly," for people fall short of what they truly want, taught as children never to reveal desire lest it be used against them or ridiculed by those whose own wings were early crippled. Flying high in imagination, one learns for oneself what is fantasy and what is worth disciplining a life to attain. Finally, answering how to "let go and let God," he warned that no one should fall into a God painted as fearsome; one must first find the safe inner place worthy of trust, put God aside, and simply learn to stop and fall into that place a hundred times an hour — pausing before rising, between one task and the next — until the pull itself carries one from event to event, each as beautiful as the last, and the meaning of letting go is known through living.