Gestures Toward a Living Culture
12 week online course
Not Currently Running
This 12-week online course introduces foundational material at the heart of a growing soul curriculum, meant to re-enchant our lives, nurture our imagination, honor our longings, welcome our heartbreak, inspire our authentic impulses, remind us of the mythical, and hopefully give us the courage to become more naturally ourselves together and reclaim a sense of meaning and mystery. Each week we will explore a different and related field/theme.
Content
Collective Wound, Repair of the World & Landscape of Soul
Dreams & Imagination
Beauty & Enchantment
Wild kin & Animate World
The Well of Grief
Ritual & the Sacred
Obstacles – Shame & Trauma
Outcasts, Protectors & Predator
Intimacy & the Soul friend
The Terrain of Initiation
Background
For the past 20 years I have been immersed in holding and facilitating groups for healing and soul making. For many years, working with dreams with intimate groups of women was the primary portal. I expanded into offering nature- based rites of passage retreats for women. Several years ago my work shifted towards convening larger community rituals of grief and gratitude open to all. Over the years, although the forms have changed, the intent and longing has remained the same. How do we liberate what is most wild and true within and without? What are the gestures personally and collectively that move us towards a thriving, just, wild, wise and reciprocal living culture?
Always an integral part of the work has been, and continues to be, offering welcome, mercy and compassion to the outcasts in our interior lives, those parts of ourselves we have had to shut out, separate, exile, armor, numb, deny, hide… as well as the strategies we developed for protection, in order to survive in this broken and troubled world. Finding the gifts in the wound, the beauty in broken places, and the creative participatory impulses that often emerge out of our dark times is my orientation. The initiatory dark times, with containment, guidance and community support, allow us to grow wider and wiser and re-imagine what is possible.
Intention — Although this course is an introduction to the material, it is also an experiential training of sorts. At its most lofty, to help ripen us into adults and true elders that know who we are, what we serve, and to whom and what we belong. It is meant to deepen our soulfulness, presence, wisdom, compassion, and eccentricity as well as our sense of belonging in community. It is my hope that this seed will grow and nurture a robust community of practice, study and communion that meets with regularity to engage the curriculum. To offer virtual opportunities for deeper dives into the material. To invite guest teachers and collaborators from various related and interconnected fields. To host in person, on land, retreats and longer form trainings. Practice the communal art of villaging as an antidote to the dis-ease, fragmentation and individualism of the modern world.
Form & flow — Attunement & embodiment practice, dyad check in, 45 minutes of interactive teaching, 30 minutes of small group work (explicit instructions and guidelines will be given) and a 20-minute question and answer section to go over ideas, questions, concerns as a larger community.
Participation
· Recordings of each session (presentation and q/a only) will be available.
· You may purchase the recording of the classes without attending - which will provide exposure to the content of the work and my teaching style without the villaging community component of the course.
· You can sign up for the course and watch the recordings when it works for you.
· If the time does not work and you are interested in participating live, let me know. With enough interest we may be able to set up alternative "village community circles" that could meet at an agreed upon time different from the scheduled time.
“ “Belonging is where people co-create the future together.” ”