8 sessions – please commit to attending at least 6 of the 8 sessions
Space limited to 9 participants
Refund Policy: Tuition minus $75 of registration fee is refundable up to two weeks prior to the start date of the program.
What does it mean to pray? What are we doing when we pray? So many of us have been misshapen by a colonial version of prayer. Call-and-response, mimicry, memorization of words that have very little meaning to us…this is how many of us have formed a relationship with what we call prayer.
Yet some of us have taken the time to reclaim this ancient and essential way of speaking with the other world and those who inhabit it. Perhaps we realized we’d been praying since childhood, the thing that was erroneously labeled a conversation with our imaginary friends. Prayer is perhaps the most intimate and universal act of our human devotion to that which we cannot see with our physical eyes or measure with our scientific instruments. Like breathing, making love, crying and laughing.
An aspect of praying that often goes unmentioned is the art of listening. The man-made world is filled with endless distractions, all deterrents in our essential capacity to listen and to hear. How do we cultivate ears that hear beneath and beyond the noise of our modern world? To whom are we listening and do we have the muscles to hear what is being said?
This is the terrain we will traverse in Finding Our Words. For those who have some familiarity with these questions, and have found resources and capacity along the way. This journey group is for those who are ready to weave our prayers with each other, and to weave what we hear in response to those prayers.
Together we will make an offering of our listening and our prayers.
This circle invites us to focus on our journey work, the practice of our unfettered praying and the weaving of our prayers with each other’s for the tending of our world.
It is a specific invitation for those who have a reliable intimacy and immediacy with their Ancestors, as well as the tools and skills to sustain these essential vibrant relationships. This group is a chance to gallop with each other. Well beyond the need for our ancestral work to be for us or our personal healing, our relationship with these deep imaginal, deep time beings who made us possible is a profound opportunity to come in contact with our unique voice and the medicine we carry for our beautiful, whirling, tender world.
So, this group is for those who know this place of service beyond a focus on self or what our Ancestors might do for us. For those whose service is their primary orientation in the world, who are also strong in their Ancestral reverence practices and relationships. Please reach out to me if you’re interested in this group but are uncertain if you’re a good candidate. There is still time to do some 1:1 ancestral work with me before the group starts.
We will spend our time focused on The World, rather than our own personal stories. Honoring what we’re sensing (in all the ways we sense, including hearing, seeing, feeling, imagining and more) we will sit in our seats of relevance and responsibility to share what we’ve received, weaving our worded wisdom with each other as we go. Our opening and closing circles and councils will be invitations to speak to what we are uniquely and essentially tracking in the unfolding story of The World.
The hope of this 8 week adventure is that each of us will come away with an even more exuberant and audacious capacity to pray as if the wellness of the world depended upon our doing so…because it most assuredly does. We will make space to reflect on both the unique nature of our voices and the unique nature of what is ours to say – the eco-tones of our prayers – so that we might come to know ourselves even more unequivocally as the living embodiment of the ecologically essential wisdom our Ancestors carry.
What These Sessions Might Look Like:
Each evening will begin with an invitation from me (or if you have come with an invitation, it will come from YOU!) – a stirring question that is not meant to be answered but acts as a catalyst for us to cross thresholds and enter the deep imaginal realms to bring essential wonderings to our Ancestors
We will spend the bulk of our time each evening in the journey and council spaces
We will experiment with different journey processes including singing, drumming and perhaps even dancing ourselves into and out of journey space
We will experiment with different council styles to help us find our words in myriad ways, which might include song and movement
Our sessions will take place in The Kirkja. We will be gathered around fire and while we will have plenty of comforts to keep us out of the direct impact of the elements, we will be some version of ‘outside’, and we will be around smoke.
You are encouraged to arrive no later than 6:15 because we will begin promptly at 6:30.
You’re encouraged to bring your (small) drums (djembes and very large buffalo drums will likely be precariously close to the flames and sparks in the Kirkja), rattles and any other noise makers including, of course, your voice!
A special note to say that I often offer groups solely for women, but this group is for all adults (of any gender). We need a beautiful diversity of our voices, perspectives, heritages and languages to weave a solid wisdom into being!