Home Practice

April 22nd, 2017; 12:30 – 5:30 pm; Church in Ocean Park

Cultivating a capacity to pause, sense inside the body, and respond, more or less with movement AT HOME with your self, is empowering and a perfect adjunct to group experiences. All of the benefits we associate with a movement class or workshop, such as tension release, mental focus and clarity, sense of connection, pain relief, anxiety reduction, enhanced flexibility, muscle and organ toning, cardio-vascular ease, can be obtained daily in the comfort of your home, or anywhere.

Many of us find it difficult to stop the world for even a few minutes to allow the kind of easy mindfulness and movement that we might find in a group. Outside or indoors, with or without music, 5 minutes or 60 minutes – its Good to do it as frequently as possible.

In this workshop we will explore specific simple movements, how to begin, sustain, and end a session for your Self, and ways of self-direction that will inform, deepen and expand your dance practice and provide insight as to how it all applies daily, everywhere, in and out of our culture-at-large.

This workshop can also be used a a perfect warm-up and orientation into the Medicine Dance Facilitator Training program See/Hear/Love: As A Tree in October.

Partner Practice

July 22nd, 2017; 12:30 – 5:30 pm; Church in Ocean Park

Moving with an other can be the most wildly satisfactory, fun, sensual, fulfilling part of a movement experience. For some of us, it can also be confusing, discomfiting, and sometimes scary.

There are ways to enter into dance with a partner, with more and less physical contact, that can support clear boundaries and spontaneous, playful exploration that provides time and opportunity to plumb the depths of our Selves while having fun and fulfilling the simple universal mammalian pleasure of communing with Other.

This workshop will present the concept of the Impersonal and Intimate nature of our dyad work. The attention of each dancer will be invited to stay on the sensation inside their own body, a practice of extraordinary self-care, with opportunity to find safety and comfort one moment to the next, while our partner is doing the same. Agenda-less and autonomous opens the doorway to profound communion.

“For both autonomy and communion to exist simultaneously is a newly emerging potential in consciousness. Usually, when an individual experiences powerful autonomy, it is almost always at the expense of communion with others. And in order to experience profound communion, usually the individuals involved have to sacrifice their autonomy. But in Evolutionary Enlightenment, a dynamic field is created where the one and the many are literally the same and yet simultaneously remain distinct and different. It is a new and evolving expression of nonduality in which the thrill of autonomy and the bliss of communion merge into one singular, unified state of consciousness.” –Andrew Cohen

Dying Practice

November 18th, 2017; 12:30 – 5:30 pm; Church in Ocean Park

George Harrison in his last interview:

“You know, I get confused when I look around at the world, and I see everybody’s running around. And you know, as Bob Dylan said, “He not busy being born is busy dying,” and yet nobody’s trying to figure out what’s the cause of death and what happens when you die. I mean, that to me is the only thing really that’s of any importance, the rest is all secondary.”

Almost all contemporary visionaries, future-primitive writers and ancient mystery texts address the necessity of practicing the single most important moment of a human beings life – their moment of death.

Our movement work draws heavily on the Buddhist practice of mindfulness, combined with  the ageless human need to express, physically, through the body (DANCE). How can we not talk about death? Who of us is not at least curious, if not fascinated or terrified of the prospect of our own demise? Is our practice worth anything if it does not touch into the areas of inquiry suggested by George Harrison?

The act of pause, entering into the living tissues of the body, responding through movement, is more or less an act of rebirth. Let us be born again, and from a safe and curious place, let us consider death. Ours, and others, especially ones that matter deeply to us.

What is the relationship between dance and dying for you? For this relationship (yours), is the only important one.

This workshop will invite extraordinary time and attention inside the body, in movement and in stillness. Stillness is a Good place to practice dying. We will include stillness in movement, as well as movement in stillness.