The Odyssey of Embodied Spiritual Living℠ (OESL)

The Odyssey of Embodied Spiritual Living℠ (OESL)

The aims of this program are:

• To lead participants on a journey toward increasing awareness, understanding, and love for being human through developing more heartfelt, full-body appreciation for one’s unique experience of being alive in communion with others;
• To awaken and diversify understanding of spirituality as expressed through the embodied movement of life;
• To teach concepts and basic principles regarding ways human creatures create meaning by utilizing embryology, Epistemics, affective theory, somatic movement, and creative processes; and
• To support participants in their unique and communal journeys toward dreaming and creating more sustainable, healthy, and loving lives.

Each module incorporates learning through:

• A creative flow of dialog/ lecture,
• Experiential practice (activities explored individually, with partners, and as a whole group), and
• Discussion of applying inquiry, principles, and practice to one’s daily life and/ or profession. 

Participants will be encouraged to keep a creative journal and will be given reading material and “assignments” to further their learning beyond the module time.

The following curriculum is designed in 6 modules.  Each module builds upon the previous one, with two final modules.  One is a seven-day retreat where participants spend 3-5 days in silence together; and lastly a module dedicated to creating daily self-practice & achievable goals.  The retreat and final module are a meditation upon, and culminating celebration of all we have cultivated along our odyssey of embodied spiritual learning.

Note: Attending In-person preferable & Online possible!

MODULE 1:
Embodiment of Spirit:  Sensing, feeling, and loving from the immaterial to manifest form

(3 day module)
Friday-Sunday
January 19-21
10 am – 3 pm
$325 (as a single module)**

This module begins introducing participants to processes and concepts that can enhance their connections to and understanding of the origins of human life; and the significance of our sensing, breathing, feeling, moving body beings.  We explore the significance of dynamic oppositions always present in creating and maintaining presence.  The primary focus of this module is to develop new and/ or more capacity for experiential knowledge in order to help balance out more dominant abstracted thinking (which lends itself to all forms of disassociation) with more immediate body awareness in one’s immediate environment.

Module content will include:

• Basic embryology—spirit manifest in dynamic and fluid form.
• Awakening Silent Level meaning through breath, sound, movement, sensing, feeling, and awareness of space and gravity dynamics.
• Heart-centered presence as expressed through dynamic oppositions:  basic human heart anatomy, open-closing, expanding-contracting, giving-receiving.
• The human being as a fluid system in communion with the earth and cosmos.

MODULE 2:
Feeling Moving:  The biology of emotion—motivation & meaning

(4 day module)
Friday-Monday
February 23-26
10 am – 3 pm
$425 (as a single module)**

Utilizing what we discover and learn in the first module, we open our focus to the shapes, colors, and dynamic range of the biology of emotion at play in human consciousness.  Feeling is at play as an essential aspect of our body’s minding system.  Feeling lets us know what is optimal and not optimal for our well-being.  Feeling moves us to extend, shrink, learn, create, ignore, commit, disappear, shudder, rejoice….  Positive, negative, and neutral all feeling points to deeper needs that are ongoing throughout life. 

This module focuses on:

The evolutionary significance of the biology of emotion.

Theories, concepts and practices that enhance understanding of the ways feeling moves us.

Our spontaneous and learned responses to emotion.

How we learn and continue to learn the ways every thought, decision, and movement of our lives is motivated by the affective system—the biology of emotion.

Module content will include:

• Ways humans abstract meaning from What Is Going On (WIGO) in the universe through the Silent Level expression of the human organism: Orders of abstraction – Epistemics, David & Bois.
• The biological roots of emotion—Affective theory – Tomkins, current neuroscience.
• All About Attention—The movement of attention through the basic affects in the art of learning, creativity, self-regulation, resonance with others, and healing.
• Silent level awareness of affect, feeling, needs, and support.
• Dialog with self and others—beginning to facilitate relationship.

MODULE 3:
Touching the Surface, Feeling the Depths, Seeing the Possibilities

(4 day module)
Friday-Monday
April 5-8
10 am – 3 pm
$425 (as a single module)**

As sensate beings we are touching and being touched by our environment, body systems, concepts of self and other, and our symbolic/ metaphorical creations of meaning.  Skin is the largest sense organ of our bodies and because of its connection with the central nervous system, touch is essential for healthy development and our capacity to regulate from infancy throughout adulthood.  We recognize feeling as the activity of all our body’s sensate processes, and as the intangible flow of emotions.  Seeing is our ability to process visual light and movement from our external environment and from our imaginal realms.  The word heal, means to become whole, and to be touching, feeling and seeing is a whole experience of being.   As we are touched on the surface of our beings, vibrations and frequencies move through the depths of our body, awakening us to see the world of our experience with fresh awareness.  Offering new possibilities for what we call healing and what it means to become whole.

This module focuses on how we can explore meaningful safe ways of touching, feeling, seeing each other, and seeing the world we live in; and on ways we can attend ourselves when we feel touched, felt, and are seen by ourselves and the world. 

Module content will cover:

• Focusing more intensively on interaction through touch, breath, sound, movement, and witnessing to facilitate more intimacy with self and others.
• Asking the questions:  What is healing?  What makes a healer?  What is healing if nothing is broken or needs fixing?  What is a healer if no one has special powers and everyone has special powers? 
• Exploring creative ways for each person to discover new meaning in the art and play of healing.

MODULE 4:
Moving Body Dreaming

(4 day module)
Friday-Monday
June 21-24 10 am – 3 pm
$425 (as a single module)**

The imaginal realms of our humanness are as real to us as material objects.  The images we manifest through daydreaming and night dreaming move our physiology as much as the sights, sounds, odors, and movements of the environment.  When the needs of our organism are not fulfilled in a timely way, we immediately begin to think, and this thinking movement is one expression of our dreaming.  We dream through our ability to imagine and through wondering, what could possibly meet our needs in a more efficient way? Some of our needs are vital to our survival.  Other needs are vital to our need for novelty, which as it turns out, is also vital for survival and evolution.

Night dreams are gifts from the transpersonal activities that occur when we let go of functioning in daily life and rest our bodies.  During our night dreams we see, feel, taste, touch, and become many people, places, creatures, and more; moving freely beyond what is safe and appropriate social behavior.  This capacity to let go of social acceptability, to feel and move beyond what’s normal, and to extend into the realms of super-being relieves us of daily stresses, empowers us to do the impossible, and restores and strengthens us to return to waking daily social life.

Intentionally exploring our day and night dreams can facilitate more clarity about our deeper needs, can help us attend these deeper needs, and can support the expansion of our imaginations and manifestations.  By embodying our transpersonal dreaming capacity, individually and in community, we awaken our potential for dreaming, and creating together the lives we long to live and the world we long to live in.

Module content will include:

• Dream writing
• Experiential dream play—individually and collectively
• All-night silent dreaming together
• Embodying our dream life through movement & sound
• Creating “altars” as aesthetic and visual centers to connect with ancestors, elements, and other transpersonal and transformational energies

MODULE 5:
Silent Retreat: Return to Origins

(7 day retreat module)
Sunday-Saturday
August 25-31
Hours & Price TBA – must attend prior modules

From formlessness to form, form to formlessness:  We are created by the mystery of the universe and beyond.  All that manifests on this earth as living dreaming human-body-beings, eventually and completely returns to the mystery of the universe.  Our bodies, needs, desires, longings, our best and worst traits, and loving intentions, all arise from universal origins upon conception, and return to these universal origins with death—the death of meaning as well as physical death.  During this retreat we let go of communicating through words.  We acknowledge the importance of interrupting our own sense of purpose, self-importance, and conscious intentions, and we offer all that we “know” about being human back to the vast potential of the universe and beyond.  Allowing the creative potentials from which all living, breathing, meaning making, and manifesting beings arise, to be fed and inspired in ways beyond our wildest dreams and imaginations.

Incorporating all of the elements from each module previously articulated, the group comes together for a seven day retreat, spending 4-5 days in non-words silence, breathing, moving, sounding, sensing, feeling, touching, dreaming, dancing, stilling, and …..

MODULE 6:
Odyssey of Living: Designing Self-Practice & Achievable Goals for Daily Life

(3 day module)
Friday-Sunday
September 27-29
10 am – 3 pm
$325 (must attend prior modules)**

In this module we reflect upon all that we have explored, discovered, and learned through practice and silence together.  We articulate creative inquiry and strategies to help us design individual and collective group practices to take home; and to articulate achievable goals for daily life, to support our intentions to manifest, from spirit to body, more sustainable, healthy, and loving lives.

Attending In-person preferable & Online possible!

FEES:**
Commit to all 6 modules and receive a $325 discount. 

Commit to modules 1-4 and receive a $175 discount,

Total Modules with discount = $1425.00

TO REGISTER
Contact:  mary@movingbodyresources.com or call 212-206-7546

• Fees must be paid before attending each module.

• Fees can be paid via Venmo, PayPal, Credit Card, Check, or Cash. 

• Credit Cards will incur a service fee of 5%.