Archive
We All Go Home
Community Practice Ritual
Cultivating Skills of Reception
Open to all, suggested donation $30-60, NOTAFLOF (no one turned away for lack of funds)
Registration required, see directions below
Saturday April 23 11am-1pm ish PST
You are invited to the first run of our community practice ritual! We use the word "community" here with full awareness that true community is an intricate art that many of us have only had glimpses of, but we try it out anyway and let the word choice also be a prayer. Hence the term community practice. There are no prerequisites, and people are welcome to bring friends, family members, etc although we ask for folks to be mindful of who they invite. It's not a good idea to bring someone who has major hangups about spirituality, ritual, or animism. This gathering is mostly about “doing the real thing together”; addressing personal and collective backlog, getting an energetic and spiritual tune up for ourselves and inevitably our ancestors, and doing our part as humans to collaborate with Spirit and Nature for the benefit of all beings. We will not be offering much intellectual explanation or doing tight hand holding through each exercise. For more of that, please join our next Between Sun and Moon Foundations course.
If you are unfamiliar with how we do things or you need a refresher you can check out our set of principles under media and a couple of our videos: Interview with Nora Bateson Receptivity
The flow that we will move through together will have a range of ways to participate, and everyone is in charge of their own experience at all times. There will always be options to simplify or just chill out and observe in a sacred way, or to practice in ways that you are already comfortable with. Everything is an invitation. We will be working with rhythms inside of rhythms, providing many aspects of our experience with the chance to sync up with the deeper intelligences of the body, the land and the seasons, and Reality itself. We are ritual improvisers listening in real time to the fluctuations of the group, so any time we host something there is always space for the unexpected or unpredictable. This gathering will not be recorded.
Elements that will very likely be included:
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Using breath, movement, sound, and stillness to support beneficial energy flow, flexibility, creative play, and subtle sensing
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Grounding into the lower body and general embodied re-calibration and stabilization
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Opportunities for cleansing/harmonizing on many levels (self as ecosystem, home/ space, relationships, creative projects, and so on)
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Helping to settle fucked up ancestral patterns directly and indirectly, per the experience of the participant
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Offering prayers and creative expression on behalf of self and other(s)
How to register:
Please email ch8osandwonder@gmail.com with the following:
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Put "we all go home April 2022" in the subject line
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Name(s)
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if you are registering on behalf of family members or friends that can't register for themselves then please include their name(s)
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what email you used to donate
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Anything else you want us to know/any questions you have
After we see your email you will receive the zoom link
Donation instructions:
Suggested donation is $30-60, but NOTAFLOF
Send donations via paypal to larissakaul@gmail.com, select "send to friends and family" and write "WE ALL GO HOME APRIL 2022" in the message field. Be sure to include your full name and functional email in the message as well. Please include any paypal fee in the total. Paypal is changing things up but usually if you have a paypal account and you send money directly from your linked bank account we can avoid fees. If paypal doesn't work contact us.
Preparation
Comfortable clothing and space to move around or lie down is recommended. Give a heads up to housemates about possible sound. You might want to fluff up your space (clean, organize, decorate) and altar if you have one. You can prepare food offerings for spirits and ancestors if that is part of your practice.
All of reality sings, plays, learns, and is interconnected
We match our pace to the bigger body of the world song
That which helps us feel how we are claimed, needed,
And changed in the turning of the cycles big and small
Inside reflects the outside, outside feeds the inside, inside leads to outside
In the western hemisphere the first movements of springtime are beginning to stir
What has decayed in the winter is now slowly resurrecting
What has died begins to gestate
Receiving nourishment for the next cycle
This series of workshops is an opportunity to practice and encounter artistic-animist ways of living as it is available to us according to the fluctuating movements of reality and the natural world. These practices are “healing” in the sense that they tend to result in greater feelings of connection, nervous system health and inner stability, skillfulness in all kinds of relationships, and everyday appreciation for our lives.
We recognize that western/colonial cultures have complicated the process of accessing these things, and that the many wellness industries that have popped up to try to address the disconnect have created a lot of noise around something that has very natural and ordinary origins. There are definitely many pathways to what we might call “healing”, and we hope people are getting what they need as best as possible.
With this series we are offering support in having playful, creative, simple, and direct experiences with the world, and treating those experiences as teachers. There is no grand, fixed map for how to do this that you can get certified in. There are however, many ways to practice and play as a responsible animist-improviser, responding to life and death (change, transition) with our unique creative expressions while staying connected to the context we find ourselves in.
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This iteration of the Foundations course is focused on the specifics of Receiving & Receptivity. Spring is coming, but not here yet, so it is a very good time to to feel the smaller, more subtle yang energy before it is an overwhelming force.
Many people who have been harmed by ancestral and cultural domination & competition patterns have (unconsciously or otherwise) closed off, blunted or disorganized their reception capacities as a defense against perceived attacks. This can lead to an inability to buffer stimulus, thereby causing very fast triggers and over-threshold states in the body-mind-spirit.
In so-called ancestral healing or spirit work, learning to receive and titrate communication (often non-verbal signals), and then translate those signals into other channels of expression (including stillness) is key.
We must also learn to prime our systems for receiving what is “good for us and all our relations at this time” and not just trying to ‘drink the ocean in one gulp’ or ‘understand everything that’s happening in order to be safe’.
This kind of practice is directly applicable to dealing with social threat and inter-personal projection, as well as internal self-talk and parts-talk that creates internalized oppression.
Receiving can be felt as cooperatively resting in peaceful confusion, allowing form to arise from formlessness, and for things to change without struggle, while honing our timing and participatory witnessing.
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To encounter writings, practices, and more from Animist Arts visit www.patreon.com/animistarts
Some of what the course will help feed:
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A capacity for feeling ordinary satisfaction
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Simple embodiment practices that help us become intimate with our biological thresholds
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Navigation and collaboration with different rhythms and tones in our environment
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Reducing the feeling of social threat
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Being able to playfully name/describe different spirits, emotions, and energies (“who might actually be in the room”)
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Have access to a built-in guidance system through direct sensing (using our entire felt-sense which can include our rational thinking but goes beyond rational thinking)
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Move more flexibly between scales (personal, local, global, galactic. micro-macro relationship)
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Relaxing inside of discomfort and uncertainty
Who is this for?
Anyone who wants to start fresh or revisit the basics in a fresh way with live, facilitated feedback. This is an all-levels course that will focus on the simple, playful, ordinary, practical, miraculous roots of our practice.
What is the time commitment?
6 Thursdays: Feb 24, Mar 3, 10, 24, 21, April 7 (skip week March 17) 11am-12:45pm PST
via zoom
Yes, all will be recorded. There is no Facebook or Mighty Networks group.
The more you curiously practice, the more you will discover about your whole relational body.
You can sign up after the first session has started, but we recommend attending all live sessions if possible. In any case, all registrants will have access to the recordings.
Attending the live sessions allows you to access the most potent group field, get real time feedback and ask questions.
Why are you calling it “Adaptive”?
Because many “methods” attempt to create a one-size-fits-all linear approach to “getting what you want”. Our practice is much more about listening to the larger cycles of time, season, culture, etc so that each time we “start” there is a freshness, and yet certain principles repeat over and over (like inhaling/exhaling, sleeping/dreaming/waking, ingesting/digesting/excreting, day/night).
In this way, we are offering this Live series multiple times over the next year, and it can be attended cumulatively, much like a martial arts study or temple practice. We are not certifying anyone, or promising that this specific 6 weeks is somehow the same as 6 weeks in another season or time. If you want to study with us “from a beginning place”, you can attend all the sessions over time as we all change and grow and move towards death.
What are the other logistics?
Offerings are done on a tiered scale based on your own level of resource.
The median value of the course is around $500.
If you are struggling to make ends meet, the minimum offering is $150 and up.
If you have the resources and want to help support, please offer the median value or above.
Youth (ages 13-19) can attend for free or by donation
*We cannot offer refunds*
Register by sending the amount to www.paypal.me/daresohei and writing “BETWEEN SUN AND MOON, FEB 2022” in the message field. Be sure to include your full name and functional email in the message as well. You will then be sent the zoom link via the email you wrote. Please include the paypal fee in the total. Paypal is changing things up but usually if you have a paypal account and you send money directly from your linked bank account we can avoid fees. If it ever asks, be sure to say you’re sending to “friends and family.”
You can sign up after the first session has started, but we recommend attending all live sessions. In any case, all registrants will have access to the recordings.
When will you be doing this again?
Unknown. We are attempting to create an ecology of participation with various levels of relational commitment. We often hear from people about the lack of practice groups and community and we are working to figure out how to create “sangha” space while mitigating the need for energy-expensive moderation and trauma-ghost explosions. Stay tuned to the new website while we iterate transparently.