INITIATION is inevitable. ARE YOU READY TO LISTEN, stay awake & PLAY inside OF it?

What if using your creative power for personal and collective benefit was a universal initiation that belonged to all humans?

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Humans have unique gifts and impact on the planet. One of these great avenues of impact is the way we make culture. Culture manifests through shared language, concepts, narrative, art, and ritual (repeated actions or behaviors), and determines how we think, what we prioritize, and how we relate. Culture-making is an inherently creative and artistic process.

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In the origins of human culture, there was an understanding of the importance of menstruation as a reflection of cosmic life and death principles. In this series we will learn how those ancestral memories are looking to be born continually Now.

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Practitioners across the globe are hearing the need for the re-emergence of ways of relating that have been exiled from domineering supremacist cultures. Healthy relationship to Death, Mystery, Darkness, Change, the Wild, Creativity, Community, the Erotic, the body, vulnerability, Violence, and Nature are missing from many of our daily experiences and commitments. To be out of alignment with these elements, all of which have direct tethers to Blood and Menstruation, is to be out of alignment with Reality and existence. It drains our energy, creates desperation and despair, and makes us incapable friends and family to other humans and the many beings we share this world with.

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What does it mean to participate in culture-making that reorients toward these exiled principles?

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For many eras in our ancestral history, and in contemporary subcultures and original cultures across the globe, people use basic ritual/theater and creative structures to externalize inner knowings, clarify necessary communications, and revitalize the community and local ecosystems with deep listening, play, shapeshifting, and tending. They use these communal structures to "think out loud" and transmit inner knowings and reinforce essential wisdoms.

In the Bleeding Circle we call upon this shared ancestral technology to usher in the exiled aspects of ourselves and human culture(s). Steeping ourselves in the "menstrual mind" (Grahn, 1993) we dance with Death, Love, Renewal, and Rhythm, and partner with them as teachers for our current context.

The Bleeding Circle itself is a participatory art project. Culture making requires time and consistency, and our aim is to make this art project evergreen; occurring year-round over multiple years.

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By apprenticing to blood and menstruation, we are apprenticing to human creativity and holistic culture making. The exiled and taboo elements are rewoven with the favored and palatable, allowing the totality of reality to be deepened and recognized. Birth, growth, love, expression, violence, death, and dissolution all speak to one another and require one another. This inescapable truth has been reiterated through myth making, ritual theater, art and communal practices. We continue this human act.

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Blood is the portal and the teacher, to the way in which we are all implicated in world-tending. Blood is the answer to chronic cultural avoidance of taboo subjects, and the suffering that we and many other beings are reckoning with. Blood points us to surprise and depth, to source our ritual artistic expression from the place where emotion becomes sacred and uncategorizable.

This crucible is possible because of the love that flows unconditionally, timeless and vast, from the centerless center of all things, The Original Mother, Absolute Nature, or nondual wisdom.

The nondual principles of this work require us to recognize the interconnection between all names, forms, and systems that have developed over millennia in response to this knowledge. We will not be following one specific lineage, but speaking directly with the energies and forces as they show up for us authentically. 

Bleeding and menstruation calls us into necessary responsibility, a gravity of vision, creativity and strength that does not show up as easily in other spaces, under slightly different intentions.

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our journey

APPLICATION DEADLINE NOVEMBER 9TH

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• November: INTIMACY IN CLARITY. Introduction to primary material, research inquiries and commitments
  Main Session [11.16.23] 5:30-8pmPST, 90 min art party TBD
   

• December:THE STILL POINT. Ceremonial space touching open potential and stillness, Deep Dreaming Constellation. Live offerings to the Spirit of Blood.
  Main Session [12.14.23] 5:30-8pmPST, 90 min art party TBD
   

• JANUARY: THE DARK MOON. Meditation and ceremony on darkness and emptiness. Navigating ghost realms and the exiled. Live offerings.
  Main Session [1.18.24] 5:30-8pmPST, 90 min art party TBD
   

• FEBRUARY: RENEWAL. Looking toward the precarious and unpredictable process of bringing the liminal into form. Group salon for works in progress. 
  Main Session [2.15.24] 5:30-8pmPST, 90 min art party TBD
   

• MARCH: LIVING BALANCE. Meditation and ceremony dedicated to the dynamic dance of life/death/life (Pinkola-Estés) and the paradoxes of the dual world.
  Main Session [3.14.24] 6-8:30pmPST, 90 min art party TBD
   

• APRIL: FEEDING THE SPARK. Meditation and ceremony for rising to meet what blood, menstruation, and Nature are asking us to grow into for the benefit of the whole.
  Main Session [4.18.24], 90 min art party TBD
   

• MAY: WORKS IN PROGRESS SHOW [5.9.23] 6-8pmPST

The timeline gives an overview of the arc of our journey, but keep in mind that Larissa is an intuitive improviser and may choose to make changes to the content of sessions.

investment +
what is included

COST: Sliding scale donation: $60-160 a month, or $360-960 for the whole series. I cannot offer refunds. 

This experience includes:

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• One "main session" each month where we gather, alternating between ceremony and direct experience practices and crafting artistic expressions of what we find together. These sessions are highly curated and serve as catalysts for the rest of our time.

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•  Approx. one "art party" a month where people can check in and be in dedicated practice space alone-together, or together-together according to the needs of the group. Timing determined based on feedback from the participants.

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• A private social network either on google groups or Telegram where people can ask questions, share resources, get reminders, or prompts for ongoing engagement.

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• A small group experience, with about 12 participants max. Each participant will choose a creative research inquiry and/or commitment that will guide them throughout the 6 months.

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• Works in Progress public offering at the end of the 6 months. There are many ways to participate according to comfort level, and this is a crucial aspect to the initiatory and culture making qualities of this experience.

This is a 6 month closed container, meaning that everyone is committing to the 6 months and new people cannot join late.

At the end of 6 months there will be a Works in Progress offering from the group for the public.

At this time a new 6 month cycle may begin, making space for people to depart and new people to join. Participants who show up consistently will be invited to stay in the circle for the next round.

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