EROS GUEST TEACHERS
Mindful Erotic Embodiment
With Kait Singley
Thursday, Feb 3rd, 2022 @ 11am - 1pm PST
DESCRIPTION
Kait holds a safe and sacred space for us to explore and cultivate our relationship to erotic energy as a vital life force, which begins within each of us as individuals. Mindful Erotic Embodiment is a practice of dropping expectation, feeding the senses, owning your eroticism, giving your body what you truly want, and awakening a channel of life force that lays a foundation for every connection with another. Explore your own visceral sense of Eros as a source of connection & creation Learn to distinguish between Erotic and sexual energies and how to use both as fuel for your life. Be introduced to MEE Time Exercises - Mindful Erotic Embodiment for solo exploration Be guided in an inquiry of your own energetic flow and blocks as well as how to safely and carefully meet what you need Meet the possibility to increase pleasure, reclaim power, fuel desire, and purpose, and, at the root - access the deep sense of *belonging* that we are all yearning for.
BIO/CONTACT INFO
Kait delights in the paradoxes and delicious dynamism of life as a homesteader and sex educator, a grief walker and ecstatic dancer, a systems designer and an improviser, a mystic and a pragmatist. With a lifelong spiritual practice of accessing the Divine through the body and connection to the natural world, she uses the tools of somatic healing, mindfulness, ecological design theory and nature connection to guide and support her clients. From her fierce commitment to the liminal and sometimes uncomfortable realms, she brings a grounded and loving attention to sessions as a Somatic Sex Educator and Erotic Embodiment Guide. Kait is comfortable with a wide range of lifestyles and erotic expressions and offers creative co-exploration into your own truth and wisdom through private sessions at LivingEros.com
Landscape As Lover: Deep Ecology & Deep Healing
With Sophie Strand
Thursday, Feb 10th, 2022 @ 11am - 1pm PST
DESCRIPTION
For a long time the human narrative has held center stage. But what if there were other stories that needed our attention and could offer us deep healing? Landscape stories. River stories. Dirt Stories. Let us decenter the human narrative and recenter participatory land-based storytelling. We will engage in Kaleidoscopic empathy: using science, somatic practices, and imagination to shift our perspective and imagine what it is to be something else. A microbe. A photon. A hummingbird. The more embedded we become in our landscape, the more intimately we can experience the nourishing embrace and wisdom it readily offers.
In this 2-hour class participants will:
- Learn somatic body based practices to open the doorway way into an “ecodelic” experience of everyday life.
- Queer Ecology: Understanding that queerness, inside ecosystems, is ubiquitous from flowers to insects to fungi. Queer Ecology seeks to trouble how cultural dualisms get grafted onto entangled, complex ecosystems. It “interrupts” the tired monologue of hegemonic heterosexuality and the sterile fiction that we are, in fact, differentiated from the natural world.
- Landscape as Lover: Approaching nature through courtship and curiosity. Romancing stones. Wooing thunderstorms. Telling new stories about what love can looking like with the collaborative help of plants and mushrooms and animals.
- Ecological Erotics: Ecosexuality as a way of re-entering into sexuality and embodiment after trauma.
BIO/CONTACT INFO
Sophie Strand is a poet, historical-fiction writer, and essayist based in the Hudson Valley with a focus on the intersection of spirituality and ecology. She has three chapbooks: Love Song to a Blue God (Oread Press) and Those Other Flowers to Come (Dancing Girl Press) and The Approach (The Swan). Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transpecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculine is forthcoming from Inner Traditions. Her writing has been published by The Dark Mountain Project, www.poetry.org , Unearthed, Braided Way Magazine, Creatrix Magazine, Your Impossible Voice, The Doris, Persephone’s Daughters, and Entropy. And you can continue to follow her work and poetry on Facebook or Instagram: @cosmogyny.
Courting the Muse: How to be in Right Relationship with the Creative Spirit
With Day Schildkret
Thursday, February 17, 2022 @ 11am - 1pm PST
DESCRIPTION
How do you approach a creative, create altars, dress, and offerings. How do you make expectations of the creative muse? And what do you do when the muse doesn’t show up?
In this 2-hour class participants will:
- Ritual and Meaning Making for sane-making, deeper understanding and wisdom
- Creative Expression for finding fulfillment, facing fear and courageous living
- Relating to Impermanence for skills of mindfulness, non attachment and resilience
- Wonder for renewing a sense of awe, curiosity and aliveness
BIO/CONTACT INFO
Day Schildkret is an award-winning author, artist, ritualist, teacher and is internationally known for Morning Altars, which Buzz Feed calls, “a celebration of nature and life.” Working for over a decade with professionals and communities that range from death/dying/grief, wellness/therapy, youth education, religious, trauma, Day is helping to heal the culture through ritual, creativity and meaning-making. Day is the author of Morning Altars: A 7-Step Practice to Nourish Your Spirit through Nature, Art and Ritual (The Countryman Press/WW Norton) as well as Hello, Goodbye: 75 Rituals for Times of Loss, Celebration and Change (Simon Element/Simon & Schuster) publishing in 2022. www.dayschildkret.com
Liberating the Bodies Wisdom
With Langston Kahn
Thursday, February 24, 2022 @ 11:00am - 1:00pm PST
DESCRIPTION
We are of the Earth, not on it. Connect with the wisdom of the earth through the body, as you move throughout your day. How do you sustain change in your life in a way that is truly in right relationship with all living things? In a world where so much constantly pulling at our energy and seducing us into experiencing ourselves as disembodied minds, what does true restoration require of us?
In this 2-hour class participants will:
- An exploration of what true restoration feels like and how we can replenish our energy when we feel chronically depleted or scattered
- Practices for deep grounding: to cultivate the habit of being in connection with your body and the Earth.
- Tools for cultivating true presence in ways that allow you to be more compassionate to yourself and others.
- Techniques for connecting with the wisdom of your body, and interpreting your body’s unique symbolic language
- Time for questions
BIO/CONTACT INFO
Langston Kahn is a New York City based shamanic practitioner specializing in emotional clearing and radical transformation. He stands firmly at the crossroads, his practice informed by the western modality of Inner Relationship Focusing, initiations into traditions of the African Diaspora, the contemporary shamanic tradition of The Last Mask Center and the guidance of his helping spirits and ancestors weaving it all together.
He joyfully endeavors to bring spirituality out of the dark dusty recesses of esotericism and into our daily existence, where it can aid us in re-aligning with the ecstatic energy of our soul’s purpose and opening our hearts to create real lasting change. He firmly believes that no emotional wounds or trauma is beyond healing and is devoted to guiding adventurous souls in transmuting what has been poison in their lives into medicine for themselves and the world.
Testimonials
"Langston is an incredibly skilled and embodied ritualist and facilitator, gifted at being able to attune deeply to the needs of the group. He brings great care, integrity and emotional awareness into his work and relationships. It’s clear that he has delved deeply into his own personal work which I feel is also why he’s able to show up so fully. Plus he’s just a really kind, heart centered and magical human."
- Chi Young Kim, Ancestral Healing and Ritual Practitioner
"Healing is not a solitary process. Healing generations of trauma is both an interdisciplinary and interdimensional process. I trust Langston because he lives with community as his praxis. Langston is an effective healer because he is an experienced and deft navigator of journeys through multiple realities. He is an exquisite listener; he offers wise counsel; and his expertise comes with an abundance of compassion and clarity. I cannot recommend him more highly."
Daniel Alexander Jones, Artist and Educator
Womanist* Imaginations: Joyfilled Movement Building
With Ashara Ekundayo
Thursday, March 3, 2022 @ 11 am - 1pm PDT
*Womanist = Black Feminist.
From the text: “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” Alice Walker
DESCRIPTION:
Join us for a braintrust in joy-informed pedagogies for movement building and creative arts practice. How do we create change from a place of pleasure? How can we more understand “Art-Work” as Vital and essential work? What does it mean to hold intentional space as an artist whose creative practices heal communities and save lives?
In this 2 hour workshop you will explore
- Joy-informed pedagogical models
- Centering and celebrating the work of your Divine Artist-self
- Intellectual & Somatic lessons rooted in Black Feminist Imaginations
- Abolitionist Aesthetics as Liberatory Praxis
BIO/CONTACT INFO
Ashara Ekundayo is a Black feminist, interdisciplinary creative arts leader committed to an intersectional framework of social transformation that expands the influence and impact of arts and culture on racial equity, gender & justice, and environmental literacy. Working internationally across cultural, spiritual, civic and social innovation spaces, she embodies a range of roles including independent curator, cultural theologian, artist, creative industries entrepreneur, organizer, mentor and mother. Ashara is the founder at Artist As First Responder, an organization and interactive arts platform supporting BIPOC artists whose creative practices heal communities and save lives. Additionally, she is a forum curator at the Museum of the African Diaspora and also serves as Cultural Strategist for Chef Bryant Terry’s 4 Color Books, an imprint of Ten Speed Books.