GUEST TEACHERS
Kait Singley
Polina Tšerkassova
Taya Mâ Shere
Amidst the Blessing of the Ancestors: Sound, Soma and Rooting in Positive Resource
Taya Mâ Shere
Friday, February 5 10am-12pm Pacific Time
Join Taya Mâ Shere for an exploration into the rich world of ancestral connections as a source of healing and support. Taya Mâ will guide us in a container of chant and somatic honoring, as we explore the fertile soils of working with ancestors of family lineage and honoring ancestors of place, identity and spiritual traditions. We will learn ways in which honoring ancestors can be an important, and empowering aspect of personal and communal healing. This exploration is crafted to be accessible for those new to considering ancestors, and for folks across spiritual paths or traditions.
In this two hour class you will:
- Explore blessings available through cultivating relationship with loving and wise ancestors.
- Receive practices for connecting, honoring and relating with lineage ancestors.
- Learn the importance of creating boundaries in ancestral realms.
- Engage sound and soma as pathways for healing and connection
About Taya Mâ Shere
Taya Mâ Shere plays passionately in realms of transformative ritual, embodied vocalization and ancestral reverence. She is co-founder of Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute, co-author of The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Visions of Jewish Women’s Spiritual Leadership, and is Assistant Professor of Organic Multireligious Ritual at Starr King School for the Ministry, training emergent clergy across faith traditions. Taya Mâ teaches Ancestral Lineage Healing, offering sessions virtually and workshops world-wide. She co-leads Makam Shekhina multireligious Jewish & Sufi community and co-founded Al Kahina Journeys. Taya Mâ is a Somatic Experiencing practitioner and offers online courses including Embodied Presence, Jewish Ancestral Healing and Pleasure as Prayer through Kohenet Virtual Temple, an online school open to all. Taya Mâ’s Hebrew Goddess chant albums — This Bliss, Wild Earth Shebrew, Halluyah All Night and Torah Tantrika — have been heralded as “cutting-edge mystic medicine music.”www.taya.ma @ravkohenet
Mindful Erotic Embodiment
Kait Singley
Friday, January 22 10am-12noon Pacific Time
Kait holds a safe and sacred space for us to explore and cultivate our relationship to erotic energy as a vital life force, as it begins within each of us as individuals.
Your primary and longest erotic relationship will always be with yourself. We can’t accurately relate to anyone else without being oriented in and responsible for our own bodies first. So this is where we begin - by getting to know our own sensations, impulses, responses and deeper desires. We explore what our own bodies have to say, what we need, how we work and what truly works for us, to be able to open to fulfilling connections.
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.
Eros isn’t just about sexuality. We are cultivating a greater connection with the animating force of life itself from the inside out. When you fully and shamelessly embody your true nature, your relationships with humans as well as the living world will conspire toward more harmony, greater cohesion and greater possibilities than we could ever conceive of alone. Our deepest longings are a primary ingredient in healing the wounds of separation and isolation.
Bringing intention and presence to your own body with breath, touch, movement and sound, can turn “self pleasure” into a ceremony for massive healing and empowerment. Any erotic experience can be a place of deep medicine to heal wounds that have led to disconnection and excess suffering. We begin with sensing into safety, and only then do we open toward the great possibilities of connection and creation.
This class is an intro level to somatic self exploration. Participation in guided exercises is based on your own level of comfort and desire. We will remain clothed and video-appropriate, though you’re always welcome to be off-video.
In this 2-hour class, you will:
- Explore your own visceral sense of Eros as a source of connection & creation
- Play fun & interactive games to explore desire and pleasure - all optional and with variations to match your comfort and consent
- Be introduced to MEE Time Exercises - Mindful Erotic Embodiment for solo exploration
- Be guided in 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.
About Kait Singley
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
Kait immediately put me at ease with her open, non-judgmental, and grounded presence. It was such a relief to know that almost everyone has issues in this area. She has “seen it all” and helped so many people. Kait has an extraordinary combination of integrity and compassion, which helped me feel safe and trusting right away. Her warmth and friendliness throughout our sessions as well as her deeply respectful and sensitive approach has helped me experience an openness, confidence, and playfulness towards sexuality I never had access to before. I can’t recommend her highly enough and I trust her with my dearest friends.”
~Lisa F, NYC
"Kait’s combination of loving kindness, skill and wisdom in helping me to recover parts of my life and vitality that have been lost or deeply buried was profoundly transformative for me. I directly credit her work with me in allowing me to experience real intimacy with a woman for the first time in almost 30 years. Perhaps more important, I was able to learn much more about how to experience and articulate my own feelings, bodily states, wishes and desires. Working with Kait was like going to a great school to learn how to be a better human, much more rooted in the truth."
~Michael, Berkeley, Ca
The Art of Soul-Centered Storytelling
Polina Tšerkassova
Friday, January 29 10am-12noon Pacific Time
With Polina Tšerkassova we have the opportunity to travel to northeastern Europe to immerse ourselves in traditional and modern stories and fairy tales gathered from her extensive travels. Polina will be sharing her unique soul-centered approach to storytelling combining music and unique instruments from all over the world. She has studied and played with Sufi mystics and is trained in Turkish Music therapy. Polina is a professional storyteller coming from the lineage of storytellers. She published several audiobooks with storytelling and she is often invited to share her stories and views on different topics in TV shows, radio and printed media. In her approach to soul-centered storytelling Polina likes to raise awareness of the responsibility the storyteller carries and the art of Deep Listening.
In this 2-hour class, you will:
- Receive three love stories from the rich fabrics of the North European traditions (Estonian, Siberian Russian, Celtic)
- Dive into the soul-centered approach to storytelling
- Discover the role and the responsibility of the storyteller in the modern world
- Explore the concept and levels of Deep Listening
- Learn various techniques of Deep Listening to enhance your relationships with yourself and with others
- Listen to various rare musical instruments used in traditional music therapy
About Polina Tšerkassova
Polina comes to us from the faraway lands of Estonia where she is a Ph.D. candidate and lecturer in the field of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Through her research, she examines the relationships between sound, experience, music, the creative process, and contemporary religious practices. She is a gifted and embodied storyteller, a masterful musician, a social activist, and a cultural anthropologist. She has traveled extensively around the world performing and studying and learning about cultures and communities. Polina has produced and recorded several storytelling albums in three languages and has appeared as a guest on the world storytelling cafe. As a professional storyteller, Polina composes fairy tales for kids and adults and tells them while playing the instruments of the regions. Some of the rare and unique instruments we may get to experience include the birbyne, rebab, setar, kalimba, santur or the hurdy-gurdy.
“I don’t know another person who would leave the same impression as Polina and her stories do. It is a gentle and strong mixture of awe and sweet vulnerability. As if your soul was taken out, cleansed and placed back or made whole again. This is abashment and inner silence. Gratitude and humbleness.” - Terje
“It doesn’t matter if there are ten or five hundred and ten people listening to Polina and her stories - she somehow manages to look into everyone’s heartland touch everyone’s soul.” - Risto
“I haven’t been in any contact with my father for the last eight years. But after attending a storytelling session with Polina, I took out my phone on the way home and called my Dad. He was happy to hear me and since then we fixed our relationship.” - Jaan
“A week ago my father passed and I was feeling gloomy and lonely. Besides it was lockdown time then. I started listening to Polina’s storytelling audiobooks and finally they were playing on repeat for several days. I felt empowered again, found peace, trust and faith. Gratitude from all of my heart.” - Kristina
“I didn’t know what to expect and came to Polina’s storytelling live concert without knowing much about her and believing that stories are for kids. I cried and laughed, and now I try to attend all of her perfomances in my town and her online events.” - Alex
“She makes men cry, that’s the coolest thing.” - Estonian Newspaper Aripäev