This is a great guide to sumptuous and stunning words from some wondeful wise women ".....her meditation on high and holy places is walk into, rather than up, mountains; a caress rather than a conquer of peaks.....Often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him..... I am never not thinking about nature, because I don’t understand a way we can be honest about who we are without understanding that we are nature.... Women who write about the wild cannot easily labeled... hey are hard to pin down but for their willingness to be unladylike, to question, and to seek....."
https://www.outsideonline.com/…/women-writing-about-wild-25…
"Stand still.
The trees ahead and the bushes beside you
Are not lost.
Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful...
stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest
breathes. Listen.
It answers, I have made this place around you, If you
leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to
Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does
is lost on you, You are surely lost.
Stand still.
The forest knows Where
you are.
You must let it find you.”
David Whyte
Rites of Passage- dance and arts based leadership development programmes updated their profile picture.
"....Mentors and apprentices are partners in an ancient human dance, and one of teaching's great rewards is the daily chance it gives us to get back on the dance floor.
It is the dance of the spiraling generations, in which the old empower the young with their experience and the young empower the old with new life, reweaving the fabric of the human community as they touch and turn.”
― Parker J. Palmer
‘Once you start to awaken, no one can ever claim you again for the old patterns. Now you realise how precious your time here is. You are no longer willing to squander your essence on undertakings that do not nourish your true self; your patience grows thin with tired talk and dead language. You see through the rosters of expectation which promise you safety and the confirmation of your outer identity. Now you are impatient for growth, willing to put yourself in the way of change. You want your work to become an expression of your gift. You want your relationship to voyage beyond the pallid frontiers to where the danger of transformation dwells. You want your God to be wild and to call you to where your destiny awaits.'
~ John O'Donohue
"Dance has been my language, my strength.
In the dance I have confided my most secret thoughts and shared the inner music of all mankind.
I have danced across mountains and deserts, ancient rivers and oceans and slipped through the boundaries of time and space.
��Dance has been my freedom and my world. It has enabled me to go around, scale, bore through, batter down or ignore visible and invisible social and economic walls. ��
Dance is my medicine. ...
It is the scream which eases for awhile the terrible frustration common to all human beings who, because of race, creed or color, are "invisible". Dance is the fist with which I fight the sickening ignorance of prejudice. Instead of growing twisted like a gnarled tree inside myself, I am able to dance out my anger and my tears. ��
Dance has been my teacher, ever patiently revealing to me the dignity, beauty and strength in the cultural heritage of my people as a vital part of the great heritage of all mankind. ��
I dance not to entertain but to help people better understand each other.
Because through dance I have experienced the wordless joy of freedom, I seek it more fully now for my people and for all people everywhere..."
Pearl Primus
3 places left for this Sundays session for anyone whom want to explore using the dance to dive deep inside and how we work in this way....
I’m not sure if the 5 Rhythms dance floor is where actually where we go to practice dance, I think that’s often a safe subtext… For me the dance floor has been much more use as place to practice life (-and yes, it has certainly brought some increase in my ability to move through space with more physical prowess than I possessed before). Yet mainly I have learned an embodied way of walking through this weird wild world with less resistance, effort and meddling from the mind; a...
Continue ReadingWonderful deep dive in to dance as a rites of passage led by the inspiring and amazing Melissa Michaels at Embercombe this summer. Very happy to be assisting alongside a great team bringing her awesome and potent work to the UK.
"To dance with life and not against it, to move responsively instead of reactively, this is a way to make spirit visible in the world." Anna Halprin
Lovely to be featured in this months 5 Rhythms tribe newsletter. http://www.5rhythms.com/…/5rhythms-tribe-using-5rhythms-to…/
We can look at the map of the 5 Rhythms and see how individuals of any age can learn specific somatic skills for self awareness through the process of mindful movement:
The first rhythm: flow helps us find our feet. It teaches us to check in with ourselves internally, to receive what is really so for ourselves- thus support our growing self awareness and self knowledge as we ripen through adulthood.
The second rhythm: staccato teaches us how to express ourselves in relation t...o others and the wider world. It’s movement vocabulary is liner, clear, concise. How can we learn to act and interact cleanly, clearly and concisely; stating our needs simply and with self responsibility?
The third Rhythm: chaos we work with what the dance can teach us about ways of being with the unexpected. How we can stay with our sure-footed feet in times of great tempo when the waves of the change arise? How we can return to our breathing as a refuge as we move through whatever life is presenting us with?
In the fourth rhythm: lyrical we look at assimilating what we have learned in the earlier stages. The body is warmed up, responsive, really able to move well through the world. We find repeating patterns on the dance floor, feel at home in our place there. This correlates with the life stage of adulthood- of moving into our work in the world, mindful of what matters most.
In the fifth rhythm: stillness the tempo slow right down and we move with what is left in the body, hearing the authentic impulses to move. Both being mindful in motion and pausing for moments of sweet stillness to see how far we have come- both in the dance and in life.
Somatic awareness skills gained through dance are invaluable source of awareness we transition into adulthood. Young people are presented with what can feel a pantheon of choices as the direction that they want to take going forwards. To develop the ability to listen to our internal somatic signals is paramount in making health decisions about intimacy and in cultivating good choices in relation to relationship, substances, life situations and the myriad of other options that emerge as we transition into adulthood. Please join us in the dance...
Another world is not only possible, she's on the way and, on a quiet day, if you listen very carefully you can hear her breathe.
~ Arundhati Roy
"Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing."
Muhammad Ali
May we all go beyond the impossible into creating something else that satisfies….
Don’t just follow your dreams. You may lose them at a red light, or while wandering the trailways of transformation. Better yet, ingest and embody them, make them indistinguishable from you. Weave your most wondrous imaginings into the breath of your being."
Jeff Brown-
This work helps us embody ourselves, learning to be leaders, stepping in-in service, becoming what we believe in.
