Moving As Listening, Moving As Creating

Listening invites a pause.

Stillness becomes a resource.

Creating is the movement.

Stillness creates space to hear our soul’s call, and as we rush about in an ever-increasing technological haze our capacity to listen, deeply listen, is compromised.  Slowing down and moving into our bodies through the practice of bridging the visible with the invisible asks us to live in depth, going deeper into the land of the sacred, the place where our intuition can guide us. This then becomes the space we need to listen, to hear, to respond to our soul’s call for healing. Explicit in this movement practice is a bridge between worlds that challenges the distance we have travelled away from ourselves and puts out the call to come home to our moving bodies, becoming the space we need to listen, to hear, and to move in response to the wisdom of the moving body.

We experience the world through our bodies. But we have abandoned the wisdom alive and waiting for us in our bodies. Our senses have become dulled, our feelings a distant memory and our capacity to relate to our lives through our bodies deeply diminished. Moving with awareness, moving with attention to rising impulses grows our capacity to be in authentic relationship with who we are, making us available to be in relationship with who you are.

Listening, tasting, touching, feeling, thinking, smelling are part of our sensate experience of the world. They are rarely singular sensations. Our smelling often involves tasting, our listening often involves feeling, our touching often involves heightened awareness of something outside of ourselves (thought) yet too many times we separate and become singular in our naming of what we notice. This happens in the sensate world and it happens in the ways in which we attend to sensation, impulse, and feelings in our bodies. Too often we define our world in terms of polarity, either/or, this or that and create a battleground on which to learn about ourselves, interact with each other and ascribe meaning to the world. No one just breathes out. No one just breathes in. It is the relationship between the inbreath and the outbreath that creates a third thing, a something we call life. As we drop into the EXPERIENCE of our moving bodies, a bridge begins to build that is made up of something else, creating a different possibility that includes, discovers the ‘and’ of life, collaborates, and begins to participate with an emerging process.

Listen to what you taste, taste what you smell, smell what you see, see what you touch and touch with thoughtful awareness. Allow all your senses to be immersed in the process of attending to what emerges. Surrender to following the impulse rather than anticipating it or racing ahead or imposing what you think is the better idea. Allow yourself to be revealed. What do you actually see looking within? What do you taste? What is your scent? What are you listening for? What do you hear? How do you feel? What thought thread are you following?

Moving with awareness is inclusive. It does not separate out this or that. It is a surrender to what is arising in the moment. As our awareness grows and includes, so does our capacity to immerse ourselves in the experience of this present moment creating itself for us. There is a moment when we fall just a breath behind an impulse or thought, allowing ourselves to be surprised, to be flung about, to be expressed. Facing inwards, we move out. We follow a single impulse and let it evolve without knowing what, when or how it will change or where it might go. We simply follow and allow. No one has to call the past forward nor can we live in the future. If there is healing to be done, it happens in the present moment.   If there are feelings to be felt, this happens in the present moment. If your body calls the past forward, it is happening in this present moment. If you are projecting into the future, it is happening in this present moment.

This moment, authentically and truly, is your embodied experience of life. As movement rises and passes away, a bridge begins to build between your inner experience and your outer expression. Taking your awareness with you every gesture, every breath, every step of the way, cultivate curiosity without knowing, surrender without imposing, follow without anticipating and experience your life as a revelation.

Summer Solstice Ripening                                                                                                                

An Intentional Creativity and Movement Intensive                                                                

With Cassielle Bull, MA, BC-DTR                                                                                                  

June 18^th: 3pm-6pm; June 19^th– 21^st: 11am-6pm                                                            

Maacama Retreat Center, Calistoga, CA

The heat of the summer is on us with slow moving water, languid evenings and a sense that all is right with the world. The garden has been planted and tended and the first of the beans are in, the apricots and cherries have come and gone and the strawberries continue to brighten our table with their gem-like colors.

What in you has been planted and tended? What parts of yourself have pushed through the dark earth and are reaching towards the sun, perhaps already fruiting and beginning to ripen? Are you ready to build a bridge between the visible and invisible through the moving of your authentic selves in creative action?

Integrating authentic movement (Body Visible/Body Invisible) with Intentional Creativity we will follow the stories held in our bones. Listening with all our senses, dropping into moving with the emerging impulses, we follow this movement thread and then another, weaving our way through the strands of impulse. The stories begin to unravel, begin to reveal their secrets until we are dropped into the center of our being/moving body.

With authentic movement (BVBI) as the basis for our creative explorations, we will explore the wisdom of our moving bodies in images through intentional creativity – creating an image of what is ripening in us in layers as they are revealed. As part of this intensive, we will also be making a mask of our own face following the inquiry of what wants to be revealed when we take off our masks and see. This will be integrated into our painting and our movement.

No previous experience in movement, painting or mask making is required. We will start at the beginning, always.

Cost: $420.00 includes lunch for June 19, 20, 21, art and mask making supplies (please bring your own brushes if you have them).

If you are interested in spending the night at the retreat center, there is an additional cost.

Bunk house: Shared $40.00/night

Deeper Waters: Single or double with shared outdoor shower and bathroom: $60.00/night

Motel 4: Shared $40.00/night

To register please go to: http://www.leapnow.org/bodyvisible/special events

BodyVisible/BodyInvisible                                                                                                      

Body Visible/Body Invisible (BVBI), is a creative, moving practice deeply rooted in an exploration of energetic phenomenon using authentic movement, art/creativity, soul journaling and the energy of the collective to understand how energy moves through the body to catalyze transformative change in our lives. It is experienced through following rising impulses experienced in the body, letting these impulses direct our movement as we explore the depths, complexities and creativity of our moving body. Teaching at the interface between the visible (that which we can touch) and invisible realms, participants explore how the wisdom of the moving body can deepen their work as therapists, teachers, artists, parents, and evolving human beings.

Intentional Creativity                                                                                                                

Who lives in here? ~ Sue Hoya Sellars

What are you here to cause and create? ~ Shiloh Sophia

What ancient knowing lives within these hands? ~ Lenore Thomas Straus

The words of these three amazing women direct our attention to the depth and layers of intentional creativity. Through creative inquiry our desires, our longing, our deep wounds and the complexities of our nature begin to take shape and come into form on a canvas. Using guided imagery, deep listening to what wants to emerge through words and developing our own symbolic language we become students of our own rising creativity.