More Than Meets the Eye, a Weekend Retreat:
Detailed Description
For those of you who have not attended one of our weekend retreats, let us tell you a bit about them! During your stay here you will use drawing and focusing* as a spiritual practice to slow down, listen deeply, and find lost parts of yourself. This is a wonderful antidote to the fast pace and urgent demands of everyday life. Here there is no right and wrong, everything is welcomed just as it is, and there is room to play. As always you need no focusing background and you need not be a professional visual artist. Artists of all professions are welcome! It is not about making pretty pictures. It’s about coming fully alive!
Here are some of the things you will experience:
Drawing into the Darkness, and Drawing into the Light:
We invite you to be part of a living metaphor, experiencing the miracle of birth, life, death, and rebirth as we draw together. We gather at dusk in the studio and begin drawing into the darkness. Watch your strategies for control as everything around you disappears and you are left in the not knowing. Stay with the experiences and sensations that come. Notice how you are as it grows darker. Perhaps you will discover a new way to navigate in there. You might let go of doing and experience allowing, or relax into meaninglessness. See what it is like to be here, now, where there are no stories. Then early the next day begin anew, in the dark. Draw until the dawn comes, and experience rebirth into the world of forms. Feel the seduction of color and shape as you reach for things you can see. See your own hands drawing and discover your own edges. Revel in the ever-changing flow of skin and bone, leaf and creepy crawly, sky and ocean, things with beginnings and endings. Try not to forget the world of the unseen reality from which you just emerged, the infinite formlessness in which you once swam, that which never changes, that which is always there. Bring it with you, and experience heaven on earth. Let spirit and body dance together, in this lifetime! Why wait???
Blind drawing, drawing from energy centers, transformational drawings:
Learning to stay in the body’s experience and short-circuiting the brain by closing our eyes, we isolate the muscles of our intuition. We resonate felt sense to mark on the page, inside to outside, and outside to inside. The image goes directly from hand and body to paper and back again, creating a dialogue that reveals what is not already known, what is fresh.
Drawing without Materials:
All distractions are removed and the process is slowed down to a crawl. Notice places you have rushed past and never experienced: approaching the paper, almost there, touching down for the first time, leaving the surface, being the paper as it receives the first touch, as the marks go deeper and the paper breathes. Moving slowly without the distraction of materials, you can connect with the source material, Nothing waiting to become Something.
Collaborative Drawing:
Some things we will play with while drawing collaboratively: letting go of ownership - being in relationship - noticing the difference between a response and a reaction - not being in the drivers seat so you can look out the window - staying in dialogue with the image - not planning ahead - exercising group mind - not being responsible for the whole of it - going places you could never go alone.
Responding to the drawings:
We spend time allowing ourselves to experience how it is for each of us with different drawings. We listen deeply so that we can hear both the conscious intent and the unconscious intent as it shows up in the work. We interact with the imagery. We never critique or analyze, we simply speak the truth of our personal relationship to a drawing. We use focusing sessions to take us deeper into the metaphors that arise.
Kundalini Yoga and Mantra with Siri Bani Kaur and Gurusangat Singh:
Regular visitors at Geryunant, Gurusanghat Singh and Siri Bani Kaur are extraordinary Artists as well as Kundalini teachers. They will lead us in a series of Kundalini Yoga Kriyas and mantras developed to transform old patterns into new pathways for growth.
*for more info on focusing go to www.focusing.org
