Maya Ward

ONLY AVAILABLE FOR PLUNGE ALUMNI

Friday mornings 10.00am-12.00 midday Australian Eastern Standard Time

February 6 - April 24 with no session on Good Friday

This eleven week course is for those wishing to continue this practice with an experienced, committed cohort.

Strumming the Sinews of Soul: Intimacy with Body. 

This will be an encounter with our sensitive animal body, our first and closest dwelling-place. We will be meeting the sense organs; skin, nose (lungs), tongue, ears, eyes, heart and belly, as well as fascia/interstitium, the vehicle for chi/qi, and also those places where memory and tension

This course will explore how tending the body increases our sensitivity and thus enables enhanced felt sense.

We will experience how our diverse experiences, when shared, infuse and enhance our individual experience, increasing our empathic capacity.

Over the last year I’ve been doing more research into the body and how it is understood in various cultures. This sits alongside my interest and practice in qi gung, yoga and contact improvisation. You will be invited to bring your interests and knowledge to our process of deepening into intimacy and conversation with the body.

And while the body is the focus, of course it is always the place between that speaks, the relational process - the body is always in relation to all, so other animacies and presences will naturally be attended to as part of this process.

The rightness of this direction feels supported by synchronicity: it delights me that just this morning I discovered this new episode of the telepathy tapes that explores many of these themes. 

Investment

Earlybird prices if signed up by January 25

Concession        $400 + $20

Part-time income   $500 + $20

Full-time income.   $600 + $20

scholarship price. $100 + $20

The plus $20 will go to the Gay’wu group of women

Price will increase by $50 after Jan 25

Payment plans are possible - enquire to me direct.

Through the Diving Deeper we will extend further in these ways:

• Encounter the depth, beauty and complexity of ecological systems through tangible embodied practices 
• Experience, through powerful creative practices, the invitation into an exquisite sense of belonging, participation, and flow: the world of co-becoming
• Grow our creative capacity, developing skills and mastery in words and other art forms
• Embed nourishing practices of connection and service to the more-than-human realms, integrating them into daily life
• Learn about the long-buried but re-emerging practice of depth perception, its diverse and intercultural roots within ancient spiritual traditions, Western and Eastern philosophies, indigenous ways of knowing, somatics, neuroscience and more, with online resources of focussed readings and audio links.
• Be astonished by the beauty and wisdom of our human companions, and rejoice in the sacredness and vitality of words spoken as offerings to the aliveness we are entangled within
• Gain courage and confidence to share our imaginal and spiritual unfurling with the world

These times are asking us to step into more life-affirming, somatically aware and interconnected knowing. In trusting the wisdom and holding of the alive world, combined with the support of a community of practitioners, this course will strengthen our capacity to make positive change. 

The course will include aspects of a sangha (the Buddhist term for a spiritual community) and a writers group/creative support community. But the core of it will be body practices, meditations and writing as a way to meet the more-than-human world. This will be a two-hour gathering once a week, plus optional readings and projects.

Through various creative and embodiment processes we will experience the aliveness everywhere with increased intimacy, animacy and attunement.

We will do this in a way that is psychologically supportive, artistically and intellectually extending, spiritually expansive and somatically grounding and integrating. The process will also include acts of service, giving back to that which nourishes us so generously.

Underpinned by values of generosity, humility, truthfulness, beauty, compassion and self-compassion, patience, and reciprocity, this course is also designed to be a fundraiser for some of our First Nations elders, the Gay’wu group of women, whose book, Songspirals, has been core to the development of the Co-becoming work. $20 from each place will go direct to them.

The Background to the Co-becoming Plunge

SOMATICS

Core to this work is cultivating body awareness; energies, sensuality, pleasure and liveliness, and how this facilitates presence within the bodies of the more-than-human world. There is rich paradox in this endeavour: through body awareness we also become more attuned to that which has non-physical body – whether we call this the imaginal, the spirit world, the animist presence of all things.

Incorporating lessons from many modalities, this work is informed by body-mind practices including hatha yoga, chi gung, contact improvisation and ecstatic dance, Zen meditation, Body-Mind Centring.

PSYCHOLOGY

Focussing, process psychology, various Jungian-inspired practices, the role of trauma in culture and how this impacts our somatic experience – these are lenses to support this deep individual and community work.

PHILOSOPHY/THEOLOGY

The Co-becoming Plunge will accessibly present some of the wealth of our intellectual and spiritual history and demystify fuzzy mysticism, while deeply honouring the mystery. The course will include content influenced by Taoism, Buddhism, Tantric Hinduism, Deep Ecology, Neoplatonism, Romanticism, Feminism and Indigenous metaphysics, as well as exciting developments in neuroscience, biology and botany. We will dive deep into the experience of the Imaginal – the co-creative edge between matter and spirit, the place where all is alive and all words matter, the beautiful, powerful realm humans have long visited, the place hidden inside the old European term “faerie”, (a word derived from the ancient term fari – to speak), a place that is correlate with Aboriginal Dreaming.

The co-becoming work was consolidated during teaching the course ‘Acknowledging Country’. By bringing a spiritual, somatic and intellectual understanding of the ethical dilemma of living on stolen lands, that course sought to deepen into the challenge First Nations people have set us – to properly respect Country, and allow ourselves to be transformed by an authentic relationship with this alive and listening Earth. Indigenous philosophers and teachers who have inspired this work include Bill Neidje, Mowaljarlai, the Gay’wu group of women, Tyson Yunkaporta, Max Harrison, MK Turner, and Ian Hunter from Australia, and Martin Prechtel from Guatemala/New Mexico.

The course also draws from European mystical and Neoplatonic philosophers including Goethe, Heidegger, Jung, Hillman and Stephen Buhner. The Plunge integrates what I’ve learned from my studies with philosophers and meditation and somatic practitioners including Josh Schrei, David Abram, Bill Plotkin, JF Martel, Freya Mathews, Jon Young, Tom Cheetham and Zen Buddhists Susan Murphy Roshi, Junpo Denis Kelly, and Corey Hess.

ARTISTIC/POETIC PRACTICE

Creating and participating with the beautiful is a core human experience, one that can transform poverties of all kinds into dignity and richness. Beauty is often marginalised within the techno-capitalist worldview, yet it is an essential part of a human and nature-centred activism. Humble yet archetypal, storyful, unfashionable and soulful – these are ways of being to work with, speak with and create with the alive world. Honouring beauty herself, beauty as an alive, animate force, will be part of this work. Creating form will be a powerful and somatic act to ground our learning.

So while developing skills and mastery in words or other artforms may be an outcome and be personally satisfying, this will be understood as a natural outcome arising from our honouring of life, and experienced as a gift to all of us, and to the whole.

SERVICE

From care for our bodies, nourishing others, tending the green ones, living lightly, random acts of kindness – this is the natural inclination of the connected soul. We will share ways in which we strengthen community bonds and feed the reciprocal flows.

About the facilitator

Maya has many years of experience as a writing teacher, facilitator, public speaker and retreat and festival organiser. Her passion for over 30 years has been to deepen ecological awareness, belonging and connection to place through diverse creative practices. Her PhD in Creative Writing explored the embodied experience of the alive world, otherwise known as the archetypal or imaginal realm. Her research ranged across neuroscience, somatics, psychology and shamanistic metaphysics. She has a Masters in Education (Social Ecology) with undergraduate studies in Architecture and Landscape Architecture.

Her memoir The Comfort of Water: A River Pilgrimage, published by Transit Lounge, is an account of her 21-day journey from the sea to the source of the Yarra River, following the length of a Wurundjeri Songline. This book has been on the curriculum in universities around Australia, and was shortlisted by the State Library for the 2012 Year of Reading Award. Her writing and poetry has also been featured in a variety of publications, including a chapter in the book series Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, edited by Robin Wall Kimmerer and others.

Currently she lives on the banks of the Yarra in the mountain village of Warburton, in the beautiful Country of the Wurundjeri people. In this place she continues her learning as a pilgrim, walking the forest and river paths, and negotiates with the birds for a share of the food forest she plants and tends.