Where: Zoom
When: Tuesday evenings 5:30-7 PM PST
Winter Session - We will meet: Dec 2, Dec 9th, Dec 16, Jan 6, Jan 13, Jan 20th
What if we dreamed again with the earth? What life would grow?
1. Dreaming with Earth
In these times, our dreaming is becoming more and more uprooted - we dream with instagram, with the cityscape, or we let AI dream for us. The images we surround ourselves with matter. What we dream WITH matters. It is the beginning of what we create through our actions - the seed of our actions. A sleeping seed dreams the whole winter with the earth before growing into her physical form.
What if we planted our psyche back into land and allowed ourselves to be moved by something bigger than ourselves? Would our existence feed life? Would we leave flourishing in our wake?
In this container, we will explore practices that help us open to hear the voices of earth and the more than human - that help us to seek vision beyond ourselves and rooted in the living world.
Sofia Jain-Schlaepfer
2. The Wheel of Creativity
Every cycle around the seasons is a cycle of creativity in nature. If we look at a plant, she begins as a seed in a fruit. She releases from her mother plant, and spends the whole winter dreaming with the earth, before sending out a root. Then she rises up into the seen material world. A vitality sends a rush of growth upward. She flowers her seen beauty to the world. Then she grows strong inside to carry her fruit. And finally she creates seeds, to feed the next dream.
It is in this way that creativity can be in our lives and our projects; first going below the ground, finding vision in the mystery, and then giving that dream voice and expression in embodied reality.
There are different places we can get stuck in this creative cycle, whether it is a trouble leaning into the grief and composting into the ground, or avoiding the stillness required to receive a dream, or cutting off the vitality that lets our vision spring into embodiment. In Western culture there is an ideal to always be flowering, which can keep the creative cycle stuck.
In this container, we will explore the creative cycle that nature teaches us and how to keep it flowing, especially making space for letting go and opening to the Dreamtime.
Sofia Jain-Schlaepfer
3. Remembering our
Human Beauty-Making
What if beauty is actually important?
Beauty is hardly definable. Perhaps it is something that make tears leap, and washes the film over our eyes. Something that pulls our centre of gravity right back into alignment with life, that drops our energy from our heads into our hearts, filling it until it breaks open to take in the world.
Beauty can have a profound effect on our joy of being alive. Truly it is beauty - the wash of the sunrise, the tastes of life - more than facts that makes getting up in the morning delightful. Just as we are fed by the beauty of earth, we can feed the life around us by our beauty making. As humans, we have an extraordinary capacity for creating beauty with our dexterous fingers and profound imagination, but we have been straying from these capacities on our quest for efficiency, linearity, and objectivity. How would we move differently in the world if we brought beauty back into the way we express artistically, the way we build our houses, cared for our children, and build relationship with our food?
In this container we will lean into our beauty making, not just for ourselves, but for the ways it feeds the rest of the living world.
Sofia Jain-Schlaepfer
We all have the innate capacity to create beauty, to receive vision, to dream, to hear the more-than-human living world speak, to be in conversation with the mysterious. The intention of this container is to:
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Create a space for these capacities to continue to unfold and grow
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Inspire and broaden our repertoire of ways of connecting
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Create a routine and a group to hold us accountable to dedicating time to these practices
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Be in a collective, which naturally amplifies our experience
Examples of what we might do:
Create an etching in the earth as an offering of beauty to a place.
While in the presence of a plant, listen to a recording that opens all of your senses to receive who that plant is and what they are communicating.
Connect to our impulse of expression through drawing practices.
Share the grief of what inhibits our expression.
Go on a deep imagination journey, wandering towards what the soil beneath us is asking to express through us.
Listen to the night dreams we encounter, and the embodiment they move us towards.
Some Approaches
We Will Take
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Writing, Poetry, Visual Arts
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Dreamwork
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Deep imagery journeying
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Wanders in nature
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Tending grief
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Deepening relationship with the Mystery
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Visionary art creation
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Leaning into the creative cycle
About the Facilitator:
Sofia Jain
Sofia is a biologist turned mystic. An awakener of wild seeds, wild dreams in people and places. Wild as in without exile of the weeds, without taming voice, grief, rivers, without planting in rows. Wild as in lands unowned, but in which we are planted. Sofia tends to the living seed capsules of plants across the continent. Along the way she also replant people with knowledge of bird language, baskets, hide tanning and other manners of being in collaboration with land. She tends to the wild seed sleeping in people, helping remove the fences around voice, creativity, and full feeling. She paint portraits of peoples inner gifts, and our interrelationship with Wild Others, planting images in psyches that may grow us towards a more alive world.
Sofia a vibrant artist, musician and writer. She has a MSc in Biology, has completed a 2 year long nature connection immersion with Wisdom of the Earth, and has trained in many modalities of soul work (Dream Tending, Grief Ritual Leadership, Internal Family Systems, Deep Imagery).
"By trying to feed the Holy in Nature the fruit of beauty from the tree of memory of our Indigenous Souls, grown in the composted failures of our past need to conquer, watered by the tears of cultural grief, we might become ancestors worth descending from and possibly grow a place of hope for a time beyond our own"
~Martin Prechtel
Sofia Jain-Schlaepfer
Format
Six 1.5h Zoom Call
- Receive inspiration
- Participate in expression
- Share
Weekly Wanders
Receive weekly invitations and practices to bring into nature, to help be in communication with the wild.
You will get a recoding to help guide you and bring you into a state of receptivity.
Community
Connect to a community to amplify your experience. Offer your gifts and receive those of others.
Our guild will connect over zoom and also have a group chat to share our experiences.
Cost
Cost for 2 months:
$186 early bird (until Nov 23rd)
$200 after Nov 23rd
I would love anyone who wants to participate, to do so, so reach out if the cost is a barrier.
