With Iris Lican and Baltazar Molina
Module 3: 4 to 6 December and 8 to 10 January 2021
Where? Sintra mountains, nature and Senhora d’Azenha (Calçada da Penalva nº20 São Pedro de Sintra)
Body Soul Medicine
Ancestrality and creativity
THERAPEUTIC TRANCE
Through the practise of sensitive listening, mindfulness and embodied presence we will explore the organic language of our body: movement, voice and sound. Feeling and celebrating Body and Spirit as a multi-layered unity, we travel through the landscapes of Earth and Soul.
Each session is unique and will never again be repeated, with life music and dance, created by each person in the group, as a collective composition.
Through the practise of sensitive listening, mindfulness, authentic presence and conscious relating we explore body language, voice and sound.
Each session is a unique and unrepeatable experience, with live music created in real time.
We are inspired by the nomadic routes of the Sahara and North African ancient tribes, crossing through southwestern Europe unto the British isles. We are heirs of a legacy of dance, music and ritual and we are invited to weave through it with our individuality.
This is a week long journey, the second part of our three part Therapeutic Trance training.
It can be done by itself or as part of the whole course.
We will work in depth with eco-somatic movement and ritual trance dances, both in wild Nature as well as within the circle space.
This is a work open to men and women, with or without previous dance and movement experience. It can be lived as a self knowledge experience or it may complement the professional skills of bodyworkers, therapists, dancers and yoga practitioners.
Allow what is happening: listen, observe, act, witness. So that soil and soul may recognize and celebrate their Oneness.
«I am nomadic.
I am so very ancient. I am still walking along the deserts.
I am daughter of the desert and I have told you a thousand times but still you don’t listen. I was raised by crossed winds upon the sand, lightning, sun burning my skin.
I ate pasture without being a cow, or bull, much less a goat. Sedentary life doesn’t fascinate me.
I am a free spirit navigating through the desert, my soul is connected to the intemporality of days and nights. I have the privilege of being visited by the stars and called to the dormant reality. Painful is the awakening from the darkness, the devil sleeping under my toe nails has been witfull and just the other day I have found he made a bed in my eye lashes!!
He needs to control what my desert-filled eyes have been seeing. I do not belong to you, mediocre individuals! – I often say this in a surprising discontentment. I have made myself alone, in the long and harsh walks throughout the desert.
The Middle East belongs to me, I have created myself from it and in it I have died.
I have not made myself through religion, because my religion is the desert. I am a solitary of the path that does not appeal to vulgarity and appearance.
I have made myself with serpents blood, I have pulled myself out with panther’s jaws; like the hiena I have waited for my demons and I had the courage to be an eagle, only to see myself as my own God (even though half of my wing has been cut off).
I am nomadic, yes.
If you prefer, you may call me Desert Flower, only to season the bitterness out of your mounth.»
Maria Bethânia, Brazilian poet, songwriter and composer
PROGRAM
- The evolution of trance dances: how does ritual become folklore
- The function of trance individually and collectively
- The difference between trance dances and ecstatic dances
- Trance, dissociation and embodiment
- The stages and cycles of trance
- Body, Soul and Spirit
- Trance and trauma: the central and peripheral nervous system
- How to create safe spaces, boundaries and release
- What psychological, emotional and energetic processes may emerge from the practise of trance? Identification and support.
- Content and container: understanding the dynamic relationship between these two forces, which are necessary and inter-connected.
- Recognizing dissociation
- Catharsis: how to identify, allow, contain and support integration
- Respecting the physiology
- Amplifying motricity and expansion of consciousness
- Breathing as essential force
- Time, space and perception (Kronos and Kayros)
- Linear time and cyclical time
- Transitions as essential liminal spaces
- Movement and trance as intricate language
- Trance as common language of the sensitive being
- Xamanic trance in Europe and shamanism
- Xamanic drum healing ceremonies
- Traditional trance from the Magreb, Sahara, Gnawa, Bedoíns, Touregs,
- Egipt, Núbia, Sufi and Yorubá
- Ritual Drumming: percussion and ritual
- The ecstatic work of: J. M. Rumi, Hafiz, Rabia Balkhi, John O’Donohue, Hildegrad Bingen
- The work of Peter Levine, Bonnie Cohen, Andrea Olsen