Rituals 3 Intensive Residential workshops of Ongoing
Study
These workshops form a large part of the Movement Medicine Journey of Responsibility. They cover the 4th, 5th and 6th gateways of the Movement Medicine Mandala which are the Past, the Present and the Future. Honouring the past and taking full responsibility for your life in the present will help you to envision and co-create the future for yourself and for all our relations.
This transformational journey is designed for those who wish to find more ground, more heart and more connection to the world around them through Movement Medicine and Ritual.
Movement Medicine catalyses the deeply held desire to give ourselves wholeheartedly to our lives. To be on this path is to get real, remember our most intimate aspirations and find the strength and the courage to live them. Ritual gives us the opportunity to experience our connection to the wider web, and receive a sense of multi-dimensional support that enables us to take authority for our lives and play an active part in creating the lives we want to live.
The Course
We recommend that you follow these workshops in order but you are free to participate in one, two or all three workshops as you choose. As well as working with specific ceremonies, on each workshop you will: • Dance deeply with the physical and energetic foundations of Movement Medicine Ecstatic Dance, Trance and Shamanic Practice in order to build, strengthen and add more spice and creativity to your dance. • Learn skills for making the most of the ceremonies in each module. This will include shamanic journeying to find guidance and allies in the spirit world . • Be given creative tasks to prepare you for each module and to help you to ground the experience of the work in your day-to-day life.
Ritual
Creating Ritual that respectfully reminds us that the wider framework in which we live our lives is a blessing. Our own personal story gains a more balanced context in the eternal and archetypal context to which we also belong. In acknowledging and communicating with the unknown, we are embraced and fortified by it so that we can return to our lives to continue our offering, whatever that may be. Movement Medicine offers a ‘no nonsense’ approach to shamanic ritual that is contemporary, practical and effective.
Intent
The intention of Rituals is to continually find ways to acknowledge our challenges and our wounds, and keep moving through them into a place where we are strengthened by our experiences, not weakened by them. Our stories then become a resource rather than an excuse. Healing is an ongoing journey through the labyrinth. Ritual invites you to see beyond separation, and actively choose to take your place in the greater circle.
The S.E.E.R Process
A deep meditation on presence. You will be introduced to working with a powerful tool for cleaning up your personal history and retrieving your own life energy from it. Ya’Acov has developed the S.E.E.R process over many years of personal work including his own recapitulation process that he went through under the guidance of Victor Sanchez. It is rooted in the ancient art of soul retrieval and it seeks to give the responsibility and the power back to the dancer to be able to do this work for themselves.S.E.E.R stands for Systemic Essential Energy Retrieval and it is the most effective tool we have developed for transforming our relationship with the past.For many of us, the past is something to forget or to move on from. The S.E.E.R Process helps us to experience the past as a great support for living an empowered and creative life. By the end of the module, you will have learned and have experience of using an excellent tool for keeping your energy balanced and in harmony.In order to ground the dreams we came here to manifest and to bring the inspiration that the dance offers into the fabric of our day-to-day lives, we need energy. The S.E.E.R process releases energy from where it may be locked up in the undigested stories of our personal and ancestors’ pasts so that it is available to us in the present. We have found that this can make the crucial difference in our ability to dream and manifest the lives we came here to live.
The Movement Medicine Vision Quest
The Vision Quest is an ancient ceremony, practiced in many different cultures around the world. It can provide a strong foundation for seeing your purpose here and committing yourself to the full manifestation of this purpose in this lifetime. It is also a ceremony that helps us to take stock of our lives and refresh and nourish the dreams we are already living. Module two concentrates on the Vision Quest. After a deep preparation at home in your own life, we will begin with two further days of preparation with the group. You will then spend 48 hours alone in the beautiful landscape of South Devon, supported by a strong circle and the nature around you. It is a time to ‘cry for a vision’ and simply to allow the deepest parts of your own being to be in dialogue with the web of life around you. For those that are already following a vision, the vision quest is a more contemplative ceremony where in the presence of nature, you can strengthen what you already know and see the next steps in your journey. You will be given thorough preparation tasks before the module and there will be time at the end to ground yourself and contemplate the task of bringing your visions into form in the rest of your life.
Burial Ceremony and Long Dance Ceremony
Shamans around the world have always supported their communities to embrace the reality of our mortality. A good relationship with death brings us a calm urgency and an ever-deepening appreciation of the breath we breathe, the lives we are living, and the people we are living them with. Like any other relationship, our full attention is required. Unlike any other relationship, this is not one we can walk away from. Death is coming whether we are ready or not. In this module, you will dig and spend the night in your own grave in dialogue with a benevolent form of death. Strange or frightening as that may seem, it is one of the most practical, powerful and effective healing ceremonies we offer. As with all other modules, there will be time to prepare for the ceremony and time to integrate your discoveries.
Having asked our new friend death to give us another chance and being ‘reborn’ in the shamanic sense, we will take a rest before preparing for the Long Dance ceremony. Developed by Ya’Acov over the past 16 years, the Long Dance is an invocation and a direct experience of our connection to all of life. The ceremony supports us to open our hearts and to see our own lives, healing and hopes in the wider context of relationship to our ancestors, culture, environment, and the spirit that moves through all things. We will dance through the night in celebration of life, embodying our prayers for ourselves, our families, communities and for all our relations.
Before we complete our journey, we will have time to integrate and set out our intentions for the next steps on the magical mystery tour that is the adventure of life!
