Women Embodied: Live 2017

Friends, I’m thrilled to invite you to this year’s magnificent manifestation of the one of a kind and once-a-year training program and women’s circle I am delighted to facilitate:

Women Embodied
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Also known as WE. This year I’ve been tempted to change it to WOWE: Women of Wisdom Embodied (wowie!) :) Instead of transitioning to an online-only version, I’ve transformed the live group into a circle that will be even more deeply satisfying for me and I hope for you too!

The short and simple details are here:

We will kick it all off with a very special gathering on Saturday, February 11th at 4pm at my home where we’ll have a chance to meet one another, to share poems, food, wine, and connect with each other. Of course, this is not any regular party, but a curated afternoon of fun and authentic connecting. Plus food and wine. It’s going to be awesome.

We (me plus 22 amazing women) will meet Monday nights 6:45-9pm at Vitalize in Sugarhouse from February 13th to May 22.

We will have 2 powerful retreat days at Vitalize: Sunday February 19, 12:30-5:30 and Saturday April 15, 12:30-5:30. (I’ve made them mid-day so though it’s a retreat day, you still have your morning and evening free. Yay!)

We will have a special outdoor retreat day + ritual on Saturday, May 20th, location TBA.

 

As usual, tuition includes all of the above plus some special gifts, which will include at least 2 books. Plus an online course home where you’ll have access to all recorded classes and readings. These are rich resources you can return to anytime you like.

We’ll also have a very special guest teacher for at least one night in March.

All in all, it’s going to be the most kick-ass, supportive, amazing Women Embodied I’ve offered yet. I’m going all out. All in. And I hope you’ll join me.

One more new thing this year: For new participants, a prerequisite is required for your application to be considered. You must have attended a course or workshop with me and/or Carl during the past 4 years to receive an application. Contact me to make sure you’ve met the prerequisite requirements if you’re unclear. If you’d like to make the prerequisite soon, you can attend our Nourishing Inner Being retreat on Dec. 3rd.

One last new thing: I will prioritize giving space to the women who want to commit to participating as fully as possible. I know sometimes travels come up or you might need to miss a few classes, but I’m hoping you’ll be as fully IN with me as I commit to being with you. I’ll be asking you to really show up.

Cost is $1700

Past attendees save $200. If you pay all at once you’ll save another $100. (So for you, my beloved Women Embodied participants of years past, that’s $1400 when paid at once or $1500 on a payment plan.)

Payment plan available: A nonrefundable $500 deposit is due now to reserve your spot. The next $500 is due January 1. And the final $500 due March 1. Please understand that if you commit to taking one of the spots in the class, you are responsible for full tuition whether you attend all classes and retreats or not. Kind of like registering for a college class. Or buying a concert ticket. Claim a spot and it’s all yours. I want you to be all IN!

I am also offering one scholarship spot for $700, with a flexible payment plan available. Contact me if you’d like to be considered for the scholarship.

Register Right Here


Payment Options



 

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More details for the enthusiastic readers:

I’m so damn excited for this year’s class!

I’m envisioning it as an Embodied Love Warrior Training.

A Training Camp for Ordinary Bodhisattvas.

A super fun, powerfully impactful women’s circle with a wise and kickass curriculum.

It will include powerful retreats, somatic practices, meditation, chocolate, a poetic dinner party, a dash of writing, brain training, great reads, authentic conversation, powerful movement lessons, deep listening, poetry, and love. While as ever I will emphasize the cultivation of “less effort and more pleasure,” when we’re authentically deepening our cultivation of presence, of courage, of self-reflection, and when we are committed to becoming more fully embodied and awake, we are likely to discover our edges and our blind spots, and we’ll be invited to lean into our discomfort and our tendencies to hide, while continuing to stay engaged in the work so we can come out the other side more fully ourselves, more fully in our integrity, more fully empowered to live a life of love, courage, beauty, and benefit.

Each week we’ll move and we’ll be still. We’ll meditate. We’ll courageously listen to our inner lives, our bodies, each other, and our world. We’ll show up. We’ll share ourselves. We’ll laugh and we’ll cry. We’ll expand our circle of compassion, starting right where we are, with ourselves, and growing to include more and more of our world. And we’re going to have fun along the way.

We begin with self-compassion. Embodying maitri is our foundation. But we can’t stop with ourselves….We must add to our self-compassion the practice of authentic self-reflection and reflecting honestly on how we show up in the greater world. There’s an invitation to take your practice beyond your own heart, body, and mind and out into the world in ways that are meaningful for you. (No one gets to judge your way of engaging – that’s entirely up to you.)

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We will be training to cultivate a grounded, centered, flexible, upright, fully embodied presence, a warm heart capable of vast courage and deep tenderness, a clear mind and a sense of spacious awareness, and a sense of joy, gratitude, and humor to sustain us through it all.

Feldenkrais lessons will help you grow a new and deeper relationship with your embodied self, your creativity, your capacity for attentional flexibility, and your sense of creative possibility. And of course, with the powerful practice of slowing down.

Embodied meditation practice will support you in growing a sense of stable presence, a warm heart and mind that can welcome anything. Embodied meditation will help you to grow stability like a mountain, spaciousness like the sky, warmth like the sun. The world needs people who can embody such qualities.

Poetry woven throughout our gatherings brings beauty, poignant insight, and touches our deepest hearts.

A non-hierarchical community circle offers the power and beauty of authentic human connection, solace, laughter, hugs, powerful wisdom, tears, deep care, and love.

Reading excellent books together buoys our spirits and allows us to relate to specific wisdom in the field between us.

 

Dark times call for bright new visions of the world we want to inhabit.  We must be the change we wish to see. And the means we use must embody the end we are seeking. If we want freedom and respect for all, we must free and respect ourselves and others. If we want a world of beauty, kindness, dancing, and poetry, we must notice and nurture beauty, embody kindness, dance and read poetry now. The world is asking for our wholehearted participation and our clarity about what we deeply care about. As Alice Walker wrote, “What we love can be saved.”

I’m inspired by this quote from Terry Tempest Williams:

Let us pause and listen and gather our strength with grace and move forward like water in all its manifestation: flat water, white water, rapids and eddies, and flood this country with an integrity of purpose and patience and persistence capable of cracking stone.

 

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I invite you to join me for more than a course. For a powerful and one-of-a-kind community experience.

 

Here’s the invitation from my heart:

In Women Embodied

I invite you to join me

to embody living ancient wisdom

to grow courageous intimacy with your life

to practice listening deeply

to plant and nurture beautiful seeds

to make room for the full range of your capacity to feel: grief and praise and everything in between

to bow deeply to what is and to rise to your full uprightness, without apology

to be still, silent, and spacious

to move with clarity, flexibility, integrity, and pleasure

to tune to the living intelligence humming in everything, including every cell in your body

to grow your grounded, clear-eyed warmth

to live intentionally with the wish to benefit others and all of life

to play and to laugh (a lot)

to powerfully deepen your inner and outer trust

to grow your willingness to abide in not-knowing

to inhabit your bones

to revel in paradox

to empower your hara and heart as a powerful foundation for a clear head

to free the genius hiding behind your wounds

to undomesticate your curiosity

to live your life as an act of love

to remember your sovereignty

to root yourself in the depths

to make your optimism contagious

to free yourself, free others, and serve everyday

to dwell in possibility

to welcome the beautiful mess of life

to use whatever arises in support of these intentions

to become empelvised, embellied, empowered

to be a fully embodied woman of wisdom.

 

 

I hope you’ll consider joining me.FXNN5293
With love,

Erin

 

 

“From bitter searching of the heart,
Quickened with passion and with pain
We rise to play a greater part. …”

~ Leonard Cohen, Villanelle For Our Time

 

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A quote from a recent article that inspired and touched me:

“There is every risk here of reducing Buddhism [and spirituality] to a bourgeois exercise in privilege maintenance, a “spirituality” that alleviates, in a palliative rather than a curative way, the uneasiness that vibrates through our dysfunctional social body. We should not perfume this body, but address its wounds.

In this ever-fresh tenderness, may our vital hope to actualize a more just world be realized. Humbly I have offered these young, forming thoughts, and now this simple prayer:

May we recognize the boundless Tathagata [Buddha] in each others’ eyes.
May we together shed the myriad veils of ignorance,
And witness through each other the intimate dawn of Awakening.”

– Christopher Raiche

 

 

copyright 2016 Erin Geesaman Rabke all rights reserved

 

 

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