WOMEN’S RITUAL OF RENEWAL
Seasonal Online Gatherings for a Year of Wholehearted Living
With Lisa Gibson & Brooke McNamara
Next Half-Day Retreat: Sunday, September 12th, 2021
(8-1 PT | 9-2 MT | 10-3 CT | 11-4 ET | 5-10pm CET )
Autumn Half Day Retreat
This half-day retreat on Sunday, September 12th will be an opportunity to practice slowing, sensitizing, and harvesting the nourishment and insights of Summer as we let go into Autumn. What is possible when we give space to feel the bittersweet ache and beauty of change within and around us?
Relaxing into the release of Summer might bring hues of grief and/or relief. Giving time and attention to connect with other women in ritual, powerful and playful conversation, silence, stillness, embodiment, and creativity can allow the bounty of summer to be digested and metabolized. As we tend the threshold of the shifting seasons, we will be richly connected to community and nature, fueled and renewed by aligning with the coming of Autumn.
"The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest.
The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.”
— Brother David Steindl-Rast
“i found god in myself
and i loved her
i loved her fiercely”
― Ntozake Shange
“These times are urgent; we must slow down.”
-- Bayo Akomolafe
The world is bursting with action and activity. There are endless demands on our time and our attention. When we strive to meet these demands with half-hearted, habitual response, we can become deeply depleted. Without stopping to renew our own souls with full, coherent intention, we remain disconnected from our life force, pleasure, and creativity. Our giving and doing becomes routinized and dull. Our uniqueness is smothered by the roles that we have taken on, and we are disconnected from our impact on the world.
Yet, as David Steindl-Rast wisely points out, the antidote to exhaustion isn’t necessarily rest, rather the antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness. It is about fully engaging with each moment and each experience. Rest is critical - and so is play, dance, laughing, walking, being with nature, holding hands and doing the dishes. Fully engaging and then releasing our moment to moment experience may revitalize our spirits in curious and magical ways, pointing us to a fuller human experience and to the source of our own deepest wisdom.
Join a collective of women as we gather together-alone to nourish and resource ourselves from our deepest inner knowing and being. Through seasonal cycles, we will pause and turn our attention inward to deeply listen to ourselves, to each other and the world around us. Engaging ritual, stillness, movement, intentional conversation, play, shadow work, and creative expression, we will wholeheartedly inhabit our precious human lives and create space for rest and renewal. Together, we will invite each other into the potent possibilities that arise when we trust ourselves, each other, and our own soulful timing.
This journey through the seasonal retreats, and connection woven in between, are gifts to you, to appreciate the wisdom that unfolds when we create space for ourselves, for those who came before and for those who will come after. It is a moment to pause and feel what is real in our bodies, what is real in the moment we are in. It is a space to honour ourselves and all of our relations, both seen and unseen. Space for your exquisite uniqueness to be watered, restored and uplifted.
Seasonal Half-Day Retreats
Seasonal Ritual of Renewal Retreats will take place once per season. You are welcome to participate in any or all of these half-day virtual retreats, which take place on:
Half-Day Retreats - Overview
Our half days together will move between structured time together online and intentional solo explorations offline. The retreat will include:
- Meditation and mindfulness
- Movement practices to fully inhabit your body-mind
- Rich, intentional conversation
- Rituals to connect personal experience to a greater sense of meaning
- Journaling to tap into your creative expression
- Shadow work to uncover hidden commitments that drain aliveness
- Play, creativity and laughter
- Time to enjoy cooking and eating a nourishing meal for yourself
$125, $95, $65
please choose the price that works for your current financial context
Women's Ritual of Renewal is for all self-identified women who:
- Yearn to connect to their deepest intentions and innermost selves
- Long for practices to restore, nurture, and enliven
- Want to gather with a community of other wholehearted women
- Need a break from the routines and busyness of daily life
- Are excited (and possibly fearful) about the potency of their aliveness
We strive to create a brave space that welcomes everyone's full uniqueness as well as attuned compassion for others. We aim to create a welcoming community of practice that includes diversity of race, class, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious affiliation, nationality, and more.
“Self-love rather than rendering us self-centered makes us open-hearted and more loving.”
~ Florence Witt
“if you are softer
than before
they came.
you
have been loved.”
~ Nayyirah Waheed
“We were not sent into this world to do anything into which we cannot put our hearts.”
~ John Ruskin
ABOUT THE FACILITATORS
Brooke Teisui McNamara and Lisa Genki Gibson are senior monks in the Soto Zen lineage of Diane Musho Hamilton, Roshi. Their intertwined paths of meditation, motherhood, leadership, and creativity are a source of endless complexity and joy.
Brooke Teisui McNamara is a poet, dance-theater artist, and teacher. She has taught at Naropa University in Yoga Studies and at the University of Colorado, Boulder in Dance. She serves as co-director with Lauren Beale of Eunice Embodiment, an organization that offers cutting edge dance-theater performances, movement education, and creative practice workshops, in person and online. Brooke has published two books of poetry, Feed Your Vow and Bury the Seed. She lives with her huge-hearted husband and two adorable, wild sons.
Lisa Genki Gibson is a transformative facilitator, coach and systems change consultant. She specializes in helping people and groups bring their whole hearts forward in creating a more just, caring and sustainable world. At the heart of her work, she is passionate about integrating personal transformation and social change to embody new ways of being with ourselves, each other and the earth. She lives on the west coast of Canada with her beautiful family on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh people..
WHAT OUR STUDENTS SAY...
“Brooke has a magical charm that sets the tone for a supportive environment. ”
~ Shelly Sharon, Meditation teacher & Life Alignment coach
BREAK
Rest, now.
Let the weight you run from every day
now draw you down.
Later there will be time to tend
to everything left undone.
Now, rest.
Fall
into your own bones
lying horizontal on this ground.
Come
into your dark corners.
Come into this
original nakedness
under all the layers.
Come where all your losses
split
you
open.
Don’t rise,
yet —
rest.
Be drawn deeper down
into the salt tide of tears.
Let grief wash you,
then drown you
beyond the name
you first were given,
when you reached to touch
your own mother’s face for the very first time,
and she smiled her light down into you.
Now reach those same fingers
for the face of infinity —
so that, opening your eyes,
you will know
the one dreaming you
is pleased with you,
that everything seen
is your self,
and that now is the time
to rise wholehearted into the work
aching to be animated
by precisely you.
— Brooke McNamara