Workshop
The Song of the Body:
Global Physical Expressions Toward the Sacred
Sara K. Schneider
In this experiential workshop, we inquire with our bodies, as well as our minds, into ancient practices designed to bring about a sense of surrender and to promote insight or an experience of the divine.
Beginning with practices of surrendering to the Other, we try on bowing as it may be executed in the secular Japanese context, and foot washing as a Christian practice of hospitality and humility. With our feet, we study pilgrimage, comparing our own experience with that of the Muslim hajj to Mecca. We conclude with a playful contemporary dance-drama that we create, re-interpreting the mirthful and fun-poking medieval Dances of Death, invoking yet another type of surrender, this one to our own sense of the myriad ways one can whimsically play with or mischievously trick, tango with or seduce death. Additional exercises drawn from global spiritual traditions are also explored actively.
In the process, we find that the experience of surrender is one not of terror but of considerable joy, not of heaviness but rather of fleetness of heart as well as foot.
In all cases, we connect these culturally embedded practices with the ways in which, in contemporary Western culture, we may surrender, both physically and in other ways, to others, ourselves, and a sense of the divine. Journaling and thorough debriefing allow participants to integrate their experience within their home spiritual practices. Movement is gentle and easily adapted; participants of all physical abilities are welcome.
in Big Sur, California, as a weekend workshop.
Other formats are also possible.
To schedule workshops at your retreat or conference center,
The Medieval Dance of Death
Sara K. Schneider
In the fourteenth century, between 30 and 60 percent of the population of Europe was felled by the Black Death; many others perished in famines and wars. A rich artistic tradition on “The Dance of Death” arose over the next couple of centuries, as those remaining struggled to make sense of the fact of ubiquitous loss, using such artistic media as Christian liturgical dramas and allegorical art, dance, and poetry to dramatize the interactions between Death, as an anthropomorphized figure, and people of every social station. Death was of course the great democratizer, coming after kings as well as peasants, the upright as well as the ungodly, the learned equally as the unschooled. Far from being restricted to Europe or to the late Middle Ages or early Renaissance, coming to terms with death is an essential task of living. In this experiential workshop, we reconstruct the spirit of the medieval Dance of Death, creating moving tableaux of not merely menacing but also the playful and seductive interactions between Death and his object.
Light movement accessible to everyone will be interspersed with scripting and personal writing to highlight the creative and healing potential of this form of “rehearsing death” -- and the universal hope either to escape the inevitable or else to make every death a “good death.”
Other formats are also possible.
To schedule a workshop for your institution,
contact Sara at sks@thinkingdr.com or 312.593.2345.
Leader's background
Workshop
The Minds and Bodies of
“Others”:
Compassionate
Cross-Cultural Spiritual Care
Sara
K. Schneider
Those who tend to the spiritual lives of others now serve increasingly
diverse populations whose relationships to touch, pain, confinement,
discipline, authority, and embodiment itself are strongly influenced by
their cultures of origin. Such culturally specific beliefs color the
spiritual experience of healthcare, prison, and military environments
-- all of which offer unique opportunities for spiritual transformation
from within constricted bodily circumstances.
The Bodies of “Others” takes physical hardship not
as an objective fact, but as a personal and cultural experience. Using
their own body-based and social intelligences, participants learn
qualities of presence, non-verbal communication skills, and techniques
of cultural inquiry that will increase their sensitivity in connecting
with patients, prisoners, and military personnel whom they view as
different from themselves -- “other.”
The workshop combines lecture with experiential techniques to help
clergy and chaplains understand and work deeply with the embodied
spiritual lives of their culturally diverse constituents and their
families.
The Bodies of “Others” is normally offered as a
half-day workshop.
Other formats are also possible.