Healers’ Intensive: Vision, Training and Initiation – Online
Announcing the 24th Annual Healing and Healers’ Intensive
To Meet These Times
With Deena Metzger
Training, Initiation, Transformation
June 24 – 30, 2023, via Zoom
On Behalf of Individuals, Communities and the Earth
This intensive is envisioned as a circle, a small group of women and men gathering, to devote themselves to the work of carrying healing at a time of great threat, suffering, anxiety and fear when we are called to face war and environmental collapse. How shall we meet this critical moment on behalf of a future. We must truly pioneer healing ways, become healers and/or healing presences in every aspect of our individual, social, and political lives. This work provides opportunities for each participant to find the often pathless path to which he/she/they are called and set out to walk it.
Our national and world situation is unimaginably grave. We do not know what stresses and deprivations may afflict our communities. Yet, somehow, we are called to meet them. Therefore, healing can no longer be only a narrow profession or a particular vocation. Such professional or vocational training is no longer central to bringing heart, true gifts and new understanding to those, including ourselves, who are suffering or in danger. Healing is the heart’s intelligent answer to the great need to change culture and social institutions drastically so that there will be a viable future for all beings.
There is an urgent need to develop new skills and new language in order to recover and integrate indigenous and wisdom ways, to heed the visions, messages and instructions from spirit, to train ourselves rigorously in order to serve individuals, our communities, the non-human beings and the Earth.
19 Ways to the 5th World
This work is based on the 19 Ways to the 5th World, dream guidance and deep listening to earth and spirit. See the full text of the 19 Ways on Deena Metzger’s blog Ruin and Beauty.
Soul Work and Community Work
For 22 years, physicians, psychologists, therapists, health practitioners, healers, educators, social and cultural workers, ministers, shamans, peacebuilders, writers, journalists, musicians and others have gathered together to be part of a courageous visioning community. It is an opportunity to reflect on grief, disappointment and terror, to confront the terrible truth that too many of our beleaguered institutions, social structures and ways of life are decaying, oppressive, failing, exceedingly dangerous. We must find new ways and forms.
Sometimes those who would heal do not have a particular form they practice, or they practice conventional professional forms which are inadequate to the times or recognize that they are in training to meet the broad, complex and demanding focus of Elder or Medicine Person. Dreams and visions, sometimes great afflictions, insist that we step out into unexplored territory. We are called in so many ways, and so we gather, study, and train.
Luminous and Soulful Paths
This intensive recognizes that the Story we have been given to live can be essential to our healing and spiritual paths. Learning to recognize Story is an essential part of this work. Spirit speaks to us through such Stories with a directness and intelligence that far exceeds the greatest human abilities, laying out events, experiences, mysterious circumstances, synchronicities and dreams. Heart, Beauty and wisdom invite us to learn to read these signs, recognize where we are being called and to what, and to understand the profound and exact instructions we’ve been given.
Indigenous people have always known how to live on the earth as part of a community of all beings, both visible and invisible. Imperialist and contemporary cultures have warred against this knowledge and its practice. On-going war, horrific technologies, physical, emotional and spiritual illnesses, and the devastation of the interconnected communities of the natural world, are the result.
We have to entirely change our minds and how we live. These new and also ancient ways are difficult and challenging, but they are also luminous and soulful paths. This week is an intensive immersion in a mystery school for the real world.
In this week we will address the issues that must be addressed, explore our lives, souls, minds, and creative work through formal and informal teaching, Council, circle reflection, bearing witness, strategizing, ethical reflection, prayer, meditation, silence and divination. We will honor the heart ways, the sacred and Earth.
Because we are meeting on line and zooming in from across the country, or maybe the globe, we will begin at 8:30 a.m. PST/11:30 a.m. EST and end at 8:30 p.m. PST/11:30 p.m. EST. The group sessions will include teachings, Council, explorations, story telling and small breakout group sessions. There will also be non-scheduled time for listening and writing, being with nature wherever one is and scheduled private appointments with Deena. The Intensive includes time in silence.
FEES, APPLICATION PROCESS, AND REGISTRATION:
The fee for the Intensive is based on a sliding scale.
A deposit reserves a space once the application process is completed. Payment plans are possible under special conditions. Please contact Jude Weber for more information.
If you have not worked with Deena before, please apply by sending a letter of intention that might include some of your dreams, background and interests to Jude Weber and Deena Metzger.
TEXTS FOR THE INTENSIVE:
To familiarize yourself with Deena’s work and concerns, select from the pieces posted on her
website and her most recent writing: the long awaited novel,
La Vieja: A Journal of Fire, and
A Rain of Night Birds on climate change and Restoration, the award-winning novel
La Negra y Blanca; the novel
Feral and
Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing;
Ruin and Beauty:
New and Selected Poems;
The Other Hand;
Writing For Your Life;
Tree: Essays and Pieces and
Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals.
Additional required reading — The book Bright Green Lies by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert, Jack D. Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals and Gregory Cajete, Native Science, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, Rupa Marya, Raj Patel, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice.
By application only – For information on fees or to apply please call Jude Weber at 310.985.3740 or email her.
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