The workshop consists of a bit of a talk involving holism and the relationship between our individual wellness and the Earth’s wellness. A good deal of the workshop is a drum meditation meant to emphasize a return to feeling as a path of alignment to greater wellness. The experience is organized around a framework of deepening awareness, nurturing prayer and abiding beauty.

One important premise of the workshop is the extent to which we, in the dominant culture, have divorced ourselves from feeling. The wisdom of the heart and the body have been exchanged for a fascination with abstract representation, offered in our language, printed word, recorded sounds and videos, computer-generated images, and computer mediated relationships with other beings and the natural world.

The awareness of this loss is a first step to returning to feeling and developing a more integrated expression of mind and body. Deepening awareness also pertains to the willingness and ability to understand the repercussions of human systems and institutions. We ask, what is wellness? Is it possible to be well with such stress on the living matrix of the planet? How can we be informed-by and affect this relationship? Arising out of our experience of an illusion of separation – a natural outgrowth of self-awareness – we are surrounded by human-created patterns that are imbued with a separation perspective and the underlying fear mentality.

We deepen awareness through rational understanding, but must also follow through into a feeling experience of this understanding. Only then can the energy used to avoid these feelings be released into a more congruent life-expression. Through this experience, our definition of love is deepened as it reveals itself as the impetus for living organization in a universe that otherwise wants to fall into randomness. We begin to imagine what the world would be like if our systems, institutions and technology resonated with the integrating vibration of love based on the reality of our connection with all-that-is.

To nurture prayer is to practice sitting with these feelings; to lose our fear of them. As root, systemic causes of the injustice and dysfunction in the world are revealed to us through a deepened understanding, the capacity to see beyond these internalized perspectives emerges. Imagining a reality beyond our wildest dreams is a reality that we can pray into.

Our capacity to create such change is dependent on our ability to co-create, both with other human beings and with the creative energies of the world and universe. The feedback required is simple. It is beauty. When we raise the grace of beauty to a place of prominence in our intention, we move toward alignment with forces unimaginably greater than our selves. This, then, becomes the fertile field in which we sow our prayers of wellness and life far better than anything we can currently imagine. This is the place where our deepest values fall in nurturing furrows, are washed with the ease and grace of the water of love, and take root in the dynamic matrix of unfolding consciousness.