Cultural Embodiment @ The Stoa ~ Noon EST Tomorrow ~ Prophets and False Prophets
Join me for a feel into the challenges of spiritual transmission and human fallibility
Dear Friends,
Please join me tomorrow for Cultural Embodiment (formerly Embodiment Hour) at The Stoa. It will be the same format—we gather, come into our embodied experience, watch/listen to a piece of cultural stimulus, and then share what comes up for us—only now under this name that better reflects the nature of the work. Months into this experiment, it’s clear to me that we are not doing Embodiment 101 here, but digesting cultural material by processing it collectively and through our embodied experience.
There are a few guidelines I am going to hold more tightly moving forward.
Take care of yourself.
Consider the group. Respect the space.
Stay with feelings and sensations rather than opinions and stories.
Less about what we “like and don’t like,” and more about practicing identifying, allowing, and moving all nature of experience.
Tomorrow, we will be working with a trailer for a new four-part documentary series about a controversial female spiritual teacher called Teal Swan:
I'm also listening to this podcast interview by Jamie Wheal on Homegrown Humans with Andrew Cohen. Andrew was a celebrated spiritual leader (“neo-Advaita”) whose community dissolved in a sea of controversy between 2011-2016. He’s since been through a shadow-work process and has a book coming out next year. Jamie’s interview is very direct and calls Andrew to task for his blind spots. Jamie’s book, Recapture Rapture, has a whole section on Ethical Cult Building, so this is something he’s thought about deeply and has some personal experience with. It’s a fascinating interview.
There’s so much to say on this topic, it may span multiple weeks. As we move through these times of extreme transition, habitual dissociation, virtual reality boundary blurring, mass spiritual awakening, environmental chaos, political turmoil…we can expect to see the rise of many prophets and gurus. How will we know who to trust? I maintain that the body is an absolutely critical tool for feeling our way forward, but we have to occupy it fully and know it well. They say the body doesn’t lie, but it can be misleading if we don’t know how to read its signals.
Practicing in community where the stakes are low and the container is held, is a wonderful way to become precise with our own embodied language and begin to see where we are holding trauma, numbness, tension, and blockages, that could prevent us from sensing environmental signs accurately. Let’s explore together!
Cultural Embodiment is tomorrow, Thursday, at noon EST:
(Thank you Ari Kuschnir for your inspiration and support!)