Each Wednesday for four weeks, we’ll meet for two hours—from 7:00 to 9:00 pm (CST)—gathering virtually via Zoom. In our Wednesday sessions, we’ll engage in guided meditations and expressive arts practices, explore the course materials, and share reflections on the between-session experiential exercises. We’ll be a small, intimate group, exploring individually, in pairs, and collaboratively, creating space for both personal exploration and shared dialogue. This course is intended as less of a ‘training’ and more of a creative dynamic exploration in real time.

Between sessions, you’ll be invited to engage in simple, nature-based, creative and meditative exercises. Using the expressive arts and meditative awareness, we’ll explore embodied, intuitive ways of being in relationship with the more-than-human world. The arts practices are not about artistic skill or performance—but rather about giving form to the inner experience. For image-making, whatever materials you have on hand will do. No art or meditation experience is required, only curiosity and openness to being surprised.

Keeping our own lived and deeply felt experiences at the center of our knowing, we’ll draw from a rich variety of resources from Daoism, Buddhism, western mystical and various Indigenous perspectives, as well as from eco-, integral and depth psychological perspectives. New terms and concepts are meant to open to different ways of perceiving and to reawaken connection to the living world. The experiential exercises and resource materials will take about 1-1.5 hours per week to complete.

We’ll engage integral ways of being, knowing, and relating—not limited to the verbal or intellectual, but inclusive of embodied, intuitive, imaginal, and emotional ways of interacting. Our time together will be co-created, opening to a multiplicity of experiences and perspectives.