TEACHING / WORKSHOP SCHEDULE


Wednesday morning Advanced Women’s Healer Training Circle

The essential focus of this work is to investigate this question: What does it means to be a healer in the United States in the twenty-first century?

The basic tenets to be examined are:

We will investigate the difference between working in the paradigms of healer as opposed to health professional [including medicine, psychology etc.] As part of these investigations, we address such questions as:

In order for such a community as we are developing to be viable individuals will need to collaborate on creating organic sustaining rather than intimidating systems for feed back, self-evaluation and self-scrutiny that allow one to be courageous and forthright in the practice of healing.

I encourage participants to bring cases or active personal experience or dilemma for presentation that:

    1. are puzzling and
    2. seem to beg to go beyond the boundaries of conventional medical or psychological practice.
    3. or where treatment is not as effective as one had hoped.
    4. or where the situation seems to be begging for creative of spiritual interventions.

Some of what we will doing is turning moments inside out to see what they mean through other modalities — myth, energy work, shamanic practice, dream work, ritual and what they mean when seen through various dimensions, especially through the perspective of indigenous mind, practices and traditions. Or we may tell healing and stories when healing did not occur to understand them from a new dimension. It is often happens that participants in the workshop offer their skills and training to a situation, for us to do hands on work in the group for and with each other in accordance with the principles we are examining.

One of the goals of the workshop is to create a community of healers, community among healers and healing in the community. Accordingly, to create a cultural context among ourselves in order to support healing gestures.

Since April 1999, we have initiated a monthly Daré — a healing circle /council /community — on the first Sunday of each month after the new moon. Participating in this Daré is an essential part of the training.

Who is this workshop for? Students and professionals who are or intend to work as healers, licensed or unlicensed. I have been working with physicians, psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors of oriental medicine, acupuncturists, chiropractors, educators, shamanic practitioners, body workers, yogis, dance therapists, nurses, movement therapists, herbalists, hands on healers, mental health workers, social workers, art therapists, midwives, spiritual and pastoral counselors, marriage and family counselors, art therapists, journal writing teachers, yoga instructors, herbalists ....

Accordingly, another goal of the work is to break down the barriers between the professions, to challenge ideas of hierarchy and elitism.

The format includes the presentation of ideas, discussion, writing, story telling, meditation, ethical analysis, ritual work, ceremony, community building and Daré.

We will, as in the past, address questions that individuals bring into the circle. In addition, we will focus on ethics, dream work, ‘healing the ancestors,’ and preparing ourselves to enter the new millennium as healers, and bodhisattvas in each moment of our lives.

This is a random list of some of the questions we have addressed over the years. In each case we write the stories, moments, events, experiences, anecdotes, interactions that contain the exploration and understanding of these questions. The responses need to be based in experience not in theory nor in the way one’s profession would respond nor in the abstract. Needless to say, we will return to these questions again as they can never be fully addressed.