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2009 Schedule

Circles, Councils, Mentoring, Teaching, Training, Intensives, Readings, Travel

Never in history has there been such a critical need for personal and planetary transformation in order to restore and protect the wild and secure a viable future for all beings.

The forms through which learning, healing, mentoring and transformation take place are as essential as the content. They are increasingly dependent on living by one's word and covenant, lived and practiced alliances with spirit, the primacy of soul work, the exacting practice of opening the heart, and one's faithful and primary commitment to all beings, including those of the future. We will scrutinize our lives and ways of life to allow what must fall away, what must transform, what must begin. Together in conversation and in solitude we will listen to spirit, read the sings, wrestle with the ethical dilemmas to follow the rigorous paths that open when we yield to the call and mandate of these times.

I no longer can work in the conventional ways. I am looking for the new ways that suit the earth and the hearts and minds of the village. Forms of rigorous but intimate connections, without academic formality -- true village forms that are no less rigorous but perhaps more so. I am hoping that we can find ways to connect that reflect the great longing and need for true relationships in community with each other, the spirits and the earth.

[If you wish to work with Deena individually or sponsor a workshop in your area, obtain further information or to apply or register for the programs, or make appointments, please contact Danelia Wild unless otherwise specified in the schedule below. Danelia can be reached via email at danelia@deenametzger.com or dwild4deena@ca.rr.com or by calling 310-815-1060. Danelia also responds to messages left at 310-455-1089.]

An exploration and training in recognizing what is being asked of us and making appropriate offerings as part of a spiritual practice.

Fall 2009 dates TBA, Topanga, CA
Begins Friday morning and runs through Saturday night
Limited enrollment
Fee: Sliding scale of $180 - $240

We are sent dreams and spiritual instructions to inform our lives and the lives of the community. Consider that they are messages from the spirits and the ancestors, inviting and challenging us specifically, as individuals and communities, to change our thinking and actions. They call us to change our lives and make binding covenants with spirit. Bring both abridged and unabridged versions of important dreams of the last year and/or other communications and transmissions so that the Way can become clear.

Fall 2009 dates TBA, Topanga, CA
Friday morning through Sunday night
Limited enrollment
Fee: Sliding scale $270 - $360

Can we learn the animals' languages? What do the animals want and how will we meet their call?

We will probably make a pilgrimage to the zoo and an early morning journey to the ocean. Please bring those dreams and communications that have come to you from the wild, particularly in the last year.
(This exploration does not include household animals.)

Fall 2009 dates TBA, Topanga, CA
Friday morning through Sunday night
Limited enrollment
Fee: Sliding scale of $270 - $360

The No Enemy Way
Monday Night Fire Circles
with Deena Metzger in Topanga, CA.
March 30, April 20, May 25, June 29

A Fire Circle is a form that can invoke a village. Spirit is invited. Teachings are offered and explored. Stories are told. Dreams are consulted. The animals, trees and elementals participate. The past is remembered. The future is considered. Critical issues are addressed in the old ways and the new ways. Over time, the various participants in the circle, in appropriate configurations, can be counted on to meet the concerns and needs of the community.

The Fire Circle format gives us the opportunity to meet in depth with people visiting the Los Angeles area as well as providing guests a more intimate introduction to the community and Dare'.

Whenever possible we will meet outside around a fire or by candlelight. Or we will try to meet around a fire inside. Or we will try to create an equivalent ambiance of inquiry and story telling inside. Please dress accordingly and bring a blanket or sleeping bag for warmth. Wood contributions appreciated.

Mondays from 7:30 - 10 p.m. Space is limited and reservations are required.
Please contact Danelia Wild at 310-815-1060 to reserve a space or to explore questions.

ON-GOING CIRCLES – By application or invitation

The No Enemy Way
Dying to the Old Life - An exploration and training circle

The focus of the circles is Dying to the Old Life. An exploration and training program for men and women, this circle is for all those interested in examining the internalized ways of conflict and ways of changing every place where the ways of conflict live and are knowingly or unknowingly nurtured or acted upon.

The essential texts for this class are From Grief into Vision: A Council and Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing.

Mondays 3:30 to 6:30 p.m.
Six circles; attendance at the monthly Dare' recommended.
2009 Class Dates: Feb. 2, March 2, March 30, April 20, May 25 and June 29
Fee: a sliding scale of $35 - $60 per circle. No fee for Dare'

The No Enemy Way
Fire Circles on Behalf of Healing War:
Understanding and Transforming Our Relationship to War
May 13, June 17, other dates pending

This is envisioned as Community Offering to meet the needs of war-affected people. It is for veterans and war-traumatized people. It is anchored in the question: What are the ways to peace that soldiers and veterans, participants and war-affected populations know together?

The fire circle will be free to soldiers, veterans and war-affected people.
Donations gratefully accepted.

DARÉ IMMERSION WEEKS AND MENTORING– By application

Daré Immersion Weeks
2009 Dates TBA
Topanga, California
Please call Danelia Wild to inquire about possible dates.

Sunday Daré – Open to the Community
Monday day through Thursday night and/or Friday morning.

Daré Immersion week provides a focus on individual work within a context of group support and dream telling. Classes, Training and Initiation through private appointments, individual and group sessions, meetings with Deena and / or members of the Daré community who carry a variety of skills including healing, music healing, dreaming, dream healing, dreaming for the world, shamanic practices, energy and body work, community building, ritual work, ceremony, divination and augury. All our work is rooted in the integrity between healing the self and healing the kin and community network of humans, non-humans and the earth. Participation, when appropriate, in Deena’s on-going classes and trainings. Thursday evening Music Daré (by invitation). Limited enrollment. For a complete list of Dare' dates click here.

MENTORING
By application

This is imagined as a non-programmatic mentoring program that serves the needs of those who want to work deeply and whose needs are not met simply by the workshops or intensives that Deena regularly offers. Though private appointments have also always been available, it appears that something else is being requested. Perhaps, it is that mentoring implies an intimate or personal relationship based on reciprocity, and a sense of being engaged together in a common work. It is also a relationship that recognizes that initiation is at its core. Mentoring is important because of the critical nature of these times and the real opportunities, if not demands, before us to impact the future by building community, developing creativity, exploring and learning the ways of healing and peacemaking, understanding the ways and intelligence of divination and dreaming, participating in Daré, and developing the minds and hearts to ally ourselves with indigenous mind and the beings of the natural world. It is these shared concerns that lead us to develop a relationship that will support this work in the world and that will support creative enterprises that are beautiful and are gifts to others. Needless to say, different people have different affiliations and some may be writers while others are healers, but whatever the mode of expression and activity, we share a sense of common purpose and heart. Also the mentee is desirous of entering into a rigorous process of self-development and self-scrutiny and is willing to enter into the process of initiation that will prepare him or her in every way, intellectually, spiritually, emotionally, politically, etc. to recognize and meet these times. Or, Deena puts it this way: "I am looking for ways to meet and support those who are being called forth by Spirit to meet this historic moment."

Deena's schedule offers some amalgam of participation in Daré, on-going workshops, individual appointments face to face or by telephone, small group meetings, Intensives, examination of the individual’s creative texts, study of texts by others, supervision, and exclusive meeting times for mentoring during the year. Anyone who wishes to enter into a mentoring relationship will need to avail himself or herself of several of these possibilities in order for us to have enough of a foundation, contact and study for the work between us to be meaningful.

The hope is, however, not to present a structure so much as to present the challenge of formulating a relationship that serves both the mentee and Deena and also serves the community, or rather, serves our work in the world, and in the words of my dear friend and spiritual companion, Augustine Kandemwa, "serves each other’s spirits."

Entering into this relationship means learning deeply through service. Through true imaginative commitment one will learn how she or he can generously support others, and who one becomes in the process.

As in other serious programs, much of this activity will be undertaken on one’s own. The real work of a mentoring program occurs in solitude and in spiritual and creative practice, while the mentor is there to guide the ways in which one is developing.

Writing Intensive – By application
May 16 - 22, 2009
Pine Mountain, California. [Los Angeles area.]
[For information on fees or to apply please contact Carol Sheppard at 310-455-1999 or e-mail carol@deenametzger.com.]

This workshop is for a small group of people who will gather to devote themselves to their work, that is to the work. The structure of the week will resemble other workshops offered by Deena — directed writing, reading to each other, dream telling, meditation, silence, solitude, teaching, questioning, daring, ritual, ceremony....

The state of our world and what is being asked to meet it requires all of us to consider our assumptions and understandings about who we are as writers, peacemakers, and members of a community of beings. For this reason, Deena has been meditating deeply on the purpose of our coming together at this time, seeking to understand the true calling of Spirit in regard to this Intensive. As a result of this contemplation, our time together will be a council, guided by Spirit, the ancestors, animals, elementals, inviting and embracing the voices of both the visible and invisible presences. Using the tools of writing, story telling, dreaming, prayer, silence, and divination, we will seek to move more fully into the writing paths that each of us have been called to on behalf of the planet and the restoration of creation. We will address our personal healing if and when it is necessary to remove the obstacles to fully embracing those paths, though the emphasis will be on global, rather than personal, healing. For these reasons, this will be the first Writers Intensive offered that welcomes both women and men.

Writing is a sacred act of conscience because the writer has been given the gift — stories, insight, vision, images and words — on behalf of the community. In accepting and using these gifts, the writer has profound responsibilities to herself, community, and Spirit; she must proceed with consciousness and ethical reflection because writing creates culture. Words are sacred: what we say, how we say it, to whom we speak, these are urgent considerations. We cannot be innocent or shy about our gifts and wisdom and must step forward to meet the urgencies of this time if we are to help create the kind of world we truly wish to live in, if we are to imagine a Story with a future.

Through the experience of living in a field of interlocking stories and alliances that may at first appear random but are deeply connected and dynamic, we will enter into a web of dreams, stories and voices, human and non-human, visible and invisible, to find and explore new cultural forms and language aligned with Spirit for the sake of healing, community, peacemaking, the natural world, and visions for the future. To enter into such a dialog is to enter into a Council. It is the discourse between the writer's self and this council that invites knowledge and vision. In this Intensive we will examine what happens when this wisdom comes alive on the page. Toward this, the ideas explored in Deena's new book, From Grief into Vision: A Council will be at the very core of our work together.

Deena is inviting approximately 20 people to meet with her in Pine Mountain, California in order to engage, alone and in community, in the rigorous work of writing and creativity. Working as we do in her groups, a map will come forth and we will follow it, each in our own way, into the world of language, imagination, concern, ideas, beauty, history, myth and story.

Living together cooperatively for a week, addressing the issues that must be addressed, we will explore our lives, souls, minds, and creative work through formal and informal teaching, directed writing, dream and story telling, meditation, silence, solitude, music, improvisation, council, visioning, ritual, and ceremony.

This is a retreat for serious and experienced writers. The work is difficult, arduous, often risky, engaging, beautiful and thrilling. Though you will be guided, it is expected that you are also self-motivated and will come prepared to devote yourself to what concerns and fascinates you, to what is calling to be written, particularly in these times. We will work in prose, but the workshop lends itself to writing in any form, fiction and non-fiction, prose and poetry.

The description, above, is only a possibility. This Intensive is intended to gather together those individuals who are willing to heed the call and direction of spirit in such times and, accordingly, to devote themselves to developing the gifts, skills and visions given to them for the sake of restoring creation. We trust that Spirit will gather those who need to be gathered and that, individually and in concert, we will engage in the training and work to become who we are being asked to become and to participate in the visioning that is being offered to and asked of us in these times.

Healers' Intensive: Vision, Training and Initiation – By application
June 20 - 26, 2009
Pine Mountain, California. [Los Angeles area.]
[For information on fees or to apply please contact Carol Sheppard at 310-455-1999 or e-mail carol@deenametzger.com.]

Writing, council, contemplation, addressing healing, spiritual and creative concerns. Individual and group work.

The state of our world and what is being asked to meet it requires all of us to consider our assumptions and understandings about who we are as healers, peacemakers, and members of a community of beings. For this reason, Deena has been meditating deeply on the purpose of our coming together at this time, seeking to understand the true calling of Spirit in regard to this Intensive. As a result of this contemplation, our time together will be a council, guided by Spirit, the ancestors, animals, elementals, inviting and embracing the voices of both the visible and invisible presences. Using the tools of story telling, dreaming, prayer, silence, divination, and writing, we will seek to move more fully into the paths that each of us have been called to on behalf of the planet and the restoration of creation. We will address our personal healing when and how it is necessary to remove the obstacles to fully embracing those paths, though the emphasis will be on global, rather than personal, healing. For these reasons, this will be the first Healers' Intensive offered that welcomes both women and men.

There is an essential relationship between creativity, healing and peacemaking, as there is between personal, community and global healing. Given the current political, historic and environmental situation, we will devote ourselves to exploring these relationships and developing our capacities to meet these times on behalf of all beings. Healing refers to easing pain, disease, and distress but it also means bringing wholeness, harmony, and well-being to individuals and community. Healing can be personal but it is also spiritual, cultural, political and environmental. It concerns every aspect of our lives, including our alignment with the natural world, with all our visible and invisible relations. To be a healer, to bring healing to the community, to carry "healing spirits," are activities of profound responsibility to oneself, community and the world. We must proceed with consciousness and ethical reflection because at this time more than any other in history, healing means finding the forms that will ensure the coherence and restoration of a viable culture that promises a future and the flourishing of the natural world and all of creation.

To be called to initiation is to be called to one's true life, the life that accords with Spirit, the life that participates in the survival of the planet. An initiated person is conscious in every aspect of her or his life and acts according to the deepest understanding of his or her soul. We cannot be innocent or shy about our gifts and wisdom nor can we hold back from the call to come forth to meet these challenging times. This is a call for vision.

This Intensive is based upon the recognition and revelation of Story as a map and a guide. Stories are given to us by Spirit as profound and exact instructions for living our lives. Spirit speaks to us in Story, engaging our lives in ways that are creative and awesome, laying out events, circumstances, and synchronicities with an artistry that far exceeds the greatest human abilities. When conventional paths are not sufficient for our lives or for these times, it is a wondrous gift and surprise that our own life stories, the circumstances of each day, even of this week together, may be the most profound and detailed instructions on how to live with integrity.

Toward this, we will consider the following questions:
    How do you read the signs?
    What story are you in — really?
    What is a healing story and how do you recognize it for yourself, for others, for the earth?
    What might Spirit want — really?
    How might creation be restored and what is your role in this?

Deena is inviting approximately 20 people to meet with her in Pine Mountain, California in order to engage, alone and in community, in the rigorous work of visioning, peacemaking, and initiation. Living together cooperatively for a week, addressing the issues that must be addressed, we will explore our lives, souls, minds, and creative work through formal and informal teaching, council, directed writing, dream telling, story telling, meditation, silence, solitude, music, improvisation, energy work, divination, journeying, visioning, ritual, and ceremony. We will use council as an essential mode of self-discovery and development in service of greater vision on behalf of the community and all creation.

This is a retreat for serious and committed people. The work is difficult, arduous, risky, engaging, beautiful and thrilling. Our hope is to create an environment where we dare to enter the world of the imagination and engage the spirits in order to call forth our authentic selves and our abilities to heal ourselves, others, and the world. Though you will be guided, it is expected that you will be self-motivated and will come prepared to devote yourself to your own work as it reveals itself.

From Grief Into Vision - A Training Council with Deena Metzger
By application or invitation

A Weekend Workshop - Thursday night through Sunday night
Topanga, California
2009 Dates TBA
Fee: please contact Danelia Wild for details

This series of training councils addresses the critical need for personal and planetary transformation. The goal is to discover who we must become, what we must walk away from and how to live and act accordingly.

As the future requires, we will rigorously address and act upon these questions through personal exploration, and in community, relying on Council, meditation, story telling, dream telling, divination, ritual, ceremony, ancestor collaboration, solitude, time on the earth, group work, as well as teachings and guidance, to see what we are being called to, individually and together, and to act on it. Each council has the possibility of invoking a small, wise community that can continue to support, sustain and inform the individuals and the work

We are working from a basic assumption: If we begin to transform ourselves and our different communities, now, into such people as will be manifest in viable futures for all beings, we will know how to meet whatever confronts us with new wisdom.

Here is another way of thinking about it: The Hopi have an image of a Sipapu, a corridor between the worlds. Passing through the Sipapu, one is entirely altered and becomes a being of a new world. We are being asked to enter the rigorous process of moving through the Sipapu, to transform in advance, so that we can act on this side with the wisdom that is still beyond us.

Over the past years, many of us have experienced the beginning of 'a change of mind.' Increasingly, we live by dream and, further, we are beginning to recognize dynamic fields of dreams that form as our individual dreams interconnect. These dreams are no longer personal, but speak to us directly of the gravity of these times and of the ways of peacemaking, community and healing, of our relationship to the earth and what might be possible for the future. The dreams and fields of dreams are calling us into impromptu council discussions and new and surprising alliances from which consciousness and guidance emerge. We are living, as best as we can, according to spirit, trying to discern how we are being guided through dreams, divinations and visions that are verified by personal and community experience, and that can be judged by the standard "All my relations" or that which serves all beings and the planet: We are trying to direct our lives according to generosity, compassion, and a concern for community, now and in the future, that is composed of humans and non-humans, of the ancestors and the elementals. We are looking to indigenous and traditional wisdom ways, as well as to new vision, to imagine viable, diverse cultures that will, together, insure the future. We hope these Training Councils will be vehicles for such transformation.

We will address the following questions:

What are the forms, assumptions and values inherent in our personal and cultural lives that have brought us to, and fortify, these tragic circumstances? What are the forms, assumptions, skills, teachings and values that can lead us to ways of living that insure and sustain true futures for all beings?

In this circle/training/council, we will engage in rigorous examinations and activities for extricating ourselves from the mental and cultural patterns that hold us in thrall in order to enter the beautiful possibilities that are life-giving for all beings. The essential concerns of this gathering are council and council mind, peacemaking, guardianship, healing and environmental restoration.

***

Deena wrote the following recently to convene another council. The concerns expressed then are informing this call as well:

"These times are critical. It is very clear that no governments and no institutions are meeting the gravity of the global situation that, as it exists, cannot be fixed; it must be changed. It is all in our hands and we cannot postpone the change of consciousness required, nor postpone engaging in the life and the activities that may lead to personal and global transformation. We are being asked to make a profound commitment to the future. All beings including the future beings are asking this of us.

"Spirit is calling together small, interlocking, circles of deep souls to enter into as yet unimagined territory and directions. We are among those who are called to respond to the difficulties and possibilities of this time. Our task is to make ourselves available to spirit and to commit ourselves to the earth and to the future beings in order to find the ways, individually and together, to change the trajectory that is endangering all beings. In doing this we are being asked to carry and live radical hope.

"This is a time of listening deeply to spirit in all the ways spirit speaks to us, listening to each other to see what happens when "I" becomes "we", working in the imagination, heart and soul on behalf of the future. This is a time when we will help each other, offer everything we have, and hold nothing back. Accordingly, this is also a time to offer everything we know up to the great mystery so that we might be transformed.

These are some of the questions that inspire this training:

· How can the traumatized, brutalized, and so increasingly terrified, terrorized and so, often brutal, global population, heal [in time]?

· Why do oppressed people become oppressors? How to intervene in this dynamic?

· How can the human and the wild truly be co-existent and co-extensive?

· What forms of healing are truly coherent with the goals of healing?

· How do we rigorously and faithfully serve beauty?

· How do we meet the current crisis where medicine is dangerous, government is treacherous, literature and journalism deceive, security is violent and freedom vanishes, when food lacks vitality and the earth itself is abused?

· How can we receive, guide, accompany, ally with and train [when necessary] the increasing numbers of those who are reaching out as they become aware, consciously or not, of true mandates from spirit and the unconventional calls and activities that are implicit in the call?

· How can we, as the spirits have suggested, individually and collectively, imagine the particular internal changes and the consequent unexpected and formerly unimagined activities that will foster transformation, sanctuary, guardianship, council mind and restoration?

· What does it mean to be a guardian?

· How can we help consciousness, peace and healing go systemic?

· How can we live, realistically, in alliance with the earth and all beings, according to “All my relations”?

· How can a nation and a world [truly] heal from war and brutality?

· How can we receive the particular guidance of spirit?

***

[ Recommended reading: From Grief into Vision: A Council and Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing.]

This writing experience comes out of the intrigue of imagining a literature that looks to a planetary future that is vibrant, beautiful, and alive, a future that is healthy and sustainable for all beings. Our focus will be the exploration of a literature that incorporates the nature of council, of the circle, of the intelligence of dreams and of the multiplicity of visions and voices and the multidimensionality of consciousness when we are truly awake and aligned with Spirit.

This retreat will gather us into a field of interlocking stories and alliances that may at first appear random but are deeply connected the dynamic. Through this matrix we will enter into a web of dreams, stories and voices, human and non-human, visible and invisible, to find and explore new cultural forms and language aligned with Spirit for the sake of healing, community, peacemaking, the natural world, and visions for the future.

To enter into such a dialogue is to enter into a Council. It is the discourse between the writer's self and this council that invites knowledge and vision. During our time together we will examine what happens when this wisdom comes alive on the page. Toward this, the ideas explored in Deena's new book, From Grief into Vision: A Council, will be at the very core of our work together.

           PORTLAND, OREGON
            July 7, 2009 7 p.m.
            Annie Bloom's Books
            7834 SW Capitol Highway
            Deena Metzger and other writers from the Sisters Singing anthology
            503-246-0053
            contact: books@annieblooms.com
            http://www.annieblooms.com

            SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
            July 11, 2009 7:30 p.m.
            Downstairs at Town Hall Seattle
            1119 Eighth Avenue (at Seneca Street)
            Deena Metzger and other writers and musicians from the Sisters Singing anthology
            including cellist and vocalist Jami Sieber and artist singer/songwriter Alysia Tromblay