teaching_schedule

Healing, Community, Peacebuilding, Partnership with the Earth,
Alliance with the Spirits, Creativity on Behalf of the Future

A dream took me to a soul vigil, a walkabout, 100 days of listening, 10 days of silence. The blueprint that follows is the result of that retreat.

Originally, I called this a program as a short hand, but in reality a program is far from my intention. I am not suggesting anything that can be written in stone but rather formless forms, dynamics, improvisational connections between our circumstances, all beings, the earth and each of our precious and peculiar selves mediated by Spirit's hope for the future and Creation.

I am hoping to be able to cohere some of the understanding and vision that has arisen around Dare' in the last 10 years so that it will continue to inform and sustain those who have seen the possibilities of community in these times. My intention in offering classes, mentoring circles, councils, etc. is to work with people involved in Dare' so they can carry it into the future, with others from across the country, with those who have been called in many different ways on behalf of us and all beings.

When I followed the imagery of the dream, I expected to be led from the old, grim darkness of imperial mind and human hegemony to sanctuary in the red, light-filled sands of southwestern cavers, kivas and holy places. Still, I was not surprised to be asked to bear witness to the extremity of our global tragedy. Awful as some of it was, I simultaneously experienced, as I have so many times in my life, the Presence alongside me/us, offering ways to heal ourselves and the great earth wounds that call for restoration and peace.

Attributing having had breast cancer to being over-radiated by fluoroscopy as a child, I understand why a dream would call me to behold radioactive waste seeping into the watershed of the Reservations. But, also, each time I went to a site or did ritual, it rained.

This was not the first time I made a pilgrimage to the Four Corners area of the Navajo Reservation. In 2008, a group of us accompanied Ki'na Dark Cloud, an Arikara-Navajo woman, to Tuba City. She had lived there as a child, had played in the uranium tailings and had contracted leukemia. We went to help her recover her health and to see what healing we could offer the earth. That time we were also accompanied by a 'dark cloud' guiding our ritual activities.

Illness calls forth its right medicine. We make the offering and become the remedy. Affliction is one way we learn the story we are called to live; each of us has been given a path to walk. Everyone is called to bring healing to this time. How do we do it?

I emerged from silence, asking the unavoidable question: How, now, shall I live? What is Spirit asking?

Within the last days, the questions were refined: How shall we live as we approach the opportunity and portal of 2012?

Many different traditions describe the end of one cycle and the beginning of another: the Kali Yuga; The end of the Piscean age and the beginning of the Aquarian; the millennium; the Hopi prophecies; the Maya Calendar Cycle - 2012, etc. Each transition challenges us. Who shall we each become in order to align with the possibility of the 5th World?

When I first began following the dream, I thought I was being called to silence and solitude. I thought my offering was to step away from community life toward the austere, but blessed life of a crone at the edge of the forest, and also toward the hermetic pursuits of a writer. Much of my time during these hundred days was spent completing a novel, La Negra y Blanca, about the Conquest. Then future books calling to be written began to present themselves to me.

But Spirit's wisdom came through friends, who commiserating with me, also said, "You can't write about Sipapu, unless you go through it yourself. Sipapu is the corridor between the worlds. To pass through it from one world to another, one must be entirely broken down in order to be reconstituted as another being, attuned to the new reality on the other side. You, Deena, cannot escape this process of transformation if you wish to write about it, if you hope that we will all be able to journey from the 4th to the 5th World."

We are moving toward the end of a 5,125 year Great Cycle of the Ancient Maya Long Count Calendar. In three years there will be a strange and powerful alignment of planets with the black hole that is the exact dark center of the Milky Way, both the birthplace of our galaxy and the mythic entrance to the underworld, the sacred site of birth, death and rebirth. Shouldn't we pay attention?

Spirit in its coyote way has divided my life in two, insisting on a stringent regime, on dedication to a double path: two weeks a month of listening, writing, solitude, solitary spiritual practice and two weeks a month of teaching, mentoring, invoking councils and circles entirely engaged with community on behalf of healing this time. Two weeks of engagement with the world, but no more; two weeks devoted to the inner life, and no less. Also, no conflict between the two. And, finally, a model for each of us of the necessary integration of the spiritual and the secular life for the sake of clarity and sanity.

This proposal is the realization of many of the teachings that have come to me in these long years of being trained by Spirit. Surprised by the inevitable, I yield, happily, to the work.

Just as I was writing Training for the 5th World, hopefully designed to help us honor the obligation to 2012, I received an email relaying a dream from the same Ki'na Dark Cloud with whom we had made a pilgrimage to the Four Corners Reservation.

I received the dream and took it as confirmation of the work. I trust that our efforts will be guided and received.

Immediately, another email arrived from environmentalist Carolyn Raffensperger who states that saving the earth, providing for the future must be a community event if it is to succeed. Reading her words, I understand that through facing the challenges together, community, itself so ravaged, will also be healed.

Many years ago, a dream voice charged me with a task: Teach the pattern; put the forms in place."

Here is another effort to meet this request. I hope it will help prepare some of us for the realization of the 5th World.

A Training Proposal for the 5th World - 2010-2012:

Entering the 5th World - Introduction and Invitation

Entering the 5th World requires a personal and cultural shift of the highest order. We are being called to accept the mandate to offer ourselves to the future and All Our Relations and to step away from whatever undermines or hinders such consciousness and activity.

We envision that this work will foster dynamic relationships with other groups and organizations working in parallel heartways and lead to interdependent, interlocking circles of concern and possibility, and working alliances with all beings and the elementals. We trust that elders' councils, elders on call, healing circles in every neighborhood, indigenous grand rounds, healing councils, peacebuilding councils, earth sanctuaries, safe havens for the restoration of war-traumatized souls and other sacred forms will develop from this work.

Ways to the 5th World include:

Recognizing that Community is an essential vessel and means of transformation.
Entering and trusting the ways of Council, Dare' and Mandlovu mind.
Learning to listen, to recognize, understand and attend the way of Story and the particular path of healing and transformation it reveals for each person.
Recognizing the language that Spirit speaks to each of us and entering into a dialogue with the divine.
Bearing witness to the horror and corruption of these times, scrutinizing our lives, and consciously ceasing our involvement.
Committing ourselves to healing war and to our transformation from war-traumatized people to peacemakers and visionaries.
Understanding and incorporating the No Enemy Way that we are called to by Spirit.
Aligning ourselves with a ReVisioned Medicine that practices the No Enemy Way, does no harm and integrates the combined wisdom of medical people and medicine people.
Making alliances with indigenous wisdom traditions.
Creating true and respectful partnerships with the earth, all beings and the elementals.
Protecting, sustaining, and healing the wild, the earth and all beings.
Living according to All Our Relations, Mitakye Oyasin.
Fostering dynamic relationships with other groups and organizations working in parallel heartways.
Attuning to, developing and being faithful to a spiritual practice on the pathless path.
Committing one's life to reading the signs, following divinations, listening to dreams, yielding to initiation, and living accordingly.
Honoring beauty, creativity, intuition, prayer, ritual, ceremony, loving kindness and compassion as essential forms.
Valuing silence, solitude, formless forms and not knowing.
Recognizing the path that one has traveled and seeing where one has been taken.
Stepping through the portal to live faithfully according to the laws of the 5th World that mandate serving Spirit and the on-going future.

The Formless Forms

This is envisioned as a three-year training for the community designed to meet the call to consciousness of 2012. It culminates three weeks before Dec. 20, 2012. It is predicated upon commitment.

There are many different ways to participate: formal and informal mentoring, mentoring pods, improvisational healing connections as needed, classes, circles, brief retreats, residencies, silent quests, the intensives, healing circles, and private work. Each person has the opportunity to design his or her participation so as to be able to meet the work they are called to do in the world.

Over the three years mentees, as individuals or as members of a pod, will have the opportunity to attend one or two of the monthly sessions in the year, attend the Intensives and engage in private appointments in person or by telephone. Enrollment is limited for mentoring and for the various classes offered. One can enroll a year at a time and participants can be added to the program whenever there is a space. By application or invitation. Fee.

The No Enemy Way and the Pathless Path

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.

In the next years, the focus will be on the following:

The No Enemy Way : All My Relations.
Living from the heart. Acting on behalf of all our relations. How will we live when we recognize that all beings and the elementals are our most precious relations on whose behalf we are called to devote our lives? How shall we chelate the toxic elements of conflict, adversity, fear, defensiveness, weaponry, battle, distrust, aggressiveness and war that we have all internalized and that, while often symptomless, are systemic.

The Pathless Path
The relationship between our lives and spirit's call is a pathless path. We have to learn to listen, to read the signs and to learn and respect the indigenous ways that have been maps for eons. We are called and so we yield to the call and to the mandate to serve all beings and the earth.

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.

On-Going Classes

Enrollment in the classes is not dependent on seeking mentorship. Enrollment is by application or invitation.

Sunday Training: Dare', Council, Healing and the No Enemy Way; based on Ways to the 5th World. (See below under Class Descriptions.) (Fee.)
Restoring a Dreaming Culture: Dreams, Dreamtime and Living by Dream.
(See below under Class Descriptions.) (Fee.)
Writing Circle - Master Class (See below under Class Descriptions.) (Fee.)

On-Going Community Circles

Dare' meets the first Sunday after the new moon. Open to the Community. 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Pot-luck with healthy food and non-alcoholic drink, organic when possible. Dare' has been in existence since April 1999. Click here to go to the Dare' page for details and schedules. (No fee.)

2010 Dates: Jan. 17, Feb. 14, March 21, April 18, May 16, June 13, July 11, Aug. 15, Sept. 12, Oct. 10, Nov. 7, Dec. 5

Fire/Water Circle to Heal War
A 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, veterans, war-affected and war-traumatized people know together? Second Wednesday after Dare' 7:30 to 10 p.m. (No fee; donations accepted.)

(Summer dates pending)
Sept. 22, Oct. 20, Nov. 17

Music Dare' - Recipients and participants by invitation only. (No fee.)

Private Appointments

Private appointment opportunities include spiritual and creative counseling and healing guidance for individuals and small groups.
Please inquire for details and availability. Fee.

Healing Opportunities

Individual and community consultations are available to people suffering serious illness or war trauma who wish to enter and be guided onto their healing paths.

The goals are:

The transformation of physical and emotional disease into sacred illness for the sake of vision.

The transformation of war-traumatized individuals into peacebuilders, transforming anguish into wisdom and injury to healing.

Fees by arrangement.

Schedule

Dare' weeks occur immediately following the monthly Dare' gatherings. Two weeks a month for nine months each year (January - June; September - November) will be set aside for Dare' events, mentoring, teaching, Councils, seminars, etc.

Special related seminars, circles and councils may be offered during these months.

Daré Immersion Weeks
2010 Dates: Weeks of Oct. 11, Nov. 8
Other Fall Dates pending
Topanga, California
Please call Danelia Wild to inquire about availability.

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. Fee by arrangement.

Mentoring

Mentoring can include committing to a course of study and soul exploration that calls for individual work, solitude, dream work, visioning, questing, informed ritual and ceremony, among the formless forms. This work focuses on the means of aligning with Spirit and the soul's mandate, particularly alliance with the earth, all beings and the spirits. It focuses on identifying the path mandated, the visions given and living accordingly.

Mentoring pod work combines individual work with work within a self-selected pod of three to five people devoted to particular issues. The pods will meet at least twice a year in Topanga, combining individual work and solitude with group work. Mentoring implies the exploration of new forms, listening for the mandate, hands on training and supervision in healing, peacebuilding, community building, restoration and visioning. The pods will work alongside Deena to meet those who are seeking healing and those seeking relief from war traumas as everyone steps onto the paths of becoming healers and peacebuilders in the broadest sense.

The pod will attend either the writers' or healers' intensives together.

Regular appointments with Deena, either in person or by phone.

Between meetings, members of the pod will meet with each other regularly through conference calls, telephone and whatever means they devise to continue, deepen the work and to sustain each other. They will learn with each other the deep practice of alliance and attunement and the wisdom that comes to each individual and the world from such alignment with each other, All Our Relations and Spirit.

No matter what the particular focus, individuals seeking mentoring will devote themselves to becoming adepts in the Ways of Entering the 5th World so that they can guide and inspire others for the sake of the future.

By application and/or invitation. Fees by arrangement.

Class Descriptions

Sunday Training: Dare' Council, Healing and the No Enemy Way

Over the three years, this class will focus on Dare' mind and the Ways to the 5th World.

Dare' is an original, complex form, based on deep attunement and alignment with the spirits and the ways of the natural world. Some form of Dare' or Council is present in all indigenous cultures. It requires the individual to yield to the hope for the future and the wisdom that comes when the boundaries between self, other, the beings of the natural world and Spirit are truly erased.

To live this way is a rigorous practice that affects every interaction and relationship of our lives. It is the training for living in the 5th World, the world that has a future for all beings. It is a form that is based on beauty, compassion, loving kindness and devotion to the Divine.

This circle seeks to explore the depths of Dare', Council, Mandlovu Mind so that we might become carriers of this way. It restores the old ways of living in alignment and attunements. It predicates community and alliances of all sorts.

Healing, so different from cure, is also a way of life. It is deeply connected to the mysteries and rigorous process of transformation connected to the No Enemy Way. Healing is based on alignment with Spirit, reading the signs, willingness to make the offering and step onto the mandated path.

Healing war implies removing fear, separation, suspicion, wariness, superiority, ego, protectiveness, territoriality, and conflict from the center of our consciousness. It requires deep self-scrutiny, making amends, yielding to the wisdom of the other. It implies establishing the reflexes of respect, recognition and alliances.

All these goals involve deep listening to Story and recognizing the paths it reveals for the sake of the community, the earth and all beings. They involve sustaining each other as we step out of the 4th world's brutalities toward a new beauty.

It is hoped that the participants in this circle will ultimately become the circle of Topanga Dare' conveners, will establish and carry Dare' in other communities and will establish and participate in circles of elders and healers ready to meet individual and community crises. It is also hoped that members of this group will eventually become part of establishing healing circles in every neighborhood.

This community training circle will meet once a month, nine months a year, through 2012, January through June and September through November on the Sunday following Dare' Sunday. The first session will be January 24th.

Fee. Some exchanges possible. Joining the circle, one commits to the nine sessions each year. A core number of committed participants is necessary.

Regular participants are expected to attend Dare' and will be encouraged to meet in pods or on the phone or through conference calls between sessions.

Enrollment limited, by invitation and application.

Restoring a Dreaming Culture:
Dreams, Dreamtime and Living by Dream

This circle seeks to restore the deep ethics and spiritual development present in all dream cultures. Together we will re-enter the dreamtime, explore the dreams sent to us for the sake of community and the future according to the old, old ways and new vision. In the past, dreams served to reveal the soul's path, to protect individuals and communities, to alert people to future events, to teach people how to live in the heart, to link people and communities over time and space, and to reveal the true nature of reality.

We hope to be able to revive such dreaming skills and use them to both cohere community and gather communities together. Finally, we will learn what it means to live by dream as individuals and as a community. Deeply attending our own dreams and holding each other's dreams in a sacred manner is the essential call.

This dream circle will meet once a month, nine months a year, through 2012, January through June and September through November on the second Thursday after Dare'. The first session will be January 28th.

Participants are encouraged to consult with each other regarding their dreams during the month.

Fee. Joining the circle, one commits to the nine sessions each year.

Enrollment is limited and is by application and/or invitation.

Writing Circle Master Class

For accomplished writers working on a project or committed to regular writing. The goal continues to be to ally with the creative spirits and contribute to a literature that invokes a viable future for all beings. Fiction, creative non-fiction, story, memoir, poetry, theater, film narrative and story architecture.

Some members of this class have been meeting with Deena since 1981 or even earlier. Through their affiliation with and devotion to the possibilities of literature and the word, they have become deep companions in the work. Anyone entering the Circle should be happy to enter such alliances.

This circle calls us to meet writing with rigor, discipline, discernment and dedication. It is a call to serve Beauty and enter the joy and challenge of meeting the unknown.

The Writing Circle will meet once a month, nine months a year through 2012, January through June and September through November on the first Wednesday after Dare'.

Participants are encouraged to consult with each other regarding their writing during the month.

Fee. Joining the circle, one commits to the nine sessions each year.

Enrollment is limited and is by application and/or invitation.

Writers' Intensive - By application
2011 Dates TBA
Pine Mountain, California. [Los Angeles area.]
[For information on fees or to apply please contact Danelia Wild at 310-815-1060 or e-mail danelia@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
2011 Dates TBA
Pine Mountain, California. [Los Angeles area.]
[For information on fees or to apply please contact Danelia Wild at 310-815-1060 or e-mail dwild4deena@ca.rr.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
2010 Dates and Locations 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.]

Writing the Living Matrix – A Weekend Retreat – By application
A Weekend Workshop - Friday through Sunday
2010 Dates and Locations TBA
Fee: please contact Danelia Wild for details.

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.

If you wish to enroll, make an application, work with Deena individually or sponsor a workshop in your area, please contact Danelia Wild via email at dwild4deena@ca.rr.com or call her at 310-815-1060. She also responds to messages left at 310-455-1089.