Workshops
Spiritual Leadership for a Sustainable World
Workshop Presentation Patricia Bombard
“Perception precedes reality"--Andy Warhol. “We are bonded with everything all the way out to the stars.” – Thomas Berry. In 1967, Lynn White called the ecologic crisis a religious problem. More recently, Al Gore and others have called it a spiritual crisis. Both approaches point to a crisis of perception and meaning: what does it mean to be human? To promote action for sustainable societies will require a change in our perception of who we are as human beings, the values we choose to live by, and our relationship with Earth's community of life. In this interactive session, we will consider the implications of a working definition of spirituality as: Spirituality describes the reality of interconnectedness within all of existence, known by each human individual consciously or unconsciously. From this reality flows a spiritual purpose and challenge for each human being: to awaken to this reality, to grow in one’s capacity to sense this interconnectedness, and to live it ever more consciously with ever greater integrity, and to contribute positively to this interrelationship of which everyone is an integral part. What spiritual practices will help us to do this? In this interactive workshop, we will experience several forms of meditation and reflection inspired by the writings of Thomas Berry, Passionist priest, and Sri Eknath Easwaran, spiritual teacher and originator of passage meditation. We will explore how these practices help to evoke and reinforce our sense of interconnectedness and our commitment to the transformation of our societies toward sustainability.
The Medicine Wheel: Natural Elements of Human Spirituality
Workshop Presentation Taj O'Brien
The Medicine Wheel is a widely known aspect of many Indigenous American traditions. As its name suggests, it has been used as a healing modality that honors life’s directions and cycles, yet it may be a technology that helps its practitioners find harmonic balance and spiritual insight within relationship of the key elements of complex life events. At the heart of the Medicine Wheel is a core symbolism of the circle and the cross aligning with the four cardinal directions. Its use in connecting micro and macro realities may represent universal harmonic patterns that play out through diverse phenomena that tend to include sequences of four. Such natural phenomena include the traditional elements (earth, water, air, fire), seasons of the year (autumn, winter, spring, summer), and conscious realms of the human being (physical, emotional, mental, spiritual). Explorations in modern understanding may be crucial in applying the unifying principle of this practice, where human anatomy finds connective tissue in both the four lobes of the brain and the four chambers of the heart. While Indigenous American mythology is perhaps the most common source of the Medicine Wheel’s wisdom, amplitudes of resonant symbolism and unified orientation exist among ancient cultures that include the Egyptian Kemetic, Siberian Shamanic, Celtic Druidic, and Gnostic Christian traditions. In this workshop, founded scientific and psychological connections put forth by the likes of Aristotle, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Carl Jung are called to life for interaction among the traditional natural elements and symbols of present consciousness.
