Wednesdays 5pm-6:30pm Pacific/8-9:30pm Eastern
Oct 30 - Nov 20, 2024
Holding
Steady
a companion course
for resilience in these times
Facilitated by Leah Song & Lydia Violet Harutoonian
We all need ecosystems that help keep us holding steady.
Leah Song and Lydia Violet bring their honed in skills in Joanna Macy’s “Work That Reconnects,” Somatics, Creative Mindfulness, and Song to offer you a companion community through this US election season. The goal of this course is to support individuals in nervous system regulation amidst this cycle of national tension, which in turn can help us access our empathy, insight, and moral imagination.
In this 4-week class
(with 1 session before and 3 sessions after the election) we will:
- Engage in practices from the field of Somatics, an experiential learning modality for finding and healing dysregulation through movement and body-mind connection.
- Engage is teachings and practices from Joanna Macy’s “Work That Reconnects,” a 50-year-old body of work that has helped thousands of people to soothe their collective anxiety and paralysis.
- Engage in traditions of creative expression and song to build collective resiliency in charged times.
We know that there is deep love, anxiety, conflict, and uncertainty moving through our communities and larger society, and we can feel our own needs for tools that directly nurture our capacities for empathy, insight, civic engagement, and principled action.
“If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear.”
― Joanna Macy
We will meet at the confluence of two inspiring and brilliant bodies of work, Joanna Macy’s “Work That Reconnects,” and Body-Mind Connection.
Lydia’s 16 years of scholarship of Joanna Macy’s body of teachings and group work has helped thousands transform despair and apathy, in the face of overwhelming social and ecological crises, into constructive, collaborative action. This work, called the “Work That Reconnects,” brings a fresh way of seeing the world as our larger living body, freeing us from the assumptions and attitudes that now threaten the continuity of life on Earth.
Joanna Macy’s brilliant model for this lives in us as it lives in the body of Earth. Let us find our ways to transform our everyday actions into offerings that build life.
The politics of this moment also lives in our bodies and our psyches, and is deeply affecting our nervous systems, including our ability to think clearly and stay in relationship to one another.
Leah Song, as you know her best in her front role with Rising Appalachia and co-facilitator of the ancestral lineage work through Tending the Bones, is also a devotee to the body and its deep and non-verbal knowing. She is a fierce believer that the more we can move our physical bodies, the more we can also move through the emotional waves of our everyday lives in this increasingly complex world. So much of our anxieties can be constricted in a tightness in the chest and pain in the body; through movement, we can become more resourced and, therefore, more resilient.
From here, she will bring in her own synthesis from her many years of engagement in the reparative work of movement, drawing from body-based mindfulness practices, the somatic arts, trauma-informed 5 Rhythms dance, and more.
Somatic expression has its focus on internal sensations as opposed to performative techniques, and is an established physical-cultural system for repair. For those of us that are experiential learners, it creates a way to receive and process hard information though the body instead of through the mind. Hence, it is a body-based learning system.
You do not have to be a dancer or a mover of any sort to benefit from somatic expressions. If you live in a body you can deepen your practices - however gently or fully - into the catharsis of movement. This is a call for any and all who feel curious. Our process will include tools for body/mind connection , and moving through the tension and stagnation internally to find release and greater connection to self and others.
Optional session with Lydia
This class will likely be a multi-partisan space, and students will never be asked to say who they are voting for in the current US Election. (You are welcome here, wherever you fall along party lines.) If you do wish to have conversation about the US Election, Lydia will offer an optional meeting guided by the principles of Emergent Strategy, an incredible organizing tool and philosophy that’s been gifted to us from adrienne maree brown.
Emergent Strategy for the Election
We are desperately in need of spaces where we can talk through our authentic questions and wrestlings about the 2024 US election, our choices in voting, and find what feels like right action. Lydia has studied ES with adrienne for 5 years and has found it a brilliant tool for grounding and visioning amidst change and complexity! In this current US election season, there are many perspectives on how to campaign and vote in ways that are in solidarity with marginalized communities, in pursuit of collective liberation, aware of the ills of empire while also organizing towards our most desired outcome. Lydia will help guide and hold this dialogue space. She will also ask that participants participate with these guidelines in mind:
Confidentiality - "take the lessons, leave the details"
Take Space, Make Space - an awareness of taking or leaving
space to share.Self-care - you have invitation to tend to your own needs as they come up, which could look like taking a break, pausing to breathe, etc.
Group-care - Lydia will do her best to "hold" the space as a facilitator, and we all shape together what happens
in our 90 minutes together. We ask
for an extension of your care here.Welcoming a pivot from punitive to rehabilitative language and dynamics in moments of struggle, as we learn and grow together in service of life.
I think it is healing behavior, to look at something so broken and see the possibility and the wholeness in it.”
― adrienne maree brown
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Your facilitators
Lydia Violet Hartunoonian
she/her
Lydia is an Iranian-Armenian-American folk multi-instrumentalist, songleader, culture-tender, grief-worker, and organizer. She brings with her over 15 years of dedicated study and co-facilitation with Joanna Macy, as well as multiple in-person “Emergent Strategy” trainings with adrienne maree brown. Lydia founded and runs School for the Great Turning and has facilitated Work that Reconnects workshops for thousands of people in diverse communities and settings.
She has a great enthusiasm for helping folks bring forth their personal callings and gifts. Lydia’s work involves a unique synthesis of Joanna Macy’s work, her own research and practice in cultural healing and integrity, and her role as a musician and community singing facilitator. She also developed “Tending the Bones,” a course for
re-connection with ancestral cultures, mythology, and folk traditions.
Leah Song
she/her
Leah Song has her roots in the Celtic Isles and Southern Appalachia. She brings with her 15+ years as the frontwoman of internationally-renowned folk group Rising Appalachia, born from her own lifetime immersion in a variety of folk music traditions. Leah is also passionate about somatic healing, offering groups her own unique synthesis of yoga, dance, meditation, and vocal exploration.
Over the past 15 years Leah has studied and trained with Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Hawah Kasat, the Urban Bush Women, Lucia Horan of the 5 Rhythms lineage, Bobby McFerrin, and taken workshops in Somatics Experiencing, yoga therapy, trauma sensitive mindfulness and more.
Join and get:
- Four live sessions with Lydia Violet & Leah Song, with recordings available within 24 hours of the session.
- An optional live call with Lydia Violet where participants can bring their questions and wrestlings about this year’s US presidential election.
- A selected anthology of Joanna Macy’s writings.
- An interactive online forum with Lydia Violet & Leah Song.
25% of all proceeds will go towards Hurricane Helene Relief
One-time Payment
$175
Two Payments
$88
Per Month for 2 months
Scholarships
We want to create as much access as we can to our courses, while paying all our teachers and team members a fair, livable wage. If you would like to apply for a partial scholarship, please feel free to fill out this scholarship application, and we will respond to you within a week of entry. Thank you!
FAQs
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The live sessions of this course starts Oct 30 and ends Nov 20, with recordings available forever! Live calls happen on Wednesdays from 5:00-6:30pm Pacific/8-9:30pm Eastern.
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After enrolling, you have unlimited access to live meeting recordings for as long as you like. The course discussion forum will stay open for approximately 4 weeks after the course is complete.
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Some kind of computer or smart phone device that logs you onto Zoom and our course forum, hosted on Circle.