This is a place where people within the community can offer their gifts to others.
Please contact them directly.
Deena Metzger
A poet, novelist, essayist, storyteller, teacher, healer and medicine woman who has taught and counseled for over fifty years, in the process of which she has developed therapies (Healing Stories) which creatively address life threatening diseases, spiritual and emotional crises, as well as community, political and environmental disintegration.
Deena has spent a lifetime investigating Story as a form of knowing and healing. As a writer, she asks: Who do we have to become to find the forms and sacred language with which to meet these times?
She conducts training groups on the spiritual, creative, political and ethical aspects of healing and peacemaking, individual, community and global, drawing deeply on alliance with spirit, indigenous teachings and the many wisdom traditions. One focus is on uniting Western medical ways with indigenous medicine traditions.
She is the author of many books, including the novels; A Rain of Night Birds, (2017), La Negra y Blanca (2012 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature), Feral; Ruin and Beauty: New and Selected Poems; From Grief Into Vision: A Council; Doors: A Fiction for Jazz Horn; Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing; The Other Hand; What Dinah Thought; Tree: Essays and Pieces; The Woman Who Slept With Men to Take the War Out of Them; and Writing For Your Life.
For more information, please visit Deenametzger.net.
Daré
The strength and essence of Daré is in the circle and its intelligence. Council is its heart. And in Council one always speaks from the heart and allows the spirits and ancestors to speak through one. Wisdom comes from the combined voices and presence of everyone who is participating. The purpose of council is to seek answers from the community that we can’t find ourselves. Asking and addressing a single question coheres the community. For more info about joining Dare, click here.
Divination and Finding the Way with Sharon Simone
For more than twenty-two years I have sought and heeded signs, warnings, omens and magic, from the Edge related to changes underway in my life and on the planet. In fact, at important junctures, and even ordinary times, I actively seek and attend to such guidance. And it always has arrived. I cannot conceive of a time of trouble or uncertainty passing without consulting the spirits who show up faithfully when consulting the Tarot, the landscape, in dreams and for me especially when consulting the I Ching.
I came to the I Ching by first happening upon the Tao de Ching (Stephen Mitchel translation) while on a vipassana retreat in the middle of Carson National Forest in New Mexico in 1999. I learned that the Tao (the Way) runs through the heart and that this is where all Change takes place. The I Ching is also known as the Book of Changes. One consults this ancient book of
wisdom, this oracle, when change is impending or underway.
I am willing to meet with “souls traveling the roads” (a phrase from hexagrams #38 and #56)
who would like support along the Way through learning or enhancing skills helpful when
consulting this Oracle. This is an offering on behalf of the Dare community I have been held by
for the last 20 years–a reciprocity in service of mending our hearts and the natural world in
these times.
Classes:
Beginner’s I Ching Group: Depending on interest I will offer a new bi-monthly I Ching
beginner’s group in the fall (October, November, and December (so 6 sessions). Membership: 8
participants. Dates and times to be determined. Email me with interest and questions at
sharon@headwatersproductions.com
College of Diviner’s: This is a more advanced I Ching study group that will meet monthly
(October 2022 through May 2023) that is focused on consulting the I Ching regarding personal
change as it relates to changes underway in social structures. Central to this group’s purpose is
my belief that the global community is in a period akin to the Change in the Mandate of Heaven
when the Shang dynasty (Old King) had lost the support of Heaven and the Chou dynasty (the
New King) was going to assume leadership. The College of Diviners seeks to discern its
relationship to and involvement with Change at this level. Dates and times to be determined.
Email with interest and questions: sharon@headwatersproductions.com
Individual consultations available on request.
Contact me at:
sharon@headwatersproductions.com
SpiritSong with Laurie Markoff and Tom Maynard
In 1997, when I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, because the motor symptoms were on my left side, I decided I needed a right brain practice. I knew a woman, Shawna Carol, (a student of Deena Metzger) who taught something called SpiritSong, so I signed up. SpiritSong is a practice in which each person allows song to come through them. It is a practice that teaches how to let go of our analytical minds and surrender to what comes through without judgment. It is usually done in a circle, in which each person’s song is witnessed and held by the others in the circle, also without judgment. It is a practice of deep listening. To warm up, connect and give breaks from the listening, we also sing a number of earth-based spiritual chants. For many years, I participated in Shawna Carol’s SpiritSong circles and then became a certified SpiritSong teacher. When Shawna moved to Hawaii and then eventually passed, I began leading SpiritSong Circles with a fellow SpiritSong teacher, Tom Maynard. When Queen Corona came, we moved the SpiritSong circles to zoom. The practice of SpiritSong is what initially led me to open myself to the energies and voices of Spirit. SpiritSong allows us to release dis-ease in our physical, emotional, and spiritual bodies, and once the channel is clear, to open ourselves to communion with Spirit.
We would like to offer SpiritSong for members of the community who feel called to it. If you are interested or if you have questions, please email me at Laurie.Markoff@gmail.com. If only a few are interested, I will invite you to the opening session of an ongoing group. If many are interested we can start a group specifically for members of this community.
