WholeBody Wisdom is delighted to present
Embodied Community Day
a day of edginess, play, growth and connection
for individuals, partners & friends

If you're ready to play big and have all parts of yourself seen and celebrated -- then come join us on:

This amazing day will have three parts,
each section building on the one before:

• noon:                 Doors Open - Arrive
                                (finish registering, yoga, dance,
                                  join the greeting line)

• 12:45-6:00ish:  The Power of Playfulness workshop

• 7:30-10:30:      optional bonus   David Deida Inspired workshop

• 10:30 - ???:     optional bonus  Intimacy Lounge

"If you're not amazed by how naive you were yesterday,
you're standing still.
If you're not terrified of the next step,
your eyes are closed.
If you're standing still and your eyes are closed,
you're only dreaming you're awake.
A caged bird in a boundless sky."
-- Jed McKenna

A day that's filled with people committed to spend the day practicing the WholeBody Wisdom Community Vision and Values described below. With all of us on the same page, we're able to spread our wings and soar ...

We're creating an event where we can:

• Play,

• Nurture,

• Challenge each other to be our best and fullest selves. 

"Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it.
This is a kind of death."
-- Anais Nin

What would it be like to ...

Surround yourself with people who are interested in living up to their potential versus worrying about their past.

"In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety."
-- Abraham Maslow

You're invited to be part of this unique experience:

This three-part event is going to be exiting and enlivening -- a place for those who are ready to find out what’s possible when powerful, loving, open-hearted people come together. Come join friends you already know ... or ones you've yet to meet. We’re going to breathe and move.... We'll have opportunities to emotionally connect…. To learn about ourselves and others…. To play and to grow...

Day-Long Experiential Workshop
The Power of Playfulness:
creating Authentic Intimacy and Deep Community
12:45pm-6pm

• Why can't work, relationships, exercise, and life in general, be more playful and fun?

• Why can't we have our self-power AND our playful, expressive inner-child?

Through facilitated paired and group exercises you'll have the opportunity to embody new skills and new ways of being that will enable you to feel connected to others while being in touch with your childlike freedom & curiosity AND your adult boundaries and care for others.

You'll expand your ability to be playfully powerful while being emotionally intimate. 

You'll have fun, while learning WholeBody Wisdom practices that will leave you feeling powerfully alive.

Then after a break to socialize and/or order out for food, you'll have the option to stay for ...

• 7:30: David Deida's Video: Spirit - Sex - Love
  We'll watch parts of the video to set the frame and context for the evening.
  I've seen this video over twenty times and each time I laugh out loud and learn something new (or get something more deeply that I thought I already understood).

• 8:10: Facilitated Activities: led by Scott Longwell
  Through paired and group exercises you'll have the opportunity to have embodied breakthroughs around: connection, openness, presence, radiance, emotional intimacy, and masculine & feminine dynamics.

• 10:30pm: Complete

Intimacy Lounge
a "Third-Stage" celebration
 10:30pm - ???
(To attend the Intimacy Lounge you MUST have attended the
 Deida Inspired workshop beforehand.)

"The value of the personal relationship to all things is that it creates intimacy... and intimacy creates understanding... and understanding creates love."
-- Anais Nin

Now that we've been grounded, filled-up and deeply-connected through participation in the previous workshop, we can share our best and truest selves -- from a place of ease, joy and personal choice.

"[Third-Stage] Spiritual practice is the capacity to offer your love even when you feel hurt, closed down, tense, angry, misunderstood, or hated."
-- David Deida

At this Third-Stage Celebration you can choose (or choose not) to participate in:

•  Sultry Dancing
•  Sacred Chilling
•  Sexy Eye-Gazing
•  Heart Shares
•  Solo Meditation and Self-Care
•  Coy Flirting
•  Creative Cuddling
•  AcroPlay
•  Massage Chains
•  Puppy Piles
•  Playful Growling
•  Acrosage
•  Wrestle-Dance ... 

-- all served up with an abundance of freedom, ease, and lots of playful connecting.

"I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man
who compels my strength,
who makes enormous demands on me,
who does not doubt my courage or my toughness,
who does not believe me naive or innocent,
who has the courage to treat me like a woman."
-- Anais Nin

--> What to Bring <--

Facilitator:

Scott Longwell

WHEN

To Be Announced

For more information on this or other workshops, or to be notified of future events send an email to:

Events@WholeBodyWisdom.com

Review
Embodied Community Day
by Gigi of Mill Valley
http://braindancing.blogspot.com/2006_12_01_archive.html

Yesterday I spent the day at the "Embodied Community Day." I know that sounds (groan) sooooo Californian.

The invitation promised: a day that is "fun, juicy, inexpensive and open to everyone who'd like to find out what’s possible when grounded, empowered, open-hearted people come together." There would be an "enliven your body" playshop, where we would learn new ways to express your essence through movement, dance, yoga and touch and deepen our emotional connections.

Then an Empowered Intimacy workshop led by Scott Longwell promising "new skills and new ways of being that will enable you to be connected, free, and empowered in romantic relationships, at work, and in Community." All capped off with an Intimacy Lounge of "Sultry Dance and Sacred Chilling."

I was introduced to this group a week ago when I attended one of WholeBody Wisdom's David Deida Inspired workshops and video screenings. It was an interesting concept -- workshop leader Scott screened the Deida film to the group and then lead exercises from the video, or exercises that took a riff on Deida's renowned teachings on sacred intimacy and we experienced them first hand.

I have heard so much about Deida lately (maybe I'm just the last one on my block -- he's written ten bestselling books) and wandered into the seminar to learn what all the hype is about. I came away from the evening feeling a better sense of what it means to be a woman, to be fully present in my body and my femininity and how creating that presence and openness makes me significantly more attractive and available to the right kind of men.

I was impressed with this group of people. First of all, they were definitely far healthier and more attractive than average -- very centered in their bodies, physical and fit. An uncommon number of them seem to be acrobats, contact improv dancers or yogis, and they exude a confident, self-assured presence.

At first the room seemed to be filled with people younger than me, but later I learned that most of the participants were in their mid-30s to late 40s and simply looked a lot younger than their actual age. The ages ranged up to a man in his 70s.

It was raining here in the Bay Area so I decided, hey, why not -- and made the long drive south to the light, airy white loft in Oakland. A girl named Jamie greeted me, and I deposited my shoes in the heap at the door, and padded across the patchwork of thick oriental rugs and sat on a cushion in the packed room.

As I arrived, the group was concluding the playshop where they were doing acroyoga and contact improvisational dance exercises.

Then workshop leader Scott was moving into the Deida-inspired intimacy sessions.

Scott said: "Remember a time when you weren't fully empowered." He's sitting on a futon in front of the group, flanked by a thin, athletic man in his early 40s and a beautiful younger woman with waist length blonde hair who strokes his hand as he speaks and "holds space."  She beams radiantly as if just being in this man's presence is energizing for her, though I have to wonder if it's just an ego trip for him to have the loveliest girl in the room practically sitting in his lap as he lectures.

Scott has a confident, self-satisfied air about him, and a big enigmatic cheshire grin. He's a big man with a powerful build and a shiny shaved head. He reminds me of a New Age Mr. Clean, here to clean up our karma and scrub our inhibitions away.

"The thing that we think is ugliest about us...when we share it, it's no longer hidden, and that in turn makes us more attractive," Scott says. One woman in the room says her weakness is rescuing drug addicted men who end up living in her house and taking her money. An attractive silver-haired elderly woman says her fear is that her body will never make love again. In turn, we confess to strangers, our deepest weakness. When it is my turn, I say: "My pattern is that I get in relationships with fixer upper men -- and buy fixer upper houses." The room giggles nervously.

"A lot of us choose a relationship based on the question: "Do I feel safe?" he says. "Choosing someone weaker than us makes us feel more powerful, but it's a lie. We want to be in control so we hire someone not as smart as us." Scott, who formerly was a management consultant in the corporate world, and still exudes this confident executive power over a room, says: "It takes a lot of confidence to hire experts who are smarter than you in areas where you are weak. In love, and work, you want someone with different skills, but more powerful."

Scott then confesses to us that he was picked on as a child, and very self-conscious as a young man because he was bigger than everyone else. In confessing this secret to us, he did become more human, more real, and in turn, more attractive. (Perhaps this is why we like to learn the relationship woes of celebrities and relish in the marital distress of stars. It makes them more human, vulnerable and thus even more attractive to us.)

Scott points out a sign on the wall: "Often others see us more clearly than we see ourselves. Our deepest gift is often underneath our biggest fear."

We then moved into an exercise where we were asked a question by a partner and then in turn, had to answer the question first as if we were coming from our head, then as if we were centered in our heart, and finally, as if we were one big genital. "Come on, answer this one as if you're one big dick or one big juicy yoni," Scott joked. The room roared with laughter as we put our whole bodies into answering that question. My partner for that exercise was a guy who seemed forever stuck in his head, and I instantly "got" how that when we respond to a sexual need with an intellectual response we're not able to communicate effectively to our partners and then just come across as wimpy and unattractive.

Later that night, we moved into the sacred chillspace -- which by the end of the night had steamy windows and was starting to look more like a high school dance, with couples making out in the shadowy corners of the room on floor cushions. A beautiful man taught me how to do contact Salsa dance (a variation on Contact Improvisation)

I've been opening myself and my heart more to intimate energetic connection with others, and now that I am less self conscious and defensive I'm surprisingly a much better dancer. I was able to feel my partner's energy and sense what direction he wanted to lead me. Instead of stepping all over his feet, I was flowing, utterly in the moment of what we were doing. I suddenly understood why dance is the ultimate seduction, and the best way to feel out a potential partner for compatibility. Somewhere along the line we've become too intellectual and too centered in our heads and thus unable to listen to our hearts. I guess the WholeBody Wisdom Workshop was at it's core about learning how to return to this kind of playful presence when we interact with each other.

The community playground that Scott creates promises the "opportunity to be playfully serious and seriously playful, an expansion of your ability to be open, loving and powerful in the face of real world challenges." I think one could be cynical and say that's all just a bunch of West Coast new age double speak, and there were a few newcomers to the event who uncomfortably admitted they felt that way about it, but in the end, I'd say his words just about sum it up. By the end of the night, I felt more alive and present in my body than I have in a long time, and less self conscious about my inadequacies.

--> What to Bring <--

Upcoming Events:

To receive a notice about upcoming events (and advance registration discounts) send an email to:

Events@WholeBodyWisdom.com

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