SURPRISE FARM RETREAT CENTER
Ritual: Journey to Wholeness
Workshop on Nov 6th , 2021, 1-9pm
“I have come to suspect that in the absence of ritual, the soul runs out of its real nourishment.”
'Malidoma Some’
Many traditions offer ritual to celebrate seasonal transitions. In this workshop, participants will explore universal characteristics and benefits of rituals, personal and social. We will also practice and experience old and new ways to co-create meaning in today’s everyday ritual. With help from nature setting, we renew our awareness, wonderment, and gratitude. After sunset ceremony, around the fire pit, we will story rites of passage—experienced or missing.
Ritual and ceremonial “patterned” behavior is ancient but appears in present forms. We seek to understand the effect of such patterns (and the loss of them) in cultural and personal stages of development.
Approximate Schedule:
Saturday, Nov 6th
1:00 Arrival & Orientation
1:30 Asking Permission and Setting of Intention Circle (at the Oak Circle)
2:30 Walk through the Meditation Stations
3:15 4 Directions & Meditation Rounds
5:45-6:15 Sunset Ceremony
6:15 5th Direction
7:00 Dinner
7:45-9:00 Fire-pit story-making, Rites of Passage. Music
Overnight stay (reserve tent separately) and Sunday program optional
Sunday, Nov 7th
Sunrise Ritual
8:00 Breakfast
Participant Preparations:
--> Bring a written page on something you want to give up. It should be thoughtful about how “it” had been useful or not in your life, what life will be like without its influence.
--> In preparation, please do some reading on ritual.
Wikipedia is ok, an easy read is "The Power of Sacred Ritual"
Suggestion: the Introduction material and a story from
Ritual and Healing: Stories of Ordinary and Extraordinary Transformation
--> Wear shoes for hiking, long pants, a hat. Re-fillable water bottles rather than plastics .
--> Bring layers for after sunset, and a flashlight.
Registrations
RSVP with a limit of 12 participants.
A sustainable donation would be $100 (students $50), but choose your own valuation.
Overnight accommodation available.
GUIDES
Heriberto (Beto) Escamilla Morales, Clinical Psychology Ph.D., From Nuevo Leon to National City, San Diego
“I believe that our children are forgetting how to dream and how to plant. I see the Retreat Center as an opportunity to share some of my experience and to pass along an appreciation for these natural human abilities.”
Don Eulert, Ph.D., Santa Ysabel, CA, via New Mexico
For 40 years Professor at the California School of Professional Psychology, San Diego. His collection Ritual and Healing stories won a 2014 San Diego Book Award. Now with the Retreat Center, he guides workshops for integration and enactment of Self, with the help of nature.
Ken Gill, San Diego, CA, is the SFRC artist in residence. In addition to being an artist and musician, Ken has spent five decades exploring our ability to perceive through the lenses of various cultures, from eastern religions to native traditions-- as well as ethnobotany specific to those cultures.. Around the fire-pit he may engage us with music and story.
Some Definitions of Ritual:
“A performed pattern to call out archetypes necessary for personal power, to arouse and direct disposable energy.”
“Re-fueling for stages of development and dealing with distressing events.”
“Gestures enlarging the personal to a greater universality and sacredness, even maintenance of a cosmic order.”
“A set of careful procedures which in the end are transcended; they are not an end in
themselves but a launching place for transformation, renewal, and participation.”
Some Functions of Ritual and Ceremony:
-- When ritual attention is paid, something creative happens.
-- Provides meaning, order, purpose, relationship.
-- Helps with passages, transformation, integration of outer/inner or opposites.
-- Gives solidarity to cultural views and world view; and to membership.
-- Brings into life those things in our unconscious we do not ordinarily access.
-- Re-integration of intention and action.