Birthing Life T'ai-Chi




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Birthing Life Tai Chi

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Phone
612-369-2718

E-mail
taichindepth@yahoo.com

Locations
Tai-Chi Center
2561 Burnham Road
Minneapolis, MN 55416

Map/directions

Twin Cities Friends Mtg
1725 Grand Avenue
Saint Paul, MN 55105





Dream Tending

Outside the wall of floor to ceiling windows, the twilit evening begins to spread its magic. Slanted rays of the setting sun turn the forest above to gold. The pond beneath these stately watchers becomes a reflective mirror that illuminates their leafy undersides with sudden bursts of liquid gold. A gentle softness reflects upon itself as the last of the feeding goldfinches secret themselves away for the night. Inside, a circle of chairs surrounds the village drum supporting a broad decorative bowl filled with salt holding a candle at its center. The glow from the candle shines into the space with a flickering warmth reminiscent of campfires in the wood.

People arrive by ones and twos, take off their shoes and place an object into the bowl that holds for them an aspect of themselves that they are working with now. By placing this amulet in the salt, they are consciously acknowledging that they are coming this evening to be worked on by what touches them tonight. Salt, that ancient necessity and bringer of soul to mundane experience, welcomes the participants into a circle of mystery.

Mystery. We have been taught to mistrust her, yet she is the only one who can truly hold us in our completeness and as we truly are. She speaks to us through our heart, our body, and our dreams. We have been taught to attempt to outshine her with the harsh light of objective logic. We turn this bright light even into ourselves and burn our shy spontaneity to a crisp wit. Here the power of imagination has been cowed and intimidated into service for fast food control ordering stands where one must have the employable answer or suffer humiliation in fear and terror: Here inner judgment is passed before even one word is spoken.

In Dream Tending we will explore another type of awareness, one born in the soft light of the dream. Here the imagination will be tickled awake and encouraged to self activate, giving an aesthetic shape to otherwise blindingly bright logic. We will find the value in sleep and allow the soft moist light of awareness to fill from within. Courage to express the ineffable can be like coming upon a deer in the wood: She disappears at the first hint of the selfish hunter seeking to kill her with an objective logic that does not belong in this sheltered glen. In this class, as in all classes at the Birthing Life Center, we seek to recognize the primacy of experience in the moment, the presence of the goddess.

In Dream Tending we actualize this attempt first of all in the way we listen to the dream. The first time we hear the dream we listen through the body: We attempt to notice what feelings in the body were stimulated or changed when we “see” an image the dreamer is describing. This begins to awaken an awareness that the body actually is sensing and responding to images in the imagination. The body is always dreaming. If we can open the doors of consciousness to the awareness of the dreaming body, we have contacted an invaluable ally. Rooting in this ally helps us to hear the dream on its own terms as a living entity with its own teleos and intent.

Everything we do in Dream Tending enhances our ability to see through petty ego expectations to the actual living reality of the dream as messenger of the goddess. As her messenger, the dream brings us invaluable experience in seeing through ourselves to the archetypal necessities being expressed by the dream. Each class brings an invaluable teaching that, through the work, attunes us all to what is trying to be birthed into the world. In becoming more conscious of what is struggling to be born, we are given a chance to midwife that birth and become co-creators of life’s aesthetic necessities.