March 8 / This session is hosted by a circle of guides and organizers. We will meet as a whole group, getting to know one another, to start the 14 week journey together. There will be a general introduction to the journey. We will also form of the sub-groups, which will continue to work together for the next four weeks.

March 15

March 22 / We come together to share reflect and share experiences, from our practice with a wider field.

March 29

April 5

April 12 / Our word carries our present self into sound. We reveal, initiate and create ourselves by bringing such word, song or vocal expression into life. When in circle, and as our words are woven heart-fully together with others, just like a basket made with many reeds, we co-create something that can hold a bigger story, a greater picture than any single one of us.

In this circle session we will enter the mystery and magic of the weave, what to listen for, how a communication more or less has impact, the quality of intention from both listening, expressing and being.

April 19

April 26

Photograph is a beehive of life and meaning
beyond logical explanation

It is not a trace of life

It is not a comment about life

It is life itself

A reflection of consciousness

Like myth carries the truth

The drop that contains the ocean

My suggestion is that the photographer has to enter into a conscious relationship with what he’s doing to realise first and foremost that his photography is linked to him by an umbilical cord. It is the mirror of his inner world and images are not good or bad but true or false in relation to his own truth. And by saying truth I’m not referring to ideas or concepts but to a state of being. Thus, the image ceases to be an object of criticism and becomes a meeting point. We feel that it is complete we do not try to understand it. We like it, we don’t like it, or it leaves us indifferent. But this is accompanied by sensations thoughts and feelings if we explore them we enter into a dialogue and a real relationship with ourselves. And as this relationship depends, so our photos acquire substance. And when we feel touched by an image, it is not sentimentalism, it is what happens when our inner truth recognise itself in the picture. The above way gives essential meaning and understanding to photographic act transmute it to a path of consciousness. And the product of this kind of art, reflects this consciousness functioning like mirror of our own truth.

Website: hariskakarouhas.com

May 3

May 10 / letting the soft animal of our body love what it loves

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver
Wild Geese

a moment to connect with our body
allowing to be with all that is
perhaps allowing softening
perhaps touching some resistance
a moment to breathe and listen
soft animal
yielding into what is calling
and what it loves

May 17

May 24

Silence is Often

Silence is often underrated

Delegated to the Back of the Line

A tone in its own time

Undisturbed by the others

Silence is often feared

Yet revered by Soul’s longing

For Stillness and Solitude

Where Silence meets its Mate

Silence is often embraced

And traced to the deepest corners

Of the Globe, the Back-tracking

And landing into Moments of Peace

Silence is often powerful punctuation

In the Mainstream Motion

Of lives lived Loud

Yet waits to be invited, Always

Yet Silence is Often

Most Welcomed in my Day

To share the Tones and Wonder

That Otherwise stay Silent

Silence is often deemed a solitary act

One that asks for space to be cleared

Yet as powerful as any

Are the ones shared with others…

– Sarah Whiteley, The Order of Creation

May 31

June 7 / In a time of unprecedented chaos and paradox, both personal and cultural, our lives depend on our capacity to remember the beauty way and to open ourselves to the great mystery that surrounds us with its immaculate ways. However flawed human choices and actions may be at this time, the song of an intelligent universe precedes our evolutionary struggles and guides us to a higher order when we listen deeply:
How can we go through this initiation we seem so destined to experience?
How will we dance with the great unknown and the mysteries of death and rebirth?

One way we can sanely relate to mysterium tremendum et fascinans (term coined by Rudolf Otto describing the numinous as “the terrible and fascinating mystery”) is by courting and praising beauty, which helps to keep the song of our hearts alive. In this session, we will explore: Beauty as medicine and a sacred act in our lives; and our relationship with beauty as part of the great remembering of the everyday mystery we are each a part of. We will also look at different forms of praise as the foundation of gratitude and in particular, the poetic form. We will appreciate poetry as a vibrant form of praise which directly speaks to and touches our hearts and minds in the darkest of times.

We are imagining us coming together, somewhere in Turkey. The time and place is unknown.