• Penny Livingston

Music as Medicine at the Whidbey Institute

A Retreat Lydia Harutoonian and Penny Livingston-Stark

To nourish your creativity and courage for the Great Turning!

Music as Medicine

Music as Medicine

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In Collaboration with the Whidbey Institute

A Retreat with Lydia Harutoonian and Penny Livingston-Stark

Oct 20 9:30-5:30 Whidbey Institute 6449 Old Pietila Rd., Clinton, WA 98236

Click HERE to Register~

A retreat to nourish your creativity and courage for the Great Turning, the transition to a life-sustaining society and the essential adventure of our time. This transition is as profound as the agricultural revolution, as drastic as the industrial revolution, but necessarily faster than any social change of its magnitude to date. Lydia Harutoonian will lead us through an intimate experience with the Work That Reconnects (WTR), a dynamic, interactive body of work developed by Joanna Macy, inspired by Joanna’s own scholarship in systems theory, deep ecology, and Buddhism as well as 50+ years of international activism.  Practiced internationally, this work has helped many thousands of people to engage in the Great Turning, re-invigorating our energy for action and resiliency. Through group experiential work, meditation, music and connecting to the natural world, we bring a new way of being in the world, thus freeing us from the assumptions and attitudes that now threaten all life on Earth.

Hearts opened by grief and celebration want to sing their songs of longing, despair, belonging, reckoning, brilliant valiant warrior-ship, and gentle loving kindness. Together we will hold space that allows for the healing of our own wounds around giving ourselves permission to make music, learning both technically and emotionally how to free our voices into song. This workshop is open to music-makers of all levels. Singing in a council of friends is one of the most healthful, encouraging, invigorating, and nourishing things that we know. We will explore songs passed down through the ages to uplift and nourish, and songs taught and created by the council of the group in the moment; both as unique paths unfolding gratitude, healing, wisdom and connection.

Penny Livingston will lead us out onto the land...You will experience directly, the healing nature of deep connection with Mother Earth. You will experience the healing capacity of plants, healing waters, fire and music. This deep connection will help inspire, inform and guide into direct action to help heal and nurture ourselves, each other and the Earth.

We are coming together to open our hearts courageously to the love of creation and to learn how to be in relationship to the grief and uncertainty our species is collectively navigating. We are listening deeply to the natural world and learning to understand the conversation that is happening all around us in the wildness of the land and in our souls. We are learning how to express ourselves through song and music making, and to remember medicine as music for our planet-time. We are connecting to Earth and each other to be held by resiliency and understanding.

Through group experiential work, meditation, music and connecting to the natural world, we bring a new way of being in the world, thus freeing us from the assumptions and attitudes that now threaten all life on Earth.

The Registration $100 and includes lunch! if you register before Sept. 30, 2019. After Sept. Registration is $120. 

Lydia Harutoonian M.A., will be our main guide into the Work That Reconnects. Central to this is the spiral of the WTR, mapping a journey through four successive stages: Coming from Gratitude, Honoring our Pain for the World, Seeing with New Eyes, and Going Forth. These four stages support one another, and help us experience first hand that we are larger, stronger, deeper, and more creative than we have been brought up to believe. She will provide people the opportunity to experience and share with others their innermost responses to the present condition of our world. The WTR provides methods by which people can experience their interdependence with, their responsibility to, and the inspiration they can draw from past and future generations, and other life-forms.
Penny Livingston M.A., will guide us into the wild of the living land through listening to the voice of the plants and the birds as they sing the song of the stars and the cosmic influences that are continually surrounding us as we sink into the beauty and love of the natural world. She will lead us in integrating the wild into our hearts. How can we deeply observe and listen the land, learn secrets the plants are holding, know what is happening in the landscape? How can we listen with our hearts and develop our intuitive nature? How can we find our voice and sing the song of relationship? How can we tap into the forces within us that reconnect us to that which is important.

Through connecting to nature we experience our true selves and remember our soul connection to creation. We feel the embrace and learn to trust our knowing that we belong and are being held as children by our beautiful and abundant mother Earth.

Here is what Joanna and others have to say!