Awaken from the Trance

Participants awake to their inherited conditioning and beliefs, and attend to their unconscious programming. And as we recover our mind–body awareness, we rewrite our legacy—softening both the trauma and “the trance” for those that come after us.

Between gatherings we’ll read about social power, body image, sexual objectification, archetypes, stereotypes, body phobias, and more.

Our themes include:

• Recognizing and seeing “the trance”
• Embodied ways of knowing
• How our beliefs shape and limit our lives
• The collective and archetypal aspects of “the trance”
• Meeting the (abjected) Divine Feminine
• Embodied sovereignty

• Whose eyes are looking at you when you gaze at yourself in the mirror?
• Whom does the body you see there belong to?
• How do you know the things you know about your body? Where do those stories originate?
• And where do you feel separated from yourself—from your tenderness, intuition, receptivity, or your capacity for connection?

If you express qualities like the ones above—qualities archetypically associated with the feminine—the expression “it’s a jungle out there” may hold some experiential truth for you. The shadow side of the Divine Masculine— aggression, a preoccupation with power, a toxic relationship to progress and production, intolerance and injustice—dominates and dictates our contemporary world. The feminine and its gifts have been silenced and wounded. One term for the consequences of what this surpression is what Bodyrites calls “the trance.” Another is “Patriarchy Stress Disorder”—both the inherited trauma and the current oppressions we experience from the over- privileging of masculine qualities.

The good news is we can embrace the fact of our wholeness through shedding light on the stifled parts of our consciousness. To enter the jungle and do this courageous work is not only to awaken from the trance but to embody the Divine, embracing all the parts of who we were meant to be.

Our research into “the trance” has demonstrated how we hold stories and beliefs about our bodies—whom they belong to, how power acts upon them or emanates from them—that are so ingrained we don’t know they’re there, let alone whether they’re true. We may feel trapped in an idea of the role we’re supposed to play in this life—regardless of our gender—because that role inhibits who and what our spirit is longing to be.

To get in touch with our bodies and recover our sovereignty is to understand how both the trauma and the power of healing reside within us. It’s to dispense with a dangerous inherited mythology that induces self-loathing, and to awaken to the other half of our wisdom. It’s to invite in our deepest desires, authentically express ourselves, love who we love, unapologetically inhabit our power, stop shuddering at the prospect of aging, and hear a loud, resounding “YES!” when we look at ourselves in the mirror, knowing we’re living and loving ourselves wholly.

It’s where qualities of the feminine—instinctive, interdependent, lush, brimming with birth and death—co-exist with the masculine. Archetypically, the jungle is also a symbol of the unconscious: the hidden, repressed, and underdeveloped parts of ourselves. It’s what the hero enters to discover something about “himself”—in this case, “her” connection to the feminine—and to be irrevocably transformed. As counterintuitive as it might seem, we need to enter and explore the jungle if we want to survive.

“Entering and exploring” means examining ourselves, holistically and vulnerably, to shine a gentle light on the suppressed parts of ourselves. It means being honest with ourselves about the ways we’ve tried to live as though we are whole, and taking compassionate responsibility for our self-silencing. It means surrendering to the parts of us that want to go soft, nurturing what wants to grow and transform. It means reassessing what we believe about the feminine, returning it to its pedestal, and regarding it with reverence once again. It’s messy work. But it’s some of the truest work we can do in this lifetime.