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The Work That Reconnects is a powerful practice that enables us to connect deeply with our innate wisdom and to reawaken to the interconnectedness of all life. As part of our Wheel of the Year series, we weave in the Work that Reconnects with a series of interactive practices to help you celebrate the Lammas, reawaken to your connection to life and to your body, and move through the difficult emotions that may be blocking you from experiencing life to its fullest.
What to expect: guided meditations, writing prompts, imaginative exercises and powerful conversations. Full participation is requested, although you can sit out of any exercise you like. Due to the sensitive and personal nature of the sharing in our workshops, we cannot record them.
The Workshop is offered on a sliding scale of 30-70 GBP. It will take place over 3.5 hours on Sunday, August 1st (with a 15-minute break in the middle).
Lammas is the cross-quarter day between the Summer Solstice and the Autumn Equinox, and it marks the beginning of the harvest season.
Traditionally the peak of summer heat, the first hints of Autumn also start to show themselves—the first grains are ready for harvest, the trees begin dropping their fruits, and daylight noticeably starts to shorten. It is a time to give thanks for the abundance of the past growing season and to look forward to the remaining weeks of light and warmth as we continue reaping what we have sown.
Lammas rituals are related to harvest and gratitude, and acknowledging and celebrating what has unfolded so far during the course of the year.
About the Wheel of the Year Series
The intense love affair between the sun and the earth, between light and life, is a constant drama of change and response, of expansion and contraction. Gwyneth and Matthew are offering a series of 8 workshops over the year, which are designed to calibrate and align inner-being with outward expression.
More than ever the world is changing, and this constant change can seem relentless, unsettling and unwelcome. By more closely observing and celebrating the tremendous energy of the changing seasons, we can better allow change to flow through us and around us, and meet it with constant creativity, renewal and purpose.
The modern disconnect with nature is apparent all around us. One way that this shows up is as a misalignment with the seasons. We are constrained to try and be the same all year round, and especially in winter this can leave us disaffected and depleted. Modernity requires constant growth and progress, but this linear path is unsustainable, and beginning to unravel all around us.
The wheel of the year is a profound and embodied teaching about cyclical time, about expansion, contraction and rebirth, about constant flux and relentless change. By coming into deeper alignment with the seasons over the course of a year, we can deeply resource ourselves for the dark winter to come, and find new ways to embrace and affect change.
Drawing on ancient wisdom adapted for modern sensibilities, and the tremendous power of the Work that Reconnects these workshops will be offered throughout the year. The format will be the same, but the focus and energy will be entirely different each time, as appropriate to the time of year. You can come to one or two, but each workshop offers new tools and insights to help you live life life in greater connection to the seasons.
What others are saying:
"Matthew and Gwyneth beautifully compliment each other creating and holding sacred space across continents in the virtual world we now inhabit. They powerfully facilitated an experience honoring the cycles of nature - mid-winter dreaming and melting the ice of Imbolc - and weaving the seasons artfully into the deep work that reconnects us to the planet and each other. I felt honored, a sense of belonging and held in my grief and my joy of being human at a very difficult time. Gwyneth and Matthew offer a rare authentic experience greatly needed to meet the life challenges of our time. " Cathy, workshop participant
About the facilitators:
Gwyneth Jones writes, facilitates and coaches around deep adaptation, the Work That Reconnects, connection to nature, and emotional intelligence (to name a few things). She lives in the magical city of Prague (Czech Republic), where she tends her small garden and dreams about opening an ecological centre, where she can teach others how to reconnect to their souls, to the earth, to the land.
She originally comes from the beautiful lands of North Wales, and is also a fluent Welsh speaker.
Matthew Painton is a Deep Adaptation Coach and WTR facilitator helping people take the world predicament deeply into their being so as to find ways to respond appropriately, proportionately and with love.
He has an academic background in Philosophy and Science and has practised and taught meditation for many years. He offers Wider Embraces meditation as a part of his coaching practice. His working career involved different ways to immerse and involve people with nature for mental, emotional, spiritual and physical well being. As part of the Deep Adaptation network he has developed and launched a web environment where all kinds of practitioners can offer their services and develop and cross-fertilise their practices.