ZOOM – Wednesday evenings 7-9pm, February 8 – June 14 (fully booked – contact me to be added to the waiting list/future course list)

OR

WARBURTON – Friday afternoons 1-3pm, February 10 – June 16

To enrol there’s a $100 deposit to secure your place, refundable before the end of December. 

This half-year course is for those wishing to deepen both their nature connection and creative practices within a nourishing and supportive community. Using an embodied process of stream-of-consciousness writing, we will enter into presence with the more-than-human world and bring back other – and ancient – ways of knowing. We call this co-becoming: a transformative/altered state learning that comes when we open ourselves, with humility, care and wonder, to the animate world.

Through the Co-becoming Plunge we will 

• Encounter the depth and complexity of ecological systems through tangible embodied practices
• Experience, through creative participation, the beauty, resilience and flow innate to life
• Represent this learning in poetic and visual forms, and
• Grow our capacity to share our imaginal and spiritual unfurling with the world.

These times are asking us to step into more life-affirming, somatically aware and interconnected knowing. In trusting the wisdom and holding of the alive world, combined with the support of a community of practitioners, this course will strengthen our capacity to make positive change.

The course will include aspects of a sangha (the Buddhist term for a spiritual community) and a writers group/creative support community. But the core of it will be body practices, meditations and writing as a way to meet the more-than-human world. It will run from February to June and have a maximum of eleven participants in two streams – one in person in Warburton and another on zoom. There will be a two-hour gathering once a week, plus optional readings and projects.

This work is based on the Co-becoming Practice Community courses I’ve been running since 2020. It will include members of those groups but will also be welcoming and accessible for newbies. Here’s a testimonial from a current participant:

The co-becoming practice community has been a highlight of 2022! With wisdom, skill, playfulness and humility, Maya has guided us into a deep, ever-evolving and often surprising relationship with the more-than-human. I feel an increased capacity to listen deeply and remain present with what is within and outside of me. Never have I felt so accepted and at home with a group of people as I have in this community. – Julie

Working with Co-Becoming practices has been an immersive and deeply transformational experience for both myself personally and in my creative work as a writer, musician and artist. Being in a state of reciprocal conversation with the living world, weaving these practices into my daily life and creative processes, is opening a well of inspiration and new-yet-profoundly-and-innately-known experiences. This vivid living-with, and presencing-with life and the animate world are rich and fecund landscapes to inhabit. Thank you Maya for the space of flourishing and edge-expansion you are offering us all in sharing this work. – Phoebe 

If this work calls to you, email me to register your interest on mayawarby@gmail.com

In more detail…

Diving deep, and riding the ripples out from our centre, we will come into presence with the concentric circles of being. Through various creative and embodiment processes we will experience this universe, from the tiny bacterial lives inside us all the way out to distant galaxies, with increased intimacy, animacy and attunement.

We will do this in a way that is psychologically supportive, artistically and intellectually extending, spiritually expansive and somatically grounding and integrating. The process will also include acts of service, giving back to that which nourishes us so generously.

Underpinned by values of generosity, humility, truthfulness, beauty, compassion and self-compassion, patience, and reciprocity, this course is also designed to be a fundraiser for some of our First Nations elders, the Gay’wu group of women, whose book, Songspirals, has been core to the development of the Co-becoming work. $100 from each place will go direct to them.

We will work with nine themes, one every two weeks, in circles radiating from the body.