CHOIR CAMP 2023: THE RETURN
Hello family!
I finally got on the facebook page and felt so warmed by what was on there. It instantly lifted my spirits. your vibes and tones, generosity, visuals, stories.
It's been a big week huh?! You may have found yourself completely energised and inspired, with the fire that was lit inside you over the weekend propelling you forward. You may not have left with anything particularly profound, just the release of some stress, met some new people, felt yourself in a group for the first time, felt relaxed around people and you feel you can carry on having had some fun. Or you may have had a very discombobulated week, still trying to find a way to land and make sense of it all. Sometimes it brings up some grief; To be in and then out of the field of connection, having experienced so palpably being caught by a graceful net of like-minded community and unity of purpose. The village. The place where they sing and play all day! Who doesn't want to live there!!!!
Yes, if you have found yourself super wobbly this week, between worlds, not quite able to function or feel motivated, it is completely natural and the only thing is to keep moving with it. We can't force a resolution or any outcome. We need to let ourselves be mush in the chrysalis for a moment. Something has been let go of, rearranged and we are as yet unformed and we just don't really get what happened. There's no way around integration after these things. It can just take some time.
A reminder that little rituals, especially writing, and most often a conversation with a fellow traveller, will allow something to land and will help us wriggle our way into a more settled place.
But what is it to open up these spaces and then return to the everyday? How do we make sense of it? For those who have a few moments to read on, let's have a deeper look...
We've been in liminal space. I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with this term...
liminal /lĭm′ə-nəl/
There is so much we could say about it but I'll try to be brief(ish!).
We open up this space to move beyond the places that we get stopped. to expand out of old habits. to generate something new. Things get shaken up and then in that state we can create something new in ourselves, the analogy I am thinking of is like resetting a bone. That is its opportunity.
Any life-changing moment has a quality of this liminal state. Sometimes life creates it for us, through a natural rite of passage (childbirth, death, marriage, coming of age) or through crisis, an event for which there is a before and after and the passage of change is the threshold. For aeons humans have also been intentionally generating this space, through ritual, for the purpose of expansion, individual & collective evolution and well-being.
We come together periodically for these ecstatic experiences, trance experiences are essentially what they are. They fortify our spirits, they create repair in our emotional and physical bodies and they buoy us with a sense of belonging, a rejuvenation of our spirituality and a sense of what's possible. We witness others in their challenges and beauty and we ourselves are seen and allowed to be ourselves. We remember how the heart can open and what safety feels like in a group. This in and of itself is healing.
It's also a space that is not meant to remain open. It has a purpose, the purpose of moving us to a new place. We engage with it with intention and then we must balance it with normality and find ways to infuse it into our daily lives. The mundane everyday tasks of the relative field of activity are actually what helps the experience of heightened realities integrate and become infused into our beingness. Much as we wish we could stay in this state forever, it is not useful. Were we to keep that space open perpetually, change wouldn't stabilise. Stability is needed for change to occur.
And so we must return. Return and reflect. We are on a threshold. We can embrace the chance to feel untethered to an old self and to be in the nascency of what might be possible without forcing or concretizing anything, without knowing what.And in reflecting, we might see the need to course-correct if necessary.
Sometimes this can be slight, even the smallest act is worthwhile and can change the landscape in ways we can't yet see, it can just be a gesture to your newly arranged self to say, I see you. Anything to activate the potency of the transformational experience and carry us forward into new potentialities, seen or as yet unseen. In formal rites of passage, this change might be cemented by a new name or a new role in community life but it also might be super subtle. You might have a small glimpse of something that still needs to gestate. Don't wrestle that thing, don't bring it out into the light before it is ready. It might only be a whisper and that is wonderful. It might be a very faint feeling of a slightly new version of ourselves, imperceptible to others but significant to our future selves nonetheless.
This is all progress. Letting the experience close and 'quietly moving on' is part of the progression.
This ever-flowing, never-slowing, river of life, moving us on.
We gather our experiences and keep becoming.
These two worlds, the profound and the profane, the unbounded and the relative, the magic and the mundane, they can exist alongside each other in this way in a beautiful correlation, each informing and enlivening the other.
POST CAMP REFLECTION PROMPT IF YOU WISH....
What did you see or feel that inspired you? How were you moved? And why? Why did that particular thing move you? What is still lingering in these days after?Pick only one thing if that's all you've got in you.
Write about it, even just one sentence.
Now find something to do to embody that thing or bring an expression of it into the physical in your life. Don't start with anything big. In fact, the smaller the better. The more mundane, the better. Just bring a symbol of it into your relative existence, plain and simple. It could be learning a song on the piano (or a chorus of a song), it could be a word on your fridge, it could be an object on your altar, it could be buying yourself flowers, it could be drawing a picture, making a totally-unrelated-phone-call to someone you haven't spoken to in awhile, a small act of paying it forward, a swim in the ocean..
If further inspired, you could write down a simple intention of what you are wanting to amplify and experience more of in yourself or in your experience of the world.
And then leave it at that. Keep on moving. Keep on singing. Keep on learning new stuff.
If you haven't already been doing some form of reflection, try and spend just 20 mins with this before too much time passes. There is a window of potency generated by this liminal space and we are still in it.Feel free to share your simple intention in the facebook group, with one other or keep it for yourself, whatever inspires.
Many thanks for your precious attention if you have gotten this far in reading. So happy to be on this pathless path together.
Yours in solidarity and song,
Virginia
I finally got on the facebook page and felt so warmed by what was on there. It instantly lifted my spirits. your vibes and tones, generosity, visuals, stories.
It's been a big week huh?! You may have found yourself completely energised and inspired, with the fire that was lit inside you over the weekend propelling you forward. You may not have left with anything particularly profound, just the release of some stress, met some new people, felt yourself in a group for the first time, felt relaxed around people and you feel you can carry on having had some fun. Or you may have had a very discombobulated week, still trying to find a way to land and make sense of it all. Sometimes it brings up some grief; To be in and then out of the field of connection, having experienced so palpably being caught by a graceful net of like-minded community and unity of purpose. The village. The place where they sing and play all day! Who doesn't want to live there!!!!
Yes, if you have found yourself super wobbly this week, between worlds, not quite able to function or feel motivated, it is completely natural and the only thing is to keep moving with it. We can't force a resolution or any outcome. We need to let ourselves be mush in the chrysalis for a moment. Something has been let go of, rearranged and we are as yet unformed and we just don't really get what happened. There's no way around integration after these things. It can just take some time.
A reminder that little rituals, especially writing, and most often a conversation with a fellow traveller, will allow something to land and will help us wriggle our way into a more settled place.
But what is it to open up these spaces and then return to the everyday? How do we make sense of it? For those who have a few moments to read on, let's have a deeper look...
We've been in liminal space. I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with this term...
liminal /lĭm′ə-nəl/
adjective. Intermediate between two states, conditions, or regions; transitional or indeterminate.
limen in latin means threshold.There is so much we could say about it but I'll try to be brief(ish!).
We open up this space to move beyond the places that we get stopped. to expand out of old habits. to generate something new. Things get shaken up and then in that state we can create something new in ourselves, the analogy I am thinking of is like resetting a bone. That is its opportunity.
Any life-changing moment has a quality of this liminal state. Sometimes life creates it for us, through a natural rite of passage (childbirth, death, marriage, coming of age) or through crisis, an event for which there is a before and after and the passage of change is the threshold. For aeons humans have also been intentionally generating this space, through ritual, for the purpose of expansion, individual & collective evolution and well-being.
We come together periodically for these ecstatic experiences, trance experiences are essentially what they are. They fortify our spirits, they create repair in our emotional and physical bodies and they buoy us with a sense of belonging, a rejuvenation of our spirituality and a sense of what's possible. We witness others in their challenges and beauty and we ourselves are seen and allowed to be ourselves. We remember how the heart can open and what safety feels like in a group. This in and of itself is healing.
It's also a space that is not meant to remain open. It has a purpose, the purpose of moving us to a new place. We engage with it with intention and then we must balance it with normality and find ways to infuse it into our daily lives. The mundane everyday tasks of the relative field of activity are actually what helps the experience of heightened realities integrate and become infused into our beingness. Much as we wish we could stay in this state forever, it is not useful. Were we to keep that space open perpetually, change wouldn't stabilise. Stability is needed for change to occur.
And so we must return. Return and reflect. We are on a threshold. We can embrace the chance to feel untethered to an old self and to be in the nascency of what might be possible without forcing or concretizing anything, without knowing what.And in reflecting, we might see the need to course-correct if necessary.
Sometimes this can be slight, even the smallest act is worthwhile and can change the landscape in ways we can't yet see, it can just be a gesture to your newly arranged self to say, I see you. Anything to activate the potency of the transformational experience and carry us forward into new potentialities, seen or as yet unseen. In formal rites of passage, this change might be cemented by a new name or a new role in community life but it also might be super subtle. You might have a small glimpse of something that still needs to gestate. Don't wrestle that thing, don't bring it out into the light before it is ready. It might only be a whisper and that is wonderful. It might be a very faint feeling of a slightly new version of ourselves, imperceptible to others but significant to our future selves nonetheless.
This is all progress. Letting the experience close and 'quietly moving on' is part of the progression.
This ever-flowing, never-slowing, river of life, moving us on.
We gather our experiences and keep becoming.
These two worlds, the profound and the profane, the unbounded and the relative, the magic and the mundane, they can exist alongside each other in this way in a beautiful correlation, each informing and enlivening the other.
POST CAMP REFLECTION PROMPT IF YOU WISH....
What did you see or feel that inspired you? How were you moved? And why? Why did that particular thing move you? What is still lingering in these days after?Pick only one thing if that's all you've got in you.
Write about it, even just one sentence.
Now find something to do to embody that thing or bring an expression of it into the physical in your life. Don't start with anything big. In fact, the smaller the better. The more mundane, the better. Just bring a symbol of it into your relative existence, plain and simple. It could be learning a song on the piano (or a chorus of a song), it could be a word on your fridge, it could be an object on your altar, it could be buying yourself flowers, it could be drawing a picture, making a totally-unrelated-phone-call to someone you haven't spoken to in awhile, a small act of paying it forward, a swim in the ocean..
If further inspired, you could write down a simple intention of what you are wanting to amplify and experience more of in yourself or in your experience of the world.
And then leave it at that. Keep on moving. Keep on singing. Keep on learning new stuff.
If you haven't already been doing some form of reflection, try and spend just 20 mins with this before too much time passes. There is a window of potency generated by this liminal space and we are still in it.Feel free to share your simple intention in the facebook group, with one other or keep it for yourself, whatever inspires.
Many thanks for your precious attention if you have gotten this far in reading. So happy to be on this pathless path together.
Yours in solidarity and song,
Virginia
