Eco-Spiritual Direction: Deep listening to Nature in the Spiritual Direction Relationship
Wed, May 11
|SDI
Through this daylong workshop, participants will be encouraged to seek beneath the urgent practical lifestyle adjustments necessary for a new way of relating to the natural world, into an intimacy, a relationship of lover and beloved, a deep belonging to your land, your place as sacred.
Time & Location
May 11, 2022, 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM MDT
SDI
About the event
"We are talking only to ourselves. We are not talking to the rivers, we are not listening to the wind and stars. We have broken the great conversation. By breaking that conversation we have shattered the universe.” Thomas Berry.
We’ve forgotten that we are part of Nature and so the voice of the Sacred remains buried beneath a disconnected, distracted, destructive culture. It is time to reclaim that connection, and it begins with remembering how to listen deeply to the more-than-human others. We are connected with the trees and oceans, the hummingbirds and ants, the soil and springs through a mycelial network that is not only physical, but emotional, and spiritual. And spiritual directors, perhaps more than any other vocational role in our current culture, possess a key to the necessary restoration of kindred relationality that has a chance of “unshattering” the universe.
Victoria Loorz, author of Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred, will offer opportunities to develop or deepen your spiritual practices of intimacy with nature. Practices of deep listening, wandering, mirroring, full bodied emotion, poetry, dreamwork and conversation with particular places and beings become portals to re-member ourselves back into intimate, sacred relationship with the rest of the living world.
Spiritual leaders — and spiritual directors in particular — are desperately needed to accompany those in our communities who are experiencing disconnection, despair, and disillusion related to Earth’s groanings. Turns out, her groaning mirror our own and can offer a way through the despair into belonging, connection and even hope.
Through this daylong workshop, participants will be encouraged to seek beneath the urgent practical lifestyle adjustments necessary for a new way of relating to the natural world, into an intimacy, a relationship of lover and beloved, a deep belonging to your land, your place as sacred.