UPCOMING WEBINARS
UPCOMING WEBINARS
Having had the opportunity to experience many different webinar formats, I have found that the most rewarding moments often happen in the exchanges between participants themselves, and how a sense of community begins to emerge through these exchanges. For this reason, I often refer to the webinars as community conversations.
The general structure is that I begin by sharing 20-30 min of reflections on a specific theme, and thereafter have us break into groups so that participants can engage and listen to one another directly, after which we will reconvene and share our insights and discoveries with the entire group.
Sunday, December 10, 2023
11am Pacific Time
8pm Central European Time
A Collective Listening - Part II
“When listening together becomes a tuning fork that can support us in regaining our equilibrium through connection with one another”
Part II - Free webinar/community conversation
For this particular session, I have invited a very special friend and talented songwriter, the illusive Tom Sway, to share a couple of his song-stories with us, to invite us into a deeper listening experience. I’ve known Tom for over 20 years and, since the pandemic, we have continued a weekly cross-seas video call to support each other in our creative practices and the tangles of our mired imaginations. I promise it will be a spirit-stirring treat!
A couple of weeks ago, in the last conversation, I invited us to consider what might happen if we see and understand listening not as a technique or activity, but a way of being with others. What happens when listening is shared? It's not always easy, but when it happens, it is, paradoxically, effortless.
This online gathering will pick up this same thread. It's open to anyone who wishes to attend. Together we will reflect on the particular qualities that arise when we experience listening as a group process - those moments when we allow ourselves to fall into a state of deeper listening, which invariably becomes a state of deeper feeling - a sense of time slowing down, of greater spaciousness, and, often, a natural willingness to be more vulnerable or transparent in what we share. And then to consider, how does listening operate beyond the human sphere? How might becoming curious about the more-than-human-world of trees, plants… the rich biodiversity of our planet itself might teach us something about listening? (I mean, do we really think trees don’t listen?). In all of this we find something undeniably alive and healthy - we find connection.
Link to Zoom Room via RSVP
Inside the Under community group
Sunday, November 26, 2023
10am Pacific Time
7pm Central European Time
A Collective Listening
“When listening together becomes a tuning fork that can support us in regaining our equilibrium through connection with one another”
A community webinar with Todd Thomas Brown
Last Sunday, we discussed how our experience of listening is able to deepen when we understand listening as a feeling rather than simply an action or behavior. We begin to see listening as a feeling-state. This Sunday we will delve further into this exploration, to better appreciate the stabilizing effect that takes place when we enter this listening-state together. Akin to an orchestra tuning their instruments before a concert, when we listen together, it is as if our bodies begin to sense and adjust to one another, finding a shared resonance. This draws us out of the patterns of our habitual thinking and into a wider space of being, healing, and connection.
Sunday, November 19, 2023
10am Pacific Time
7pm Central European Time
Creative Listening
An exploratory conversation with Todd Thomas Brown
What is the feeling that lives inside of listening? How does it affect us and simultaneously act upon the world around us? What is the activity of listening in relationship to the full presence of our being?
This is a subject that never ceases to astound me, one that always holds more and more insights to discover. Many of us have grown up in a culture where listening is seen as a passive action. From the time we were born, we have been taught the value of “freedom of speech” and, as we often discover, it can be a long journey to arrive at the point that we are able to speak for ourselves, to have the courage to share what we think and feel without self-censorship. Far less, however, have we been supported in understanding the reciprocal power that is listening - that listening is not simply a response to the activity of sound, but is also an active presence that alters the chemistry out of which sound and voice arise. Consider how many examples of speeches and powerful speakers we see daily on social media, and then ask, how many examples do we encounter of profound listening?
5 Years on a Bicycle - Saying "Yes" when you have no idea how it's going to work
WHEN: Coming Soon! (TBA)
Todd hosts special guests Marc Hors and Indira Urrutia for a conversation about diving into the unknown and crossing continenents in the process.
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Photographer Marc Hors left Alaska on a bicycle with a loose plan to make it to the southernmost tip of Patagonia, South America. He took a brief hiatus upon reaching San Francisco, CA, where he met visual artist Indira Urrutia. Indira said she would like to travel on a bicycle. Marc replied, “Pedaling is the easy part, to live on a bicycle is what’s complicated”. They agreed that she could try it out for a few weeks and then see. Indira did not even own a bike at the time. So they bought a bike and packed their things. In just the first day they got separated in the coastal fog south of San Francisco. Despite the fog, they eventually found each other and thereafter spent the next four years riding from one town or city to the next, from San Francisco to the southern tip of the Americas. What is most unusual is that they never plotted our their route. Instead, they would host an informal slide-presentation and conversation with the local communities they encountered and thereafter followed the guidance and suggestions offered to them. Theirs is a story not of cyclists conquering a continent, but of artists-lovers navigating human relationships in an abundance of uncertainty.