I believe bodies remember and resonate best to poetry and symbol, especially when mixed with reverence for life and not to serious light heartedness.

So just after new years I held a retreat to plant intentions through dancing, writing, listening for key words, and letting them resonate. InterPlay is my design tool bag!

I drew lightly on 10 Tips To Setting Powerful Intentions by Evelyn who blogs at Abundance Tapestry.  I especially like her differentiation between visualization and visioning and her recognition that visioning is a communal act.

We started with gratitude, remembering all who help us and recalled the help we offer. Gratitude sets and resets a tone of detached openness.

We welcomed intentions for our little, everyday self, as well as our bigger visionary dreams, given that living gently on the Earth in harmony with family and neighbors is one of the most beautiful things we can create. (and not too easy, therefore requiring lots of prayer.)

We danced to three pieces of music and wrote for 5-8 minutes between each dance, noticing with partners afterward.

We ate a yummy meal and took some walks.

Then, prayer flags became the form to further evolve and express the poetic seeds of our intention.
I named a few areas of focus such as

1. Gratitude for Helpers (These flags were made by another participant and shared at the end.)
2. A virtue we want to practice
3. A form of service we hope to provide
4. An offering of beauty or playfulness
5. Our devotional relationship
5. Something we want to manifest
6. Our ongoing purpose or question.

We did DT3″s with a partner, an InterPlay movement and storytelling form, using easy focus to uplift our intentions. After some noticing we spent a good deal of time constructing our own prayer flags.

At the end we took another persons flag and danced with it on behalf of their intentions., placed them in the center, sang and named the larger history making intentions n which we play a part.  Then we  gave it all over.

Here are the words from my own flags: patiencing, saunter, i am sensitive to myself: self soothe, lead with neutral, creative alignment, foster freedom, i honor my heart-honor your heart, and someone else gave the words “Thanks for InterPlay supporting you and you supporting InterPlay!” My intentions have to do with being and being aware. Perhaps because I manifest a lot, the balance for me is in HOW I do it. My everyday life is precious.

I am looking forward to offering an online weekly practice in Dance as a Sacred Art staring Monday 5pm pst Jan 12. I call it the Ruby Way. Email me at cynthia@interplay.org if you are interested.  I’ll be leading people in how to not only dance our prayers and our lives but how this dance can embolden clarity of vision, fine tune efficiency of energy, and encourage us to love boldly.

Is there a word or words that you hope to embody this year?