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Play as a Spiritual Practice

 

What an absolute delight to hear the personal reflections on play as a spiritual practice from two of InterPlay Australia’s cofounders, my dear friends Susannah Pain and Rod Pattenden on  ABC Radio National Wed 25 Sep 2024. WOW! Dip into this hour-long interview hosted by Dr. Meredith Lake on Australia’s Radio Program Soul Search, and partake of the magic of movement, visual art, writing, and heartfelt play as it sources spiritual life.

At the inception of InterPlay, it was my joy to provoke a cosmic romp through the mysterious, wild beauty of improvisation, art, creation, and divine connection. Trying to make sense of life in a religious context, I needed more than the promising hints, gestures, and hushed undercurrents alluded to in texts and sacraments especially when a cosmic lightbulb went on any time I danced and improvised with Phil Porter.

Why was ecstatic ordinary playful creativity so taboo? Why was play a four-letter word in Protestantism yet also the holy of holies? Why was releasing our obligation to productivity and dowsing ourselves in humanity so liberating?

Finding brilliant souls like Rod and Sue was such a consolation. When the light went on in my peers, it filled me with hope. When they took the wisdom of embodied play into their lives, built on it and led from it, I knew the genius of life was at work.  In addition to fostering personal and group freedom, we were uncovering a way of dancing with life where community care and right relations could be seeded and thrive again. Over time I’ve witnessed this wisdom grow green tendrils in many people and movements. Hallelu.

As you listen to the cofounders of InterPlay Australia perhaps you will be as inspired as I am by their courageous hearts, humility, and potent leadership. Rev Susanna Pain is an ordained Anglican priest, and senior associate of the ecumenical Benedictus Contemplative Church in Canberra.  Rev Dr Rod Pattenden, is an artist, art historian, educational facilitator, and former chair of the Blake Prize for religious art. Check out his amazing art is on his website.

Why an Art of Ensoulment Playbook and Course?

I am not offering courses at this time. Please email me at cynthiawintonhenry@gmail.com if you are interested in course materials or mentoring with an ensoulment coach.

 

The Soul Loves the Body

Embodiment is in the news these days. Hallelu! I feel lucky that I got to play a part in the embodiment movement as I developed InterPlay, an active, creative way to unlock the body’s wisdom. And there’s more. Earth needs us to reboot the ancient soulways if we are going to gather the necessary spiritual intelligence for our time. 


The Body Wisdom of Soul?

In my 20s, a guiding question arose, “What happened to body and soul?” I felt the split in the body and soul of the dominant culture in academia, church, the arts, and seminary. As a dancer who thinks and prays with her whole body, I need body and soul together for mental, spiritual, and intellectual well-being.

My lessons in the Art of Ensoulment began in earnest when seminary professors encouraged me to articulate my theological worldview. Could I say what I knew? That the dance of body and soul is a spacious playground? That life improves when I witness people tune into Soul and dignify “the-me-of-me” and “the-you-of-you.”. That when the motherboard of imagination reboots, we come into balance. Waking up to this will often make us cry or laugh. 

In my 30s, grappling with energy imbalances and injustice, streaming Great Love, and feeling weird, alone, and not knowing how to navigate the world, one day, a voice instructed, “These are your three directives–efficiency of energy, clarity of vision, courage to love.”  I was ready. The path of ensoulment introduced me to the initiations that I now teach in the Three Directives Course.

The Dancing Center

As one rooted in The Dancing Center, a Universe known and organized as movement, my approach diverges from Western models. I’m grateful for indigenous dancing worldviews and take them seriously. Our ancestral ways still demonstrate that embodied spiritual practices bring us together and open up guidance. Meanwhile, if the culture doesn’t support us to be ensouled, we feel crazy. 

Inhabiting the Dancing Center introduces a paradigm shift that rattles white institutional cages. What do we do? We need to belong and get paid by our poorly embodied institutions, so we stick to standardized methods that don’t dance and don’t listen to Earth.

It is said, “Who does not dance does not know what comes to pass?”* Driven by money, property, and prestige, we colonize and dominate others, land, and ultimately ourselves. 

Fair warning: I’ve learned that entering into Creative Source’s earthy, alive simplicity both nourishes our hearts and sets a chiropractic adjustment of body and soul in motion. Our initiations require the undoing of the old practices and histories of dominion. The art of social change happens in one’s personal and collective bodyspirt.

Gifted and Sensitive Bodies

Do you honor soul in body? It can be tricky until we shed old myths that have claimed soul as hidden, higher, hard work, and dependent on higher authority. 

The Art of Ensoulment calls us to reclaim human sensitivity as honorable and normal. Instead of pathologizing sensitivity, ensouled bodies get credentialed as ambassadors of grace. The path and the finale of the Art of Ensoulment are about honoring and credentialing what we notice, know, and offer.

A Course with Words & No Words

The Art of Ensoulment Playbook offers a beautiful map that awakens ensouled thinking. The bad/good news is that ensoulment is not a solo dance. “Wherever two or more gather,” the Holy says, there I am. The time of individualism is over. Spiritual intelligence requires us to learn from body and soul connected to Earth and the Greater Whole. 

Today, ensoulment coaches and mentors invite participants to experience the ensoulment playground alongside willing playmates. If you are a spiritual director, artist, spiritual leader, or therapist, Art of Ensoulment courses introduce an approach and tools that you are welcome to share with your community. It doesn’t cost to get credentialed to coach the Art of Ensoulment, other than familiarizing yourself with my framework. 

I celebrate your unique path, lineage, and way of being. You are already ensouled and hopefully have the support and wisdom you need. 

If you’re drawn and are seeking a way to play a part in the changing movements of our time, please get your playbook and bring your wisdom into play. We need you.

Link here to express interest and explore.

 

Life Purpose is no Mission Statement

Get the Divining Purpose PDF, with exercises and a workshop recording.

Explore a somatic process that helped me clarify the “What, Who, and How” of my Purpose. Differentiate between gifts, calls, and purpose. Ask your body for help to reveal more about your own initiator, your life purpose. Weave a support system to strengthen clarity of purpose no matter what. Unveil an artful expression that rings with purpose.

What I Know

Purpose is more profound than a call, a job, or even a vocation. It’s a poetic way-finder, trouble-maker, and life-loving sensibility. In David Whyte’s words, it’s where “all the elements of our life and our inheritance join and make a meeting,” 

Purpose abides in every cell. While purpose doesn’t need language to carry you, life makes sense when purpose reveals itself in a word, song, gesture, or image that rings true. You understand why things happen the way they do. 
 
History shows that those who dance, sing, and listen to body and soul can hear the poetry of purpose, especially alongside affirming witnesses who mirror, ground, and honor our path.
 

In my seventh decade, I remain curious about my life purpose: “to foster freedom for myself, playmates, and others.” In every season, a new restlessness rises. I need to check in anew with how I am living from purpose.

Freedom is usually attributed to the creatively daring, youthful, athletic, politically active, and rebellious. Me? My right knee often screams when I pivot. I’m drawn to quietly practice an art form that is new to me but basic in the world. Bold and Rebellious? Do people care about what an older white woman thinks or creates? I know I do.

I know my life embraces the freedom of new, paradigm-changing voices. I know I offer shoulders to stand on when asked.

I unwaveringly hold a banner for civil liberties and the right to dignity for every soul and element on our planet. With that banner, I dance.

I know I sometimes suck at freedom. I retract or puff up in the presence of conflict. I forget that I take up space others might need to breathe. At least I know these truths more freely.

Fostering freedom as an elder means increasingly creating room for human beings and their choices, despite what I’ve experienced. Fostering freedom heightens the challenge of bringing my vulnerable flesh to embrace organic life, to stay kooky, to laugh without concern, to curtsy to whimsy, to suffer out loud, and to create, create, create.

Fostering freedom is, for me, about recognizing the power of soul in body, with eyes and heart wide open. It’s about being free from thinking that death is the end or the worst thing possible.

Fostering freedom is about consciously allowing suffering and joy in myself and others. It is also about respecting the limits of my ability to endure suffering.

Finally, and most importantly, freedom is about claiming that I think and live as an artist, freely human.

 


To get the Divining Purpose PDF with exercises from the Art of Ensoulment Playbook, plus the recording for $35 Register Here.

 

What Happens in a Dance Chapel?

Dancing Saints from St. Gregorry Nissa Episcipal Church

The Hidden Monastery has a secret. It runs on the restorative power of Dance Chapels.

I discovered I need a regular space to be my best me. For this, I need my home prayer languages- movement, breath, voice, listening. Unfortunately, I found it hard to find a place to pray like this with others. I could teach, write, join workshops and praise the dancing way as I do in Dance–The Sacred Art: the Joy of Movement as Spiritual Practice,  but, what I really need is to pray and play with others in a ritualized holy time. It’s not enough to dance alone or on a rare occasion.When I move with two or more people, the body and soul switch turns on. 

Only then do I most gracefully touch
the depths of my soul
the truths of my body
the energetic web vibrating, near and far
and enter the sacred portal of collective imagination.

When others join I get to hear their wisdom as we engage our diverse Spirit Teams, receive guidance, transmit healing prayers to one another and benefit as others dance and pray on our behalf. Chapels feel effortlessly potent. Like our ancestors we travel and deepen wisdom by dancing with each other in ritual times.

Dance Chapel is the single most important thing I do for my mental, emotional, and spiritual health. Because of chapel my soul is well. Of course, I want this for others. But, my leadership style and time isn’t for everyone. So, I support additional online dance chapel times and leaders. 

I encourage everyone to find something like a dance chapel. And, if you’ve been thinking about coming, please do.

Here is the Dance Chapel link  825 748 1773 The Password is wedance https://us02web.zoom.us/j/8257481773?pwd=R0c2dmN3dDhsbnMxYUh1aEpPNkZiQT09

What happens in dance chapels?

 
Entering the zoom room, each person is welcome to take time to light a candle, virtual or real and share an intention out loud or in the chat box. If you aren’t feeling well you can witness or participate in a quiet way.
 
Next, we warm up body and soul in a simple way. I lead a non-verbal warm up where members are free to follow or to move as they desire. This is about 7 minutes. I often conclude this meditative period by inviting people to move one hand and hum or sing as we warm up voice and hear the inner song of the moment. (We are all muted for this.) We pause afterward, soak in a little silence, and then affirm and notice what is present.

Each chapel is different! There are hip hop dance chapels, art making chapels, poetry based chapels. The middle section of chapel nourishes body and soul with poetry, music, and practices. I am currently invoking the art and wisdom of Meinrad Craighead’s Litany of the Great River. I share her image and prayer, then create opportunity for reflection using movement, writing or other media.

In the third and last section of chapel each person is partnered with another participant. We briefly tell our partner something we would like a dance-prayer for. Then, one partner dances on behalf of the other partner to music. We then change roles.

Chapel concludes with a deep breath, final word and blowing out our candles.

Here is the Dance Chapel link  825 748 1773

PW wedance

 

Monday at 4:30 pm pst with Cynthia Winton-Henry
Tuesday 4:30 pm pst with Monisha Mittal
Wednesday 9:30 am pst with Marla Durden
4:30 pm pst Dancing Hand with Ruth Showalter
Thursday 9:30 am pst with Nancy Pfaltzgraf and Jane Siarny
 
More information about chapel leaders at Hidden Monastery website.

There is no cost to participate. Many regular attendees financially honor the chapel and leaders through the Hidden Monastery via paypal.me/cynthiawintonhenry, Venmo @Cynthia-Winton-Henry or check to Cynthia Winton-Henry 4025 New York Ave 317, Fair Oaks, CA 95628. 
 

The Longing to Belong to a Dancing Center

If someone asks me who is my spiritual community I’m going to say, “I belong to The Dancing Center of Love’s Hidden Monastery.” For me these are real people and beautiful relationships.


Fortunately or unfortunately, people rarely ask about my people. In my world it seems we’re expected to be pretty much on our own, unless we are attached to family or work. Even when I had membership in a spiritual community, I rarely felt certain that I fit in given my sensitive, mystical, playful, somewhat INTENSE nature. As an elder, I now see more clearly my situation. Maybe the question of belonging is overworked? Do sensitive bodies ever fit? After all, we are statistically one out of five.

Still, if we bodies want to grow in ease and grace, we require a ‘deep enough’ sense of belonging, a grounding, strongish circle that can willingly credential our gifts and purpose. 

Do you dream of deeper connection, but find it hard to create one? Do you struggle with belonging?

 

If you follow what is happening in the Hidden Monastery maybe you, too, are wildly in love with Mystery, magically moved by grace, and compelled to pray in uncommon ways. Like me, you probably know what it’s like

  • To be geographically distant yet intimate in shared practice.
  • To provide service yet often feel alone.
  • To yearn for playful embodied sanctuaries where beauty and truth can rise without interrogation.
  • To endure institutions and groups that resist body and soul.
  • To know justice as both the beauty we give ourselves and what we seek in all relations.
  • To feel the haunting call to honor ancestral and adopted lineages and equally dignify all the Wisdom Trees in Earth’s garden of love and joy.

 
Perhaps you are drawn to what is being pioneered in the Hidden Monastery. If so, you are at the heart of helping redefine spiritual community and practice. This is the art of ensoulment that is happening in dance chapels, the Art of Ensoulment Course, the Creativity Studio, in individual spiritual direction and more.

Would you like to deepen connection, and better enjoy, see, and support The Dancing Center? If so I extend to you my invitation to join me in The Dancing Center of the Hidden Monastery where I will offer you

  1. Grace Notes- a private email list to share prayer requests,  celebrations, and your offerings.
  2. A regular letter that will curate your wisdom, art, poetry, prayer requests, and findings from my trove of resources of contacts.
  3. Supportive references and reviews, social media, and newsletter announcements about your work from Cynthia or other qualified members.
  4. An annual Credentialing Celebration to reaffirm our gifts and purpose.
  5. Discounts on workshops and retreats. (not including the Art of Ensoulment).

 

If you already contribute thank you! Link to join the Circle.
You are resourcing our circle’s future expressions. 

LINK HERE TO JOIN

 

If this is a new practice, please join at $25/month
or make an annual contribution that is right for you.
Contribute Here

 

In gratitude, may we bow together

honoring all,

journeying forward

one dance, one prayer at a time.

 

Cynthia

 

 

 

Things to know about wisdom, sensitivity, and the prime directive

 

“The soul loves the body.”- Meister Eckhardt

As a dancing theologian seeking a theology that dances, I’ve been researching and teaching the body wisdom of soul for ten years. That doesn’t include the decades I dedicated to InterPlay: an active approach to unlocking the wisdom of the body. 

I’ve never been clearer. New, yet ancient premises are needed if we want to live from a healthy theology or worldview, one that attunes to the dancing, dynamic, embodied, and spiritually intelligent Universe. This is where ensoulment comes in.

Last July I decided to reorganize my year long Art of Ensoulment course. At the same time I began prepping the playbook for publication. Writing and thinking are remarkable exercises. Wisdom loves order,  just so long as I don’t try to control it.  Along the way insights rose! I love that.

I am excited to supplant several underlying myths that prevent the dancing way and to offer the ground-shfting understanding that can better lead us into the sustainable, honoring, ensouled dance of life.

This Fall you are invited to sign up for a Free Introductory Course on  “Wisdom, Sensitivity and The Prime Directive.”  The wisdom isn’t unique. The way I put it together is. It’s all part of the Great Turning. And as a highly sensitive dancer, artist, and thinker, I am used to being on a pioneering edge.

I would love your input and tweaks.  Please come explore

1) The beautiful and powerful role of human sensitivity

2)  Why social change requires the body wisdom of soul

3)  The Prime Directive: Your Key to Free Will and Soul- NO TRESPASSING.

LINK TO CHOOSE YOUR PREFERRED TIME 

  • Wednesday, Sept 28, 230-4:00 PT
  • Thursday, Oct 6, 1130-1:00 PT
  • Wednesday Oct 26, 9-10:30 PT
  • Wednesday, Nov 2, 10-11:30 PT
  • Friday, Dec, 30th, 9-10:30 am PT
  • Monday, Jan 9th, 2-3:30 pm PT

You are welcome to attend more than one. You can also request to receive a recording of the material I will share. Tell your friends. Make it a bigger conversation!

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