Truth Mandala: A Community Ritual for Honoring Our Grief, Anxiety, Anger and Love for the World
DATE: Sunday, January 17th
TIME: 10am PT/11am MT/1pm ET for 2 hours
PLACE: At Home/Remote Retreat
COST: $15/$30/$45 Sliding Scale Donation (Scholarships available by request)
NOTE: This offering is appropriate for newcomers and for those who have experienced a Truth Mandala previously.
Join Nina Simons and Deborah Eden Tull for a 2-hour ceremony that creates a brave space to experience, witness and (if desired) express emotions you may be feeling about systemic racism, state violence, climate, the pandemic and all the roiling changes, challenges and movements uprising at this time.
In the lineage of Joanna Macy’s The Work That Reconnects, and the recognition that emotions - when not experienced or expressed - can create blockages in our bodies, minds and spirits, we are offering this experience on zoom towards collective and personal healing and transformation. Many report feeling wells of compassion, relief and regenerative and healthful flow after experiencing it. The Truth Mandala can be transformative and healing whether you opt to speak or not, and we offer it as a sliding scale donation experience, with no-one turned away for lack of funds.
If you are registering, please be sure to read the Resources and Guidelines section below.
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About your co-facilitators:
NINA SIMONS, Co-founder and Chief Relationship Strategist at Bioneers, is a social entrepreneur passionate about reinventing leadership, restoring the feminine, co-creating beloved community, honoring ancestors and creating connective tissue among diverse factions of women’s movements. Nina created and co-edited Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart, and is a contributor to Ecological and Social Healing: Multicultural Women’s Voices. Her recent book, Nature, Culture & the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership was a 2018 Gold and Silver Nautilus Award Winner.
Nina co-facilitates transformative workshops and speaks widely on regenerative leadership through relational mindfulness, power, resilience and the deep feminine. Prior to starting Bioneers, she was a marketing executive with Odwalla, and social entrepreneur with Seeds of Change. She received a Robert Rodale award in 2003 and in 2017 received a global Goi Peace Award. For more information on Nina’s work, and to learn where else she will be speaking or teaching, please visit ninasimons.com.
DEBORAH EDEN TULL is a Zen meditation and mindfulness teacher, author, activist, and sustainability educator. She teaches the integration of compassionate awareness into every aspect of our lives. Eden spent seven years training as a Buddhist monk at a silent Zen monastery and has been teaching dharma for 19 years. Eden has also been living in, and teaching about, sustainable communities for over 25 years.
Her teaching style is grounded in compassionate awareness, experiential learning, inquiry, and an unwavering commitment to personal transformation. She teaches engaged awareness practice, which emphasizes the connection between personal awakening and global engagement. Eden draws upon teachings from the natural world and an embodied understanding of animism.
She is author of Relational Mindfulness: A Handbook for Deepening Our Connection with Our Self, Each Other, and Our Planet (Wisdom 2018) and The Natural Kitchen: Your Guide for the Sustainable Food Revolution. Her work has been featured in The Los Angeles Times, Tricycle, Yogi Times, GOOP, Shambhala Times, and The Ecologist. She also teaches The Work That Reconnects, a program created by Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy, and teaches for UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center. Eden offers retreats, online courses, and consultations internationally.
resources for those attending the ritual:
Before our gathering, please take a moment to read over these guidelines from the East Bay Meditation Center Agreements for Multicultural Interactions. We want to emphasize that everything shared in the Truth Mandala is to be held in confidentiality, especially important if you are doing this ritual with people you know personally. This is NOT a recorded event. Please also note that you can participate in whatever capacity feels true for you. In other words, no one is required to share out loud. The invitation will be offered for whomever wishes to share.
NOTE: we wish to acknowledge that these Agreements come from VISIONS, Inc. That is VISIONS's requirement for our using them and sharing them, and we fully agree that VISIONS should be credited for wonderful work. EBMC has tweaked some of the wording, and the pdf you see represents those tweaks, which have also been approved by VISIONS.
Please bring with you an object or two symbolizing any of the 4 points in the Truth Mandala: 1) Grief and sorrow for what is happening in our world 2) Fear 3) Anger and outrage 4) Our hunger for what is missing. A note that Hope is also represented by the very process of the ritual itself.
To note: if you need to leave on the hour you can, but if we have a large group, we may choose to go 30 minutes longer to give everyone time to debrief.
