In many animist cultures throughout time immemorial, it has been revered knowledge that our physical and imaginal bodies are – as interwoven expressions of Soul, Earth, and Mystery – potent vessels for mutual revelation and prophetic wisdom. However, in many colonized global societies today, this connection to the animate worlds and non-conventional ways of knowing has been profoundly marginalized, desacralized, and forgotten. When we observe many of the current political and social responses to the world’s greatest issues, including relationship conflicts, it is perhaps obvious how much non-consensus reality is disavowed. However, when our conventional and intended responses to individual and collective problems no longer support meaningful change, what practices and perceptual technologies might we turn to? 

If we begin to engage with our deep-time ancestors and pre-colonial history, it is very common to encounter the repeating cross-cultural pattern of human communities turning to the onto-epistemological craft of divination for guidance. 

One way of understanding divination is as an essential practice of preserving the prophetic, in service of greater awareness. Not prophetic as in telling future events, but prophetic in the sense of becoming aware of and intuiting patterns and potentialities as they are manifesting in this present moment, across multiple levels of reality. Perhaps, this is the art and essence of divination. Which begs the question: what if there are novel, emergent, and creative ways of divining?

From a process-oriented perspective, the dreaming-body (in relationship to both consensus and non-consensus realities) can be a powerful divination tool. In other words: the body, the animate world, our imaginal dream-scapes, and the Mystery – as a whole – can act as technologies of the sacred simply through a shift in our perceptual awareness. In this way, somatic divination can open us to divine information that may support us to face life, and respond, as ripening adults. 

In this workshop, we will explore the art of somatic divination through dream-body exercises inspired by process-oriented and animist perspectives as a way to divine an important issue and/or topic in our lives. We’ll journey to the crossroads where our somatic experience meets the workings of imaginal-intelligence, follow the trail of awareness, and harvest what decides to emerge. We’ll turn to our dreaming-bodies as divination tools and see what kind of threads of wisdom blossom to support us to meaningfully engage in radical personal and social change. Our time together will include gentle movement, imaginal creativity, spacious and embodied contemplation, and emergent conversations with the inner and outer Wilds. 

This workshop is open to all body types, shapes, sizes, ages, and abilities. Please bring along a journal and pen/pencil.