Body-Mind Centering® meets Maitri Space Awareness
with Barbara Märtens and Friederike Tröscher
August 10th to 20th, 2024
Dechen Chöling, France
Drawing on both the Maitri Space Awareness and Body-Mind Centering® approaches, we will learn to open our heart and senses with courage, mindfulness and respect. A journey of discovery into our innate wisdom: a compass for navigating challenging times.
We live in a time where life on earth is not easy. We are flooded with news and signals of danger, terror, and disbalance to a point where the continued existence of our planet and humanity sometimes seem called into question.
When confronted with pain and despair, both on an individual and a societal level, we often draw back and contract out of fear and overwhelm. We shrink back and isolate ourselves in a cocoon of apathy and supposed safety. When this becomes our way of life, we block our natural wisdom qualities, like empathy, love, joy of life, wakeful intelligence and more.
To live in a less constricted way, with a more spacious, open sense of possibility, creativity, and connection, we can choose another option: to learn to open our heart and senses with courage, mindfulness and respect to explore the situation we live in. When we do so, we discover – to our surprise – that we have within our body, our emotions and mental capacities the wisdom necessary to find answers to the burning questions of our modern times.
B
ody-Mind Centering® (BMC®) offers an experiential study of the body systems (bones, organs, fluids, nerves, muscles, etc.) within the context of human development. Every cell has consciousness, is moving, breathing, relating.
Examining and being present with the living tissues of our bodies through guided perception, movement and touch, opens and deepens direct understanding of how we are in relationship with ourselves and the world around us and how mind-movement and body-movement are inseparable expressions of our unfolding journey.
Body-Mind Centering® was founded by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen in the 1970s and is being explored and deepened by a worldwide community of practitioners and schools. This practice invites us to discover our habitual patterns, to expand into new possibilities and to recognizing the pathways from one to the other.
Maitri Space Awareness Practice (MSAP) was first developed by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and is based on the principles of the five buddha families of Tibetan Buddhism. Each buddha family emphasizes a particular aspect of energy or pattern within and around us, which can manifest in a way that is sane and wakeful or confused and blocked.
By using colored rooms or glasses and specific body postures, the experience of these different energy patterns is intensified. This allows us to recognize how they manifest within us at the level of body, speech / emotion and mind.
The emphasis of the practice is on discovering, within these raw and colorful energies, unconditional friendliness (or maitri) towards oneself. This discovery becomes a basis for living one’s life more fully, skillfully understanding and relating with others, and establishing a dynamic and healthy relationship with one’s work, home and natural environments.
This programme is open to everybody. An introduction to different meditation techniques as well as BMC® and MSAP will be given within the continuation of the programme.