Sacred Sensuality: Pathways to Presence & Pleasure
This nourishing retreat on the Mornington Peninsula offers women a safe space to connect deeply to the wisdom of their living/loving bodies and to remember and reclaim the body as Temple as Sacred as Earth.
This is a weekend of singing up bliss, diving deeply into the pleasure of our female bodies and the present moment, under a Full Moon in the fire sign of Leo. Awakening to the Earth as Lover, listening deeply to our womb space, our breasts, our hearts, our bodies. Singing up our sacred sensuality, our birthright.
Yet, as soon as we make such an intention, we are faced with our other birthright: the legacy of centuries of undervaluing and abuse in a patriarchal culture that still, to this day, rapes, threatens, kills. Shame, pain and trauma – whether arising in our own stories, or the stories of our mothers and grandmothers, the stories of our sisters around the world, or the stories of our wounded Earth – shadow our bliss at a cellular level.
This is a weekend of allowing, rather than forcing. We will lovingly receive our grief and joy, both, as Teachers on this journey to wholeness. We will play, pray, explore and allow all that needs to be expressed to be expressed.
We are not alone. We will listen with the ears of our hearts, sharing our stories in the alchemy of loving sisterhood.
At its heart, this weekend is an invitation to listen deeply to your body and what you are needing. To trust your own impulses and receive your own intuitive wisdom. No activity is compulsory, all is offered in a spirit of openness and a deep trust in your process. You choose what you share and reveal.
We alchemise our past through the power of our loving attention, and Grace. And we do this for all our relations, stretching forwards and backwards in time.
Together we are Re-Membering our birthright for pleasure, for Aliveness, for Authenticity.
Together we are reclaiming our Readyness to offer ourselves fully for the healing of ourselves and our world, emboldened by the truth of our Sacred Sensuality.
A taste of some of the activities on offer:
* Creating sacred space in our bodies and through the intimacy of a women’s circle
* Barefoot dancing on the earth
* Massage and nourishing touch
* Drum journeying
* Crafting our stories with wool and thread
* Gazing, milling and deep ecology processes
* Goddess rituals, anointing, prayer and ceremony
* Drumming and Singing ourselves up
* Pelvic Blessings and Womb stories
* Walking on the earth
* Ample free time to be with all that arises in this beautiful space
And many more divine, heart and womb felt offerings!
~ This is open to women of all sexual persuasions and flavours! ~
Bookings essential.
$380 early bird until 15th January.
$440 after that.
Tix via Eventbrite.
You are welcome to pay us directly (to avoid the booking fee), just send us a txt. (contact deets in FAQs)
Price includes delicious food and accommodation for two nights.
Payment plans available.
Hosts:
Sarah Miller is a Moonsong workshop facilitator and hosts the Temple of She!, as well as movement and dance sessions for women. She is a deep-hearted environmentalist, poet, writer and dancer, wife and mother.
www.embodimentsdance.com.au
Rebecca Funk is a priestess living in service to the divine feminine. She is a writer, workshop facilitator, and Apprentice and Intern Teacher with the School of Shamanic Womancraft. She is mother to three children, and wife to her partner of thirteen years. This marriage is an Apprenticeship in intimacy, at times excruciating and at times ecstatic. Spiritual embodiment and honouring of the feminine have been lifelong explorations.
www.priestessyourlife.com
FAQs
What are the principles that inform this work?
You can read more about our grounding principles at the end of these FAQs (see below).
What are my transport/parking options for getting to and from the event?
Car is most convenient, and takes about 1.5 hrs from the city, although peak hour will affect this timing, so please check for yourself.
There is also a bus (#782) that runs from Frankston to Flinders (takes 1.5hrs). On the Sunday, the last bus comes through at 3.25pm, so you’d need to leave slightly early. Please check the timetables before you commit to this means of transport!
How can I contact the organiser with any questions?
Very happy to talk through any questions! Call Sarah on 0435 140 148 or Bec on 9478 239 400.
What’s the refund policy?
50% refund until 2 weeks before the event; after that, no refund, in order for us to confirm catering and accommodation, etc.
Do I have to bring my printed ticket to the event?
No, we will have your name on a list.
Is my registration fee or ticket transferable?
Yes, just let us know who’s coming instead!
GUIDING PRINCIPLES
The Chambers Dictionary defines the word sensual as ‘of the senses, as distinct from the mind; not intellectual or spiritual.’ But actually, our embodied experience, as women, as humans, is a spiritual experience, and there is an deep intellect of the body that is wise and true! We are rewriting this old story, shedding this mistruth.
The sacred is not beyond us, but within us, and it is through our bodies, senses and intuition that we commune with divine Mystery.
We offer a shamanic perspective on sensuality, on the embodied experience of being a woman.
In our perspective, the body is the gateway to and the locus of our spirituality. In this earthly plane, Spirit is matter and matter is spirit.
* * *
We are all sexual beings. Sexuality is far vaster than limited commercialised/patriarchal versions of it.
Sexuality is the pulse of the universe flowing through each of us.
We are 100 percent sexually alive beings.
Sexuality is the eroticism for life, the source of our essential creativity.
Sexuality is a whole body/whole spirit way.
We always have a womb space – whether or not we still have a physical womb – and we can always attune to its wisdom.
* * *
Sexuality is integral to our rites of passage into the phases of woman.
“As a woman journeys through her life, during her incarnation on the earth plane this time around, she encounters many a shamanic journey. These are the opportunities for transformation and development of her being. Menstruation, pregnancy, birth, and menopause are shamanic journeys. A woman travels deeply during these times into her inner world, which reflects the landscape of the shamanic realms. She meets her fears, her obstacles and her deep inner knowing in her lower world, she plays out different scenarios in her middle world, connecting with what is and she meets her extraordinary strength, wisdom and available guidance in her upper world.” School of Shamanic Womancraft handbook
Our sensual experience of each rite of passage is that which helps us to transmute the experience from a mundane one to a shamanic one in which we are transformed.
Our calling to earth, the moment of our conception, is a sexual experience.
Birth is our ecstatic entry into the world via our mother’s vagina, or not.
Menarche is our opening to our fertility cycle, a journey in which we continually cycle through hormones, through desires, through sexual, creative energies, through the life/death/life cycle. We meet our womb blood for the first time. We meet our wombs and the stirrings of this energy.
Birth is a direct response to sexual activity, a fertilisation of our creative impulse. All our births are rites of passage, whether they come to full term or not, whether they are human babies or other significant creative acts.
Peri-menopause is the opportunity to rebirth ourselves as we respond to fluctuating hormones, triggered by our wombs, eggs and the spiritual and psychological opportunities rising through the journey towards cessation of our menstrual cycle.
Menopause is the gateway to a second Spring, to a sexuality in which pregnancy is no longer a possibility and a deeper spiritual sexuality can flourish.
Our sexuality is integral to who we are.
* * *
The body is the gateway/is the portal/is the lived experience/is the temple.
We have to drop into the wisdom of the body to fully negotiate our experiences. It is by turning within, to the feelings, the energy, the cellular patterns and deep inner knowing that we can find and release the blockages that keep us trapped in old stories, and it is also the way we tap into the enormous potential of life, to the Shakti, the primordial feminine energy.
This energy/ this life force is available to us right now, it is us.
But we have become skilled adaptors and controllers. We repress this enormous energy. We resist it, we deny it because our culture tells us too. How obedient we have become.
* * *
Shame is an enormously powerful way to control another. We are shamed by our bodies, we are shamed by our sensuality, we are shamed by our sexuality and our feminine power. We are shamed. And this shame is in our cells. It is intergenerational trauma, that we pass on and pass on and pass on until we heal.
And our healing is a reclamation of our bodies as creative, sensual, intelligent, imaginal, as the source of power. We are like the Goddess Druga, staying in our truth, no matter what. Being soft and yet deeply embodied, so that the demons (shame, fear, mistrust) no longer hold sway. We cut them down by being so fully in our bodies. In our bliss.
We can use the wisdom of the cycles to create conditions that are ripe for shedding that which no longer serves and for seeding that which does. We tend to that which we want to see growing in ourselves, and let go of that which we don’t.
As Shaman we learn to witness ourselves, to be with and honour our own unique flowering on the tree of life. We recognise that our wounds & our painful experiences are as much teacher as the blessings, and sometimes more.
* * *
As shaman we know the power of the circle. We sit in sacred circle and the circle is teacher/is healer/is shaman. In this space magic arises. In this space we heal and flourish. All is sacred/all is safe/all is. We are the many faces of the Goddess, each of us mirroring the divine. We are our sisters. We are our selves.
The circle is integral to our work.