MOVEMENT:  Through guided movement improvisations, we heighten sensitivity to the felt experience of the body. We learn to follow visceral responses & attend to the multitude of impulses & intentions that underlie our physical actions. Through quiet attention, we begin to explore perceived boundaries of internal & external, as well as the ways in which Self & No-Self show up. These movement meditations provide a joyous & healing opportunity to release into the body's profound sensitivity & creative response to present moment experience.

Movement Teacher Wynn Fricke is a choreographer, dancer & somatic movement educator. She has worked with Zenon Dance Company as a dancer & choreographer.  Since 2008, she has served on the faculty of Macalester College in the Department of Theatre & Dance where she teaches Experiential Anatomy & the Mind-Body Connection & other somatic-based courses. Wynn is a long-time practitioner of mindfulness meditation with extensive training in the Mahasi Sayadaw & Thai Forest Traditions. She is co-founder of Common Ground Meditation Center in Minneapolis.
    Writing Teacher Sean Murphy holds an MFA in Writing from the Naropa Institute & teaches seminars in writing, meditation & creativity for many organizations, including his own Big Sky Writing Workshops & the University of New Mexico in Taos. He is the author of One Bird, One Stone, a chronicle of Zen practice in America, as well as three novels. His debut, The Hope Valley Hubcap King, won the Hemingway Award for a First Novel. Sean has been a practitioner of Zen Buddhism for more than 20 years.

     Seeing/drawing is a way to achieve intimate touch with the visible world around us as we reconnect with nature, thereby reconnecting with ourselves. The practice is to receive what is  seen without interposing the 'self', to allow the mind, eye and heart to simply reflect like a clear mirror. We find our capacity for wonder restored, along with new or renewed awe for the gift of seeing that we may have forgotten or set aside.

     The experience of seeing/drawing has nothing to do with fabricating a product. Seeing/Drawing is not devoted to self-expression and even less to making 'art objects' or 'being creative'. We're experimenting in retrieving the 'lost art' of seeing, and fusing seeing, drawing and meditation. We could call this practice 'meditation-in-action' on that which matters...an awakening from the habit of non-seeing, awakening from what could be called the coma of 'looking-at' into the immediacy, the intimacy of seeing.  

     When the eye wakes up to seeing again, the eye, mind and heart suddenly stop taking things for granted. When we're truly seeing and drawing a leaf, a flower, a moth, a branch or a foot, we're saying "yes" to its existence. We dignify it, declare it worthy of our total attention...as worthy of attention as you and I are ourselves, simply because we and it are here in the midst of this awesome mystery and miracle that we share.

     The thing that we draw, be it a mushroom, onion, tree bark or a face is no longer a thing, no longer an object...no longer my object, and I am no longer the overbearing subject who objectifies things . Something else has the potential to happen. The quality of our perception changes with seeing/drawing, when nothing interferes between the eye and what it sees. It's as though every line, curve and dot goes through our whole organism. We are no longer the onlooker. Drawing another person's face I 'become' that person. I don't feel separated from them. The split is healed. This is what seeing/drawing really does. You become what you draw. Unless you become it, you cannot draw it.

Guidance offered to experienced students for development & nurturing of deep concentration leading towards Jhana
in the lineage of Burmese meditation master
Venerable Pa Auk Sayadaw.