Philip has taught workshops for over 20 years. That teaching eventually led Philip to write his book New Self, New World. Now the book has provided the foundation for the workshops. Philip offers an introductory talk, a one-day workshop or an in-depth two-day workshop. For more information about the workshops or Philip’s availabilty contact Philip.
Bi-Weekly Toronto Classes on Mindful Embodiment
Join Philip Shepherd every other week as he guides participants through a series of gentle, practical exercises that help us to reconnect with our breath, with our deeply-seeded joy of being, and with the companionship of the world to which we belong. There’s also lots of time for questions and personal feedback, and more than a few laughs along the way. Anyone is welcome to attend – familiarity with Philip’s work is not necessary. All that’s needed is a desire to explore a different way of being.
Classes are two hours long, and will be held every other week on a Tuesday evening, beginning Feb 28th, 2012.
Cost per class is $20 and will be held at The Inner Garden, 401 Richmond Street West suite #384 (South East corner of Richmond & Spadina)
The Talk
Freeing Ourselves from a 10,000-year-old Story
“The real adventure consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in seeing with new eyes” Proust
Our sense of self and world is shaped by a set of assumptions that, like the Wizard of Oz, is hidden from sight. This talk pulls the curtain aside and shows that the Wizard running the show is a story embedded within our culture that tells us what it means to be human. We rarely question that story because it defines ‘normal’ for us. As Bruce Cockburn observed, though, “The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.”
The story may be invisible, but its effects are not: it sows division into our bodies, our psyches, and our relationship with the world around us – divisions that are associated with control, anxiety and alienation. Once you glimpse behind the curtain, though, you acquire choice, and you can begin to slip out of the tight grip of ‘normal’ and into the full, unbounded experience of your life. A free-wheeling romp through history, myth, physics, human physiology and philosophy, this talk is like a feed on the oxygen of fresh ideas, potent insights, and renewed possibilities.
The Workshop
Experience the Genius of Embodied Thinking
“What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?” Thomas Merton
In our culture we carry around divisions within us often without being aware of them, because our culture pretends that they are normal and necessary. The effect of such divisions, though, is to create issues of control, anxiety and alienation in our lives. We often seek to remedy those uncomfortable symptoms directly, without addressing the divisions that created them. In fact, it’s hard to address those divisions, because we experience them as part of the normal state of our bodies. In the end, our experience of the self isn’t going to change much if our relationship to the body remains unchanged. The same goes for our experience of the world. It all leads back to the body.
That is where this workshop begins: it brings the divisions we carry within our bodies to light, so that we can navigate those divisions, and mend them – releasing in us a newborn sense of our own wholeness. Being at home in the body enables us to be at home in the present – and that makes everything easier, opening our hearts to our own lives, and to the singular path we are forging.
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