Sweet Darkness: Holding Space for Joy and Sorrow

The Workshop

As the leaves change colour and start to fall, as the weather cools and the rains begin to set in, where do you find yourself? What are you sitting with? Are there tears that need to be shed after this time of great uncertainty? Grief that needs to find a home? What joys are waiting in the wings, eager for your attention?

Join Carly, Lucy and Thandi for a daylong workshop to move with and through ‘sweet darkness’. As Expressive Movement facilitators, we’ll weave together embodiment practices, offering a full day of connection and reconnection, with your own tender heart, your moving body and your expansive mind. 

With guided practices of stillness and movement, intuition, and expression, we’ll discover ways to hold and be with the sorrow, to unearth the unexpected, sweet joys that emerge within the dark places. Using meditation, dance, and process art, we’ll explore e-motion: witnessing and experiencing how all energy moves through us, leaving spacious awareness.

Joy and sorrow are the warp and weft that weave our collective human experience. You are invited to spend time in this supportive community where together we’ll explore the cycles of loss and love.

All are welcome. No previous movement or meditation experience required. 

To celebrate Mother's Day, we are also welcoming you to bring your mother, or your child (18 years and over), to enjoy a time of deeper reconnection.

Your Facilitators

Carly Tanur, former director at Mamelani Projects, has followed her lifelong passion to create positive transformation in community. Her wish to create an equal society where people can reach their full potential, now includes her facilitation of Expressive Movement and the Creative Arts.

Thandi O’Hagan is musical story-teller, a dancer, a gypsy, an embodied educator, a coach and an Expressive Movement facilitator. In her life-long quest for personal and collective freedom; freedom from boxes that confine; freedom from ties that bind; freedom to explore and express, Thandi uses her own practices of dance and movement to offer a compassionate and inclusive space for you to welcome in all of who you are, a place to explore your own unique expression of freedom.

Lucy Draper-Clarke is a facilitator and researcher-practitioner, with a PhD in Mindfulness and Teacher Education. She loves offering courses in mindfulness and compassion, and running retreats and workshops throughout Southern Africa. She has studied with inspiring Buddhist mindfulness, Vinyasa yoga teachers, and Expressive Movement dance therapists, and now weaves her own offerings of sitting and moving meditation. Her current focus is on Compassionate Activism for a life-sustaining society. Lucy’s light-hearted and compassionate approach to facilitation allows participants to explore their inner world through a joyful, yet transformative practice.

Programme

You are welcome to arrive from 9am to meet your fellow dancers. We will start with an opening intention and meditation session, followed by a movement warm-up, focused on the elements. After tea, Thandi will guide us through a full expressive movement wave to explore the dimensions of sweet darkness. We'll close the session with a time of supine integration. 

Please bring lunch to share in community and in the afternoon we will move into an art practice to investigate and integrate whatever is moving through you. Contemplative dyads will then offer us the chance for deeper connection before our closing circle.

Bookings

There are only 20 places available for this workshop, so please book via the ticket link to avoid disappointment. For those celebrating Mother's Day, there is a mother/adult child pair booking option. 

Ticket cost: R850

Mother/adult child pair: R1500

Sweet Darkness by David Whyte

When your eyes are tired the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone,  no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own.

There you can be sure you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your home tonight.

The night will give you a horizon further than you can see.

You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn

anything or anyone that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.