Coming up this October 26 to 28 at Foxhollow Farm in Kentucky, I will be offering a workshop for biography workers called Working with Polarities. Below is more background on the workshop that I recently sent to people who have registered or who are considering attending. There are still some openings in this workshop for people who are interested, who have some background already in biography work, so please don’t hesitate to reach out to me (see button below) if you are interested in attending. I am hoping to do a lot more workshops of this kind in the future, so you can also reach out if you would like to explore hosting me in your community. If biography work is something new to you, I encourage you to check out the website of the Center for Biography and Social Art. If you are new to earth healing, stay tuned, as I will be sharing a lot about earth healing in future substack posts.
Dear freinds,
For those planning to attend my workshop at Foxhollow Farm in Kentucky at the end of October, or who are considering attending, I want to give a little more of a flavor for the work we will undertake these days. You can find the original description of the workshop here.
Some of you are likely aware that Foxhollow Farm is not only one of the most beautiful and vital biodynamic farms in the United States, but is also home to one of the most extraordinary “lithopuncture” installations ever created in the United States by the Slovenian earth healer and artist Marko Pogacnic and his students.
As I have visited Foxhollow farm many times over the years, and as Marko and his daughter Anna has been a major influence on my own work as a practitioner of earth healing, the strong feeling has arisen in me that I want to use this workshop to build a stronger bridge between the practices of biography work and the practices of earth healing, since these two disciplines themselves represent an archetypal polarity.
This polarity arises from the fact that biography work has an intimate connection to the mysteries of time, as these express themselves in the unfolding rhythms of our individual biographies, while earth healing work has an intimate connection to the mysteries of space, as these come to expression in the spiritual and physical forces working in particular places, farms and landscapes.
If we explore this polarity more deeply, however, we can immediately see how the two sides of this archetypal polarity (time and space) actually flow deeply into one another. In earth healing, for example, we use the rhythm of the seasons, and the festival cycle of the year, to work in a healing way with the forces active in a given place at a given time.
To understand the intimate role of space in biography work, we need only consider how the call to spirit remembering in the first panel of the foundation stone mediation given by Rudolf Steiner, which is so intimately connected to biography work, is associated with the limbs which move us through the world of space…into the spirits ocean being…and which in doing so, lift our souls out of their sluggishness.
From a certain perspective we could say that the spirit remembering that we carry out in biography work represents a kind of inwardizing of the spatial movement of the limbs, while the carrying out of earth healing festivals and ceremonies on the land represents a kind of outwardizing of the forces of time. Through these efforts, time and space become healing forces.
Dynamic polarities like these are woven throughout nature and human life—indeed we could go so far as to say they are the sum and substance of our soul life at each and every moment-- from sympathy and antipathy, to percept and concept, to speaking and listening! When we look more closely at our whole biography, we find it literally riddled with the mysteries of dynamic polarity.
Can we learn to read the meaning of these riddles, and in doing so, learn to harmonize and transform the diverse, polaric forces shaping our inner and outer lives? That is the question, and the territory, which I am so excited to explore with you in this upcoming workshop.
A key modality we will use to build this bridge between time and space is something called “Goethean Movement" which has been developed by Hugh Ractliffe, a Goethean scientist and biodynamic farmer who I have been studying with for the last seven years. Goethean movement helps us to discover and express the formative forces at work in nature, in our bodies and souls, and in human biography, through simple, flowing, archetypal gestures and movements.
For those interested in doing some (optional) preparatory reading for this workshop, I would like to recommend two lectures by Rudolf Steiner. One is from the series Human Questions and Cosmic Answers, (GA 213), which can be found here at the Rudolf Steiner archive. The second is the classic RS lecture Brotherhood and the Struggle for Existence, (from GA 54) which can also be found on the Steiner archive here.
With warm anticipation,
Robert