Date/Time
Date(s) - 05/05/2018
10:00 am - 4:00 pm
Location
The Center for Art and Spirit
Asheville, North Carolina
Touching the Roots of our Being
Ancestral Mask Making
With Suzannah Tebbe Davis and Judith Toy
Date: Saturday, May 5, 2018
Time: 10:00 am–4:00 pm
Location: The Center for Art and Spirit
Address: One School Road
City: Asheville, NC
Honoring Our Ancestors with Art and Beauty
A poverty of the times we live in is that we have forgotten the roots of our being. We have forgotten that our ancestors have walked with us since our arrival.
It is believed that everything in our world is sung into existence from the Otherworld, the place where the ancestors reside. These ancestral spirits are mesmerized with our existence. And we have made a sacred agreement to remember them, honor them and feed them. This sacred reciprocity allows our ancestors to heal their wounds and for us to heal our own wounds.
In Asia, families consider the ancestral altar as important as the front door. There is a deeply held recognition of those who have come before us–through blood, land and spiritual descendants, and of the grandmothers and grandfathers–the elders who can pass onto us the fruit of their wisdom.
We must feed the ancestors that which they love–art and beauty, acts of creation: music, homemade meals, dances, wildness of spirit, honing our ties to the natural world. The world at large is dangerously unharmonious. Centuries of unfed, starving ancestors hunger for deeper connection and meaning just as we do. As we renew this sacred relationship we repair our personal psyches and family histories .And thus we heal the larger spirit of humanity.
During this day we co-create a sacred container through mindfulness practices,earth offerings, artwork and shamanic journeying. As we step into the unseen realms from this place of magic, we create masks to honor our forebears.
Guiding us in the intricacies of paper mask-making is Judith Toy, who studied with the renowned Peter Schumann of Bread & Puppet Theatre in Vermont and was a fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.
Cost:
Early Bird Rate – $70, prior to April 15th
Full Tuition – $85 after April 15th
Register Soon! Spaces Are Limited
Materials, beverages and snacks provided
About the Facilitators:
Suzannah Tebbe Davis
Shamanic Energy Medicine Woman
Suzannah Tebbe Davis is a shamanic energy medicine woman. She offers over two decades of experience with a diverse blend of indigenous mind/body/spirit wisdom teachings and Western theoretical practices.
Through her personal spiritual practice and studies with the Q’ero (Andean) medicine men and women and as a graduate of the Four Winds Society, Suzannah embraces the fundamental wisdom teaching of the Incans–that we are born into a world of living energy, the kawsay pacha, which is populated by Spirit and is available to us in each moment. Suzannah feels privileged to share these sacred teachings, transmissions and ceremonies with her clients and students as a way for them to fully awaken to their soul purpose.
Suzannah has a private practice, Your Awakened Life, based out of Asheville, North Carolina. She offers individual sessions, mentoring, land clearings, house blessings and sacred ceremonies and leads workshops and retreats internationally. She is also passionately involved with Asheville Community Roots, a local non-profit working towards recognizing the innate rights of nature, and sustainable power for the people.
For more information about Suzannah, please visit her at www.yourawakenedlife.net, and Your Awakened Life on Facebook.
Judith Toy
Personally ordained by Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh as a core member of his order, Judith Toy has led mindfulness practice since 1993 in the U.S. and abroad. Two long time dreams of hers were realized when: she and her late husband led two mindfulness retreats in the Findhorn community, Northern Scotland; and when she lived for a summer at Plum Village, France, in the hamlet where Thich Nhat Hanh makes his home. She is author of Murder as a Call to Love, a memoir about her journey toward Zen.
Toy has made her living as a writer, editor, artist-in-the-schools, owner of a public relations firm, and teacher. She and her late husband founded three U.S. Sanghas–spiritual communities in the Plum Village tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, www.plumvillage.org.
Toy studied with the renowned Peter Schumann of Bread & Puppet Theatre in Vermont, www.breadandpuppet.org/ –one of the oldest nonprofit, self-supporting theatrical companies in the country–where she learned the intricacies of mask-making and political puppetry.
For two years Toy has made her home in the eco-village of Narrow Ridge Earth Literacy Center in East Tennessee, where she is renovating an old farmhouse and hosting private country retreats for singles and couples.