Soul Medicine Through the Seasons
Litha/Summer Solstice: What am I celebrating in me?
Join Monika Denise for a virtual ceremony and visual journal workshop
June 21, 5-7pm PST // 8-10pm EST
THE WORKSHOP:
Monika Denise will offer a short ceremony: we will light candles, sing a song or two, and do a nature-based meditation.
Monika Denise will share a prompt for a visual journal practice to listen to What am I celebrating in me?
There will be an optional sharing.
TO SIGN UP:
Free/by donation.
Email Monika Denise connect@monikadenise.com with questions
The Workshop Series
I am offering you a soulful creative process that I have engaged with the last 10 years to support my own journey.
In this virtual workshop series, Soul Medicine through the Seasons, I will share how to develop your own visual journal practice, which is a sort of mashup between a mindful and expressive art process with creative journaling.
We will enter into our time together as a space of ceremony. I will guide us in song/chant as we gather. We will have a brief introduction to the season, followed by a guided meditation that will invite you to connect with the more-than-human ones as a part of your process. Following the time for you to work in your visual journal, there will be a time of optional sharing.
Give your soul some medicine around the Wheel of the Year to honor the season in ceremony and listen to your inner wisdom!
The River's Path
Soulful Retreat Trips on the Green River
Descend into a 45 mile stretch of Green River through Labyrinth Canyon while descending into yourself. Deep wilderness experience is a powerful way to connect with your purpose. All ages, ability levels and backgrounds are welcome.
Shedding Your Old Ways of Being, Re-casting Your Mythic Story and Excavating Your Way Back to Your Wild Self
A retreat for women
There’s a moment in one’s journey when life as you’ve always known it cannot continue as it has. Call it hitting bottom, a mid-life crisis, or a dark night of the soul — but there’s a looming sense that an old way of being must die away so that something more authentic and vital can take its place. Like a snake in its phase of molting, during these periods in our lives there is much to “shed” and release. And in that shedding is an opportunity to enter a life in which our losses and struggles, pain and grief, joys and triumphs are incorporated into a new identity that can be embodied and expressed in our communities and in the world.
The wild setting of the Green River is the perfect live metaphor for the journey you’re invited to take: answering the call to adventure, re-visioning your life story as one in which you’re the author and hero, and being led by mystery into the ever-unfolding miracle of who you truly are: the wild self you were born to be, before others and society tried to change you...
August 16-24, 2023
8 days, 45 miles of canoeing, daily writing,
delicious food, 15 participants max.
Guides: Hannah Lee Jones, Linda Abram, Lauren Bond, Monika Denise, and Kathy Beadle
Pricing: $2695, payment plans upon request
Where I Lived & What I Lived For (Green River, Utah)
To be alone on this red earth
where no one comes to visit me.
To crawl there, the words entering
sidelong where the skies lift open.
To be the night whose songs unsing
themselves in the space opened by just words.
To be equal parts light and darkness.
To be the light whose chains on me
were god once, and shall be again, in darkness.
To be wholly dusk and dawn,
the hours closing with dulled stars
the marked distances between.
To become nothing of importance,
for good and forever,
never asking each other what we’ve made of our lives.
To be springtime, ebbing greenly even as she brightens.
To be the soul on fire, declaring that it’s time.
-Hannah Lee Jones
ThURSDAY NIGHT EMBODIMENT COLLECTIVE
Embodiment Collaborations
As the Thursday Night Embodiment Collective, our mission is to foster a consistent space for community to deepen into exploration of self and belonging. Through embodiment ritual, inquiry and movement practice, we honor the need for self witness and co-regulation. We are committed to providing a safe and intimate container for expression, strengthening our capacity to hold and be held. All of you is welcome here.
Thursday nights at Presence Studio has been a night when the Bellingham community gathers for open floor conscious movement for years. During the sabbatical of a beloved open floor teacher, several embodiment practitioners and facilitators are collaborating together to offer exploratory labs from the medicine pouches that we each have to give. May each lab from the Thursday Night Embodiment Collective be in service of deepening our collective movement practice.
Monika Denise discovered another layer of relationship with her body and tending to her grief through participating in Open Floor labs with Kelsey Maloney of FIre and Moss. This practice quickly became a portal for Monika Denise to explore how community can hold each other and to dismantle the myth that deep healing only happens in the care of a single healer or professional provider.
After beginning to support/collaborate with Kelsey beginning in 2021, Monika Denise is following an inquiry of how her gifts of intuitive somatic listening, grief tending, space holding, song, and art may be woven into a fabric of embodied community.
Monika Denise will be collaborating with a variety of friends and co-conspiriting practitioners on Thursday nights. Take a look at the poster above for the week's focus!
To get updates or ask questions, email ThursEmCo@gmail.com
Presence Studio
Presence Studio is dedicated to the practice of conscious embodiment and personal expression. The studio operates as an elegant space for classes, workshops, performances, celebrations and rental space for public or private events. Dance classes and fitness classes live alongside Open Floor and ecstatic dance events in the diverse schedule (In-line link to calendar page). Located in the heart of Bellingham, Washington, the studio was founded by Jenny Macke, opening its doors in 2008. The studio is now run as a non-profit collective by a group of volunteer stewards and council members.
The River's Path
Soulful Retreat Trips on the Green River
Descend into a 45 mile stretch of Green River through Labyrinth Canyon while descending into yourself. Deep wilderness experience is a powerful way to connect with your purpose. All ages, ability levels and backgrounds are welcome.
Wherever we are, the place that holds us reaches out to touch our own life: what we’ve been through, what we long for, what frightens us, what gives us joy. Our places on Earth also call to us to get more involved with them—to immerse ourselves in their history, their hurts, their beauty.
Often, our own preoccupations are so dominant that we forget to pay attention to this constant exchange of invitations and impulses. On this journey through Labyrinth Canyon we open up to the dialogue between our own hearts and the land and water that hold us.
Absorbing and being absorbed by the river and canyon, we explore both what this place can teach us and how we can give back to it. The Green River and the canyon that embraces it draw us to different areas, different emotional focuses: a beautiful wildlife study area… ancient petroglyphs that evoke the original caretakers…the spoils of uranium mining… and the ways climate change threaten the river.
In this landscape of magic and mystery, we will wonder at magnificence and weep in sorrow, both for ourselves and for this place on Earth. There will be time for solo walks and reflections on land and river, and in the evenings, we’ll sit together in Council to share our stories. Every day we will give and receive beauty.
October 7-14, 2023
8 days, 45 miles of canoeing, daily writing,
delicious food, 19 participants max.
Guides: Trebbe Johnson, Lauren Bond, Monika Denise, Cate Burnett
Pricing: $2695, payment plans upon request
Trebbe Johnson
Trebbe Johnson is the author of Fierce Consciousness: Surviving the Sorrows of Earth and Self and other books, as well as many articles and essays that explore the human bond with nature. She is also the founder and director of the global community Radical Joy for Hard Times, devoted to finding and making beauty in wounded places. Trebbe speaks four languages; had camped alone in the Arctic wilderness; studied classical Indian dance; and worked as an artist’s model, a street sweeper in an English village, and an award-winning multimedia producer. She has led contemplative journeys in a clear-cut forest, Ground Zero in New York, the Sahara Desert, and for military veterans. She lives in Ithaca, New York.
ThURSDAY NIGHT EMBODIMENT COLLECTIVE
ThURSDAY NIGHT EMBODIMENT COLLECTIVE
ThURSDAY NIGHT EMBODIMENT COLLECTIVE
Winter Wellspring
A 5-week Open Floor Movement Lab and Residential Workshop
We remember. Before masks. Before gathering spaces were closed down. Before screens and zoom rooms. We remember that once, we gathered at wells where nourishment and connectivity flowed along with the stream of water. When our ancestors were connected to the old ways. In these times of heightened disconnection, uncertainty, and grief, we show up together in the heart of winter to lean in, resource, and receive the nourishment times of darkness can bring. Through the simple (though not always easy) practice of meeting ourselves and each other just as we are, we give ourselves space to expand and contract as necessary, metabolize grief and emotion, and listen to the wellspring of wisdom emerging.
Join us for a 5-week Open Floor Movement Lab culminating in a residential weekend workshop at Aldermarsh. Lab or workshop only options available.
THE MOVEMENT LAB:
Held in an open circle ritual, we will build our capacity to hold ourselves and each other, layer by layer.
Thursdays January 12-February 9, 20236:30-9pm Presence Studio, Bellingham, WAFacilitated by Kelsey Maloney, supported by Monika Denise
THE RESIDENTIAL WORKSHOP: Held by movement, art, and song, we invite you into a deep exploration of the wellspring in you, and the connectivity that flows between us.
February 10-12, 2023Begins Friday at 2pm and closes Sunday at 3:30pmAldermarsh, Whidbey Island, WAFacilitated by Kelsey Maloney and Monika Denise, supported by Olympia Open Floor Teacher Duncan Green
Kelsey Maloney
At the root of it all, Kelsey values deep and meaningful connection. She teaches in a style of receptive response to what is emerging in the moment. Through simple offerings, she invites students to deepen their self-learning, expand their capacity for connection, and practice re-humanizing our relationships. Kelsey Maloney is a certified Open Floor International movement teacher. She has completed two years of immersive study with Lisa Iversen in Systemic Family Constellations, studied Authentic Movement, improv theater, ecology and sociology. Kelsey has over 15 years of experience integrating writing, art, and play into personal and professional life. She has volunteered with a bicycle-touring theater (Otesha Project, Australia), worked at environmental education centers and camps in the US and Australia, and self-published a book, Cloak Woman Vs Man, in 2017. She has cycled over 15,000 miles across four continents.
WYRD
WYRD
SATURDAY, January 21st, 12-6pm
Presence Studio: 1412 Cornwall Ave, Bellingham, WA 98225
$75
Guided by Summer Starr with support from Kelsey Maloney, Monika Denise and Rebecca deGraw
On the first new moon of 2023, you are invited to a process of igniting deep insight and renewal to inform us in the coming year. Based on my training in Seidr, a Norse animism practice, this half day retreat will be an embodied exploration of Wyrd Consciousness, the primordial void and quantum matrix that is the origin of everything and foundation for created reality. Through this connection, we can feel into the year to come. This kind of seeing puts us in touch with our origins, refreshes the soul, and is a blessing for created reality. We will be exploring through dance, authentic movement, and essential oils.
Learn more: www.makingkin.com/wyrd
Summer Starr
I consider myself an intuitive healer and spirit worker. I am a student practitioner of Ancestral Lineage Healing with Ancestral Medicine. I am also certified in intentional peer support and provide Maastricht interviews for people who hear voices or have unusual beliefs that have resulted in a mental health diagnosis. I have almost a decade of experience working with a modality called Resonance Repatterning as well as plant spirit medicine in the form of essences, tinctures and essential oils.
W i l d C a r d
W I L D C A R D
Moving with what’s right there
It can look so many different ways
Nothing to figure out
Just listening to the body
Breathing into the belly, exhaling
Releasing head and feet
Deepening into the dance
Further, further
Into the mystery
Let’s cast the way together
Trusting the wisdom inherent in each of us
For more information and to register.
Thursdays Nov. 3 - Dec. 15, 6:30-9pm
Saturday Dec. 3, 2-9pm
At Presence Studio
With Kelsey Maloney, Monika Denise, and Summer Starr
Please reach out with any questions or curiosities.
Kelsey Maloney
At the root of it all, Kelsey values deep and meaningful connection. She teaches in a style of receptive response to what is emerging in the moment. Through simple offerings, she invites students to deepen their self-learning, expand their capacity for connection, and practice re-humanizing our relationships. Kelsey Maloney is a certified Open Floor International movement teacher. She has completed two years of immersive study with Lisa Iversen in Systemic Family Constellations, studied Authentic Movement, improv theater, ecology and sociology. Kelsey has over 15 years of experience integrating writing, art, and play into personal and professional life. She has volunteered with a bicycle-touring theater (Otesha Project, Australia), worked at environmental education centers and camps in the US and Australia, and self-published a book, Cloak Woman Vs Man, in 2017. She has cycled over 15,000 miles across four continents.
