Deep Listening to the Songs of the Heart
With Dr. Stéphanie Marchal and Brooke Arnold-Rochette
Sundays 1-6pm once per season (Nov, Feb, May, Aug) ongoing yearly.
A Gathering on the Land
May this be a place to come rest your sorrows seasonally, as this used to be part of humanity’s ways: to grieve together and so to remember together, to rest together against the bosom of the earth and so to feel our heartbeats aligned with the greater pulsing heartbeat of life force.
May this be a place of welcome and deep listening to the whispered love notes of our grief resonating in the chambers of our hearts. A place to allow the breathing earth to work its magic.
A place to gently dismantle the dams blocking the flow of our life-giving emotions, to allow our tears to nurture our bodies and the earth’s body, just as streams, rivers, oceans, rains, springs, and underground lakes circulate nourishing waters to parched land. A place where we offer our own parched lands the gift of our quiet stillness, our open awareness, our breath and our deep presence.
Whether our grief resides on the surface, singing its prayers out-loud, or buried deep in silent prayers, we can gather together to be held by the land and its breathing ones, blanketed by the elements, nurtured by community. We might hold the wish to feel renewed by the flow of our grief, just as rainfall leaves the world fresh and luminous.
We might hold the wish that we, too, “come into the peace of wild things”.
About the Leaders
Stéphanie Marchal
Dr. Stéphanie Marchal is a wilderness personal guide, and studied with Animas Valley Institute and Francis Weller among others. She works with people toward recovering their wholeness, uncovering their gifts, and applying these in their lives and for the good of their community. She has experienced wilderness as a powerful ally in these tasks.
She is also a registered psychologist working in Victoria, BC. Her practice focuses on relationships, attachment, trans-generational trauma and transitions/transformations.
Brooke Arnold-Rochette
My personal journey is one of passion for story-tracking and celebrating life with heart. Ritual and ceremony have been hallmarks in my personal and professional life to create the context for this kind of intimacy to grow and take root as a way of being in this precious world. Every day, I seek to fall in love with the world at my fingertips, and to embrace poet Jalal al-Din Rumi’s invitation to “let the beauty we love be what we do”, finding my own way to “kneel and kiss the ground.
A strong container for profound exploration
I highly recommend this program for anybody interested in developing a deeper, more soulful connection to themselves and to the natural world. Sarah and Stephanie were brilliant facilitators, and had great capacity in holding a strong container for profound exploration.
~ Participant: S.T.