Spiritual Movement & Music
Enlighten your spirit and find peace with our guidance to a more spiritually active life.
Moving into Prayer:
Exploring Ignatian Active Imagination & Embodied Prayer
Overview: Ignatian Spirituality is an embodied spirituality with a focus on engaging the senses and the active imagination in prayer. This offering will explore movements of one’s prayer life, through various forms of engaged movement. As the creation centered mystic Meister Eckhart notes, “… your body is a book of God”, and Theresa of Avila proclaims: “Christ has no body now but yours, yours are the eyes, the hands, the feet, you are his body in the world”.
Each Session Will Include:
- Welcome movement “warmup”
- Exploration of the Active Imagination Process with scripture and/or an Ignatian theme meditation
- Movement interventions and sensory “practice”
- Reflection and sharing of the process
- Closing Embodied prayer
Suggested sessions with Minimal Overview
1
2
Welcome: The
Body at Prayer
Carl Jung and Jane Ganet note, ” …movement loosens the soil of the soul”. We briefly look at bodily prayer forms over the ages, including rituals both individual and groups, and how bodily expressions of prayer differ in cultures and change over the centuries…or not!
Overview of sessions, Definitions, introductions movement warm-up, mini exploration
Themes/ scripture: Genesis 2:5-7: “Then God formed out of the clay…and blew into the nostrils…the breath of life…
Interventions: Exploring the movement of breath, as sensation, communication, and prayer
Practice: engage, reflect & share
Closing: Q&A
Posture of
Prayer
Though the process of each class as noted above this session will look at childhood rote prayers, private prayer, rosary, Liturgical prayer, “… in the stillness is the dancing”
Theme/Scripture: Lord, teach us to pray and…
Interventions: Postures, gestures, signs, Non-verbal expression
Practice: engage, reflect & share
Closing: Movement Lord’s Prayer & Serenity Prayer
3
4
Trusting the Movements of the Heart… moving out of fear
Themes: Trust/Fear
Interventions: Introduction of the Movement Scale, Exploring simple movement dynamics: Flight, Fight, Freeze, Faint
Practice: engage, reflect & share
Closing: partner movement prayer
Moving into “Body Stories” and the Senses
Themes: Hurts/healings, happiness and hopes
Scripture: Woman at the Well / Resurrection selections
Interventions: Imaginative Exploration of the 6 senses
Practice: engage, reflect & share
Closing: Prayer of Sacred Sensibility
5
6
Movements and
Shifts of
the Spirit
Themes: The Examen
Scripture: Participant choice
Interventions: Exploring Intuitive, natural, habitual
flow of movement
Practice: engage, reflect & share
Closing: Moving through and into the Examen
Moving Together
into the World
Themes: Social Justice & the Body Politic
Scripture: “To act Justly, love tenderly and walk humbly with your God”
Interventions: Participants Choice of Interventions
Practice: engage, reflect & share
Closing: Movement prayer of choice. Closing statements and Evaluation
Texts:
Hornthal, Erica, Body Aware, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley California, 2022.
Libert, Elizabeth and Paulin, Campbell, The Spiritual Exercises Reclaimed 2nd Ed, Uncovering Liberating Possibilities for Women, Paulist Press, New York, 2022.