Red Earth Sanctuary- Residential Retreats
5 Rhythms Dance & Meditation, Andalucia, Southern Spain
Living Wide Awake
“The very centre of your heart is where life begins.
The most beautiful place on Earth.” Rumi
Deeper into the Heart
Wider into the World
Dancing each other Home
Red Earth Sanctuary
5 Rhythms Dance & Meditation Retreats : Andalucia, Southern Spain
Path For Real Life
Deeper into the heart
Wider into the world
Walking each other home
Retreat Dates for Autumn /Winter
We wish you great enjoyment in planning your visit to Red Earth and if any questions arise during the process please don't hesitate to reach out to Grandmother Oya via Zoom.
How exciting-
September Retreat
The Borrowed Robe
Embracing ageing as a true wisdom serves as the greatest 'love of life' teacher
Awakened Living
Ageing in the power of NOW one breath at a time
From the moment we draw our first breath to the ultimate surrender, we age 'breath by breath' - time to say YES and embrace the joyous fullness and true nature of life;
As humans, we all tend to seek certainty when we realise that everything around us is constantly changing. In challenging times, the pressure to find stable ground, something reliable to lean on, only grows stronger. However, the reality is that our existence is inherently ever-changing. Change is inevitable, whether we acknowledge or deny its right to flow; It’s quite a dilemma! we often find ourselves conflicted because we fear facing the true nature of things. Our pursuit of lasting joy and security clashes with the understanding that we are part of a dynamic system where everything and everyone is in a state of flux.
So, here we are, caught in this predicament. This poses some profound questions: How can we live authentically in a world of impermanence, What does it feel like to accept that we can never completely have it all figured out?
Is it feasible to enhance our tolerance for uncertainty and change? How do we befriend unpredictability and embrace it as a catalyst for transforming our lives? may we discover wholeness in the time frame of timelessness - What is here present in our experience that is quiet, peaceful, unchanging and how is that relevant in our day-to-day living;
The Guest House- Rumi
This being human is a guesthouse.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight . . .
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
Our Mission; A journey of 'no distance' back to the self from zero to zero
Ageing on one level is an energetic flow motion through each decade of Transcend, Include and Descend deeper into experiential wisdom confirming as awareness of the present moment, “there is no sense of ageing” and yet, when I get out of bed in the morning my body sings a different tune at 75 to when I was 25; In those small revealing moments the ground is fertile for investigation- is love and intelligence present in your experience, kindness, care, compassion; or does your reaction come from the 'conflicted mind' of intolerance, fear, betrayal, impatience, comparison and disappointment; we can identify with the timeless wisdom and wholeness that weathers every condition - If we are unwilling to let go of fixed positions we may spend this life trying to protect and fix ourselves and never really risk living:
We will investigate stages of ageing from the small observations to what I call the 'lightening stricks' and our strategies for dealing with the true nature of life;
Let be known that which is unknown:
New Paragraph
Awareness is something we cultivate in steps. The practice starts in the body as we work with bringing awareness to our physical form and breath. By building our practice slowly over time, the conditioned body-mind has a chance to safely catch up. As our inner awareness develops in meditation, we become skilled at meeting ever subtler sensations within the body. As this capacity deepens, we notice their changing and transparent nature and are able to approach them with a more inquisitive and compassionate heart.
The radiant, vibrant, flowing, swirling, merging, and emerging unity of the awakening view; the dynamic motion empties us of that sense of separateness, fills and reaffirms us as a whole and fully functioning; together we are each in our own ways humanizing and embodying the paradox of being and becoming, the absolute and the relative, Viewed from the spiritual heart there is nothing but wholeness and seeing this inherent completeness in all, and the dance of evolving and becoming, this is experienced with the vastness of the open heart-mind without contradiction or preference;
Your body cannot lie to the one that is sensitive to seeing and willing to listen
all dancers absorbed in the constant flow motion of the dance; as all borders that define our sense of separate self soften and fall away, we see there is no dance outside, no me, no you, only the dance; there are scenes during our life of youth, health, love, joy, and beauty, as well as ageing, sickness, sorrow, war, all a dance, and each of us dancers, embodies through our unique expression the all-encompassing dance of life; please don't give this to your mind to work out intellectually, instead join in, truly feel what it is to be swept up in the dance;
Your body as an instrument of conscious creativity and key to embodied awakening
- we are the dance itself dancing through us; a universe of dancers that are being danced up, in the dance that the whole universe is dancing, all beings all events, all-time, move and merge in lively interaction and while often chaotic on the surface reveal a hidden unity below of fluid form and formless, and the sacredness in all things; where this dance has come from, where it is going is not as important as the dance that is truly realized, embodied, made real, right here, right now, in your next thought, no thought, action, interaction, holding on, letting go, in your next joyous leap, next grieving gesture, in beauty and brutality - the dance is always right underfoot, so just dance without thought of any other place;
"Ego force is the greatest resistance to your Life force"
Movement never lies, the body never lies, it is the barometer of our inner climate and constantly changing, one moment sunny the next in roll storm clouds, down comes the rain, outcomes the rainbow: this is life in all its mighty unpredictability and through free movement, we learn to trust the bodies expressions of what is passing through: Instead of running for shelter and wait for the storm to pass we learn to dance in the rain, dance with life as it is, not hang around the edge waiting for a rainbow to appear: we learn to surf the waves not be drowned by them.
A caterpillar has the possibility to transform itself into a butterfly, yet till that occurs a caterpillar is a ground dweller: they can climb a tree, but are fundamentally limited to the horizontal domain: A butterfly can fly in the air its sense of reality totally different but a caterpillar can only imagine what it is like to fly, it cannot experience the truth of flight until it undergoes that transformation; To make this transformation you must be ready to transcend your old shape and embody the new order of being:
When life force is free to move through you every moment is fresh, alive, bursting with hope, possibility, compassion, fear, courage, fury, stillness, tenderness, peace, potential, creativity, fierce grace, nothingness, and everything, all of life's rich flavours rise and fall in the day to day ebb and flow of movement, we fill and empty: an ocean of life flowing through us and we need to learn to direct the force of life moving toward and through us. If we are unable to let go and empty out of the day, the month, the year, our life, vitality becomes blocked, we feel overwhelmed, overstressed, overtired, over-stretch and our inner climate may become a little dull, grey, cloudy, drizzly, interspersed with a few light showers and not so many bright patches: For some, there is much turbulence, storm clouds with heavy thunder in the background and a few lightning bolts that jolt our sense of containment and shake us to the core:~ much of our vital force has fallen asleep under a mind-blanket of inertia, ambivalence, ambiguity, suppression, judgment, doubt, fear, cynism, mistrust, self-consciousness, and control:
As we mature from child to adult we form our sense of self around impressions, stories, and experiences. during our formative years, these stories become our structure of identity. This process of identity is very natural, and most part un-conciseness, yet it causes us to wander through life assuming that these core stories we tell ourselves are true without questioning, we believe falsehoods, inaccuracies, and lies to be who we are. I'm not good enough: I don't belong: I always get it wrong: I don't deserve: I'm not worthy: any story we tell, that describes who we think we are is simply not the truth,
We are not the shape of our mind
These falsehoods that we believe to be true create patterns in the physical body and our flesh and bones slowly over time become the manifest shape of our mind. Our shoulders lock, hand clench, joints stiffen, jaw tense, and our body grows from flexible child to lock-in or locked-out adult and we call it the ageing process yet in my experience it has nothing to do with age, it is mind-made: The mind sees everything below the neck as dangerous, emotion, love, sensuality, sexuality because it cannot be fully in control: though it has a very good attempt at working everything out analyzing love, processing life, dealing with feeling: Numbness became the antidote to life pains and numbness is where we stopped feeling and gave the mind full power to reign in our kingdom:
Ingrained in limited egoic consciousness are the stories that justify: "keeping everything button up, in control, predictable and secure, " the problem is life is not like that, life is chaos, sometimes unjust and unfair always unpredictable, unknown and insecure: So it's as if we have been hypnotized to go against the grain of how everything is naturally, organically moving, changing, shifting and we need a language that embodies this point of view and set the body free to regenerate again and again.
Dance is this language, a universal language that awakens and transforms
Relaxing our conceptual mind toward, letting go, getting it right, being the best, standing back from trying so hard something miraculous happens, we empty out and find a way through to the heart of understanding and everything quietens downs, lightens -up, the moment becomes infused by grace, stillness, immersed in the mystery, emerged into one:~ deeper spirit-filled questions come alive in the dance they invoke wisdom and help us discover what is real , what is true true,
5 Rhythms Dance
Our postal address is- Michael Moore
Spanbox B84, CC La Trocha, Coin
Malaga, Andalucia 29100
Spain
Website created by Grandmother Oya