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Flowers & Fire Yoga Yoga Garden – Gili Air

Retrieving the Divine Feminine

 

Come and join us, June 8th-14th 2020, on the paradise island of Gili Air, for a week of exploration using our body and its creative expression, to return to the wholeness of life and our connection to ‘all’ in this sacred women’s retreat,

‘Retrieving the Divine Feminine

The beauty and power of the divine feminine is all around and within us, deeply interconnecting us to the earth that holds us, and all life forms that share community around us. Retrieving her, invites us into a remembering of our identity as part of life’s weave.

According to Maria Gimbutus, in old Europe, the goddess was life itself in all her variety. She was the light giver, the death Wielder, the regeneratrix and igniter of fertility. Life was not divorced from death, and death lead to regeneration of life.

An endless cycle turning like the moon.

When we begin to experience ourselves as part of this Divine Wholeness and understand our interconnectedness to all things, we release fears, suffering and personal neurosis created by our illusionary identification with separation and un-examined ‘preferences’. This experience of separation limits our capacity to create and manifest as we strangle our process through limited and narrow self concepts and prejudices’. We also lose our ability to access the collective conscious to inspire and energize our idea seeds. When we learn to harness the power of the divine feminine and expand our identity so we feel one with life, we increase our potency, everything becomes possible and manifestation works like magic.

These practices have ecological as well as personal implications as our vision and creations become informed by knowing we are part of the divine whole. Humans, animals, land are all interconnected, all part of the same body.

On this retreat we will start to embody this knowing through transformational asana, storytelling, meditation, breath-work, dance, visualization, drawing, ritual, creating community, nourishing whole foods, and merging with ocean and land. Through these practices we will explore the different aspects of ‘The Goddess’ and express these creatively. The more we learn to allow the divine feminine to be expressed through us, the more empowered we become to co-create with her the rich, connected, heart filled and magically abundant reality our soul yearns for.

In order to create an intimate and safe container for this work, numbers will be limited, so please contact us for any early expressions of interest or to book a place

MORE INFORMATION OR TO BOOK  

 

SAMPLE DAY

Each day we will explore a different aspect of Feminine Energy, through movement, yoga asana, pranayama, meditation, story, art making and creative visualization among other processes. We will end each day with a completion ritual to activate the process.

Most days there will be optional early morning sunrise sessions, and also evening gatherings. These will be totally optional as an important part of the work is having space to regenerate and integrate the sessions in a way that works best for your energies.

(Please note that this sample schedule is only indicative and each day will be a little different)

5.45am -6.30am Optional sunrise meditation (most days)

7am-9am Yoga and meditation session with Emily– embodying the Goddess energy of the day

9 am Breakfast

10am -1pm Creative deep dive with Chardi-Using various creative processes, visualization, painting, sewing, weaving, embroidering, metaphor mining, storytelling

1 pm lunch

1.30pm-4.30pm Optional free time, or you can choose to stay in the space and continue with your creative work independently.

4.30pm-6pm Afternoon movement session– depending on the flavour of the day this may include- gentle yoga, dance, dynamic meditation, pranic energy work

6am Evening days end ritual– sometimes at the studio, sometimes at sunset

7pm Dinner

7.30. Optional Evening Sessions. (most days) These may include movie night, dancing, story telling soiree, star gazing adventure, singing bowl meditation.

PricesEarly Bird pricing until April 8th

 

4 bed share room (4 single beds)

Early bird $750 USD per person

Full Price $850 USD per person

 

Triple Share-Deluxe king Bungalow with loft (2 single beds, one queen bed in Loft)

Early bird $900 USD per person

Full Price $990 USD per person

 

Twin share –Deluxe King Bungalow (2 single beds)

Early bird $990 USD per person

Full Price $1110 USD per person

 

Private Queen ( 1 queen bed)

Early bird $1250 USD per person

Full Price $1350 USD per person

 

Price includes

6 nights accommodation

All meals (including lunch and dinner day of arrival, breakfast and lunch day of departure)

Snorkeling with turtles

All group classes, activities and sessions

All art materials

Free drinking water

Use of all props and mats in the studio

WIFI in rooms and around the centre

Unlimited Tea and Lombok Coffee

In order to create an intimate and safe container for this work, numbers will be limited, so please contact us for any early expressions of interest or to book a place

  MORE INFORMATION OR TO BOOK  

 

Category:

CHARDI AND EMILY

A professional story-teller, published author and shamanic artist, Chardi Christian has been working with women doing deep soul work since the early 90s, running divine feminine workshops using art and story to reclaim connection with soul life. Her work with women is inspired by story, myth, archetypal image and the inner drama of the unconscious. Greatly influenced by Karl Jung, she supports women to explore the ways they can excavate archetypal forces from the shadows of their unconscious, bring them into the light and utilize their energies in conscious life. Focusing on the different aspects of the divine feminine, her own art making has evolved from; shamanic practices to Eastern European folktale and mythic imagery to our relationship to the land and story. Her workshops, which she has run in Sydney, Perth, Finland and San Diego, have explored various themes, from Retrieving The Divine Feminine, Soul Totems, Dreaming Mandalas, Ancestor Boats, and Life Quilt squares, to name but a few.

‘All my work is a developing exploration of; the rich world of unconscious images and archetypes from the inner landscape, and the images in stories and myths which are humanity’s heritage’

Working with fabric, paint, felt, sewing and embodiment Chardi’s work and the community building it involves was featured on ABC TV program ‘Compass’ along with other publications. She has exhibited her ‘Soul Totems’ at major Sydney galleries such as Barry Stern, in Iceland, Helsinki and San Diego and has just returned from a prestigious artist residency program in Iceland. It is through the development of this work that she runs workshops in creativity, inner story and outer image, creating powerful communities of women in the process.

Chardi’s passion for myth and story has seen her become also one of Australia’s leading storytellers, working in Theatre-in-Education since 1984. Inspired by her early studies in improvisation, clowning, mask work, storytelling and other forms of corporeal mime, she was a founding member of ‘Shuttleback Theatre’, and worked in the improvisational community Theatre Group, ‘Playback Theatre’. Chardi also performs in the wider community, and has built up a following in Sydney and in Finland for her storytelling shows for adults. Chardi is regularly invited to perform her stories and run workshops in Finland, S. Africa, England, New Zealand and the USA and at creative festivals including the Sunne Festival in Sweden, a gathering of professional actors, musicians and directors which explored Nordic Storytelling as a performing Art, where she was invited as a special guest to open the festival, run workshops and perform. In 2005 she published her much acclaimed children’s book ‘The Selkie and The Fisherman’ based on ancient Scottish tales of the Selkie, exploring the relationship between the masculine and the divine feminine

Emily Christian

Born to parents who were dedicated Iyengar yogis, I remember waking up most days to my parents doing headstands in the kitchen and trying to copy them. When I started formally practicing as an early teen, I had a familiarity with the poses, but I don’t remember when I first learnt them. My mother, Chardi Christian, also bred me on a diet of myth and story from as long as I can remember. When her work started to focus more on the divine feminine I too was introduced to ‘The Goddess’ and her many aspects. As a result my relationship with Yoga was always evolving hand in hand with my relationship to the archetypal power of ‘The Feminine’.

I have fond memories of coming home from school to women sitting around our kitchen table, sewing, laughing, crying, telling stories. Or of having to sneak in the house quietly, tip toeing around sage smoke smudging and shaman drums beating (often arhythmically, ha ha) as there was a women’s ritual going on. Coming into my woman hood during those wild and woolly teenage years, I am so grateful for the community of women she worked with and the mentoring and love they provided for me. I know that so much of my intuitive sense of how to create, how to teach creativity, facilitate and hold space was developed during those early years absorbing the energy of mum’s work.

While I feel like I have always had Yoga around me, my early spiritual practice was most influenced by goddess work and my sense of Yoga was more in terms of physical Asana. As my practice developed in my 20s I started learning more about Yoga’s philosophical container while working with teachers from the Satchidananda lineage and I fell in love with the possibilities of the practice. In my early 30s I started to encounter more flow style, dialogue rich forms of Yoga and that is when my love affair became a committed relationship.

Since then I have trained with and been inspired by many other incredible teachers coming from a multitude of different lineages, such as Tara Judelle, Aimee Pedersen, Shiva Rea, Ana Forrest, Pixie Lillas and Marybeth Zang. This has formed a rich and complex weave to my Yoga tapestry.

The core existential concepts informing my teachings come out of a non-dualistic, Tantric lineage that conceives of the material world and the body as an expression of divine consciousness. The spiritual journey for me is essentially a journey of integrating and embodying all aspects of the human experience, thereby coming home to the divine truth of our nature. In terms of personifying this divine truth, I tend to work more with Hindu Gods and Goddesses (Believe me I pestered them endlessly for help in the creation of Flowers and Fire!!!) however ultimately it is my experience that illumination is available through a multitude of conceptual and physical vehicles and forms.

In short, having experienced the transformative power of a diverse range of approaches and lineages, and with an equally varied professional background in education, textile art, costume design, somatic therapies, and a brief stint as professional story teller, my aim as founder and creative director of Flowers and Fire Yoga, is to weave together the disciplines of Yoga, prayer, meditation and creative manifestation to support the transformative journey towards a more graceful, mindful and creative state of well-being.

So now we come full circle. What mum taught me about creativity and using divine feminine energy, magnetism and flow has allowed me to create Flowers and Fire, which will in turn allow her to bring her incredible work to the region (in combination with my own developments on these teachings)

In order to create an intimate and safe container for this work, numbers will be limited, so please contact us for any early expressions of interest or to book a place

  MORE INFORMATION OR TO BOOK  

 

Hosts

Chardi and Emily Christian

Yoga Classes

At Flowers and Fire we offer a range of class levels and workshops to accommodate all levels of experience - from first-timers to experienced yogi’s and yogini’s.

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