Shamanu: Earth Wisdom™ Creative Expression Programs

At The Living Arts Institute we believe that our hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology. One in which we celebrate the gift of imagination and creativity. The Shamanu Earth Wisdom programs offer an inspired educational process that sees our creative capacity for the richness it is. Our educational institutions have devalued the creative arts as secondary to academia. We have mined our creative minds in the same way we have strip mined our Earth. This form of education will no longer serve us.

Nature, our greatest teacher, shows us the necessity of creative imagination for life to continue to flourish. We discover that ‘intelligence’ is diverse, dynamic and distinct. Creativity means having original ideas which have value to the whole.  The desire to dance, sing, paint, create is inherent in every child.

Expressive movement, dance, sounding, ritual, meditation and reconnecting with Nature are creative expressions that can guide us to the answers that change and empower our lives, our health and our world.

The Shamanu: Earth Wisdom Teachings offer public classes and a professional training program founded on the premise that the expressive arts has the power to foster values that are personally, culturally and environmentally empowering.

Our future will no longer support an educational system based on industrialization ideals. The capacity to create is not confined to the ‘professional arts’. They include our ability to use our creativity for healing, transformation and global service.

Workshops and Trainings

Primordial Movement: Original Yoga

The fluid, organic movement, breath and sound processes of Primordial Movement offer you a powerful, deeply healing and heartful practice that revitalizes body, mind, emotions and spirit. A revolutionary physical/spiritual practice, which reawakens our capacity to connect directly to the restorative energy of Nature.  Let us show you.

 

Earth Wisdom Teachings

The cornerstone of the Living Arts Institute programs, ‘Earth Wisdom Teachings’ gives you powerful tools to develop a ‘real’ relationship with the Earth. One that embodies enchantment, wonder and awe, as well as is grounded in a genuine connection to the natural world.  Learn more

Living from Your Heart

Living from Your Heart is a powerful program which gives you the tools to release pain and turmoil, replacing them with peace. It is a time to reclaim the primacy of the heart as the principle guiding force, and with it your life energy, vitality, power, passion,creativity and freedom. Learn more

 

Earth~Rhythms

Earth~Rhythms is a sacred journey into the animating forces of Nature through dance and ritual. All of the energies of the Earth dance through the human body, shaping us, calling us forth into our creative wholeness. Ancient and holy, dance says YES! to the authentic joy and celebration of who you are..   Learn more

  

To know more about:
Shamanu: Earth Wisdom Apprenticeship Program click here

Shamanu: Earth Wisdom Teaching Educator Diploma Course click here

Some of the Shamanu™ Processes you will learn:

While most of the Shamanu processes are incorporated into all of the trainings,  each training will highlight specific processes. See below.

Pranic Healing

Breath is the initiator of Life. All movement, sound, thought, feeling and action  begins with the breathe. Societal patterning, beliefs, trauma and emotional stress are sustained by our breathing patterns.

Conscious breathing will increase the flow of life energy, opening our chakras (energy centers), clearing blockage and enlivening our organism with increased energy and vitality. The simple act of freely breathing is, not only natural, but deeply relaxing, supporting the ability to learn, feel and be present to what is true inside of us. Breathe work increases our ability to connect with and resolve the effects of our past.

By engaging with variations in breathing, we provide a non-verbal way to heal, resulting in increased sensation, mobility, emotional and spiritual attunement. Breath is the ultimate healer.

The Pranic Healing practices are an important part of all of the Shamanu Trainings and have a special focus in Primordial Movement: Original Yoga trainings and Living from Your Heart trainings.

Sonic Sound 

Sound is breath made audible. Sound Healing, ancient and revered by cultures down through the ages, is used to create balance and alignment between the physical, mental, emotional and etheric bodies.

Every object, including the human body, has a resonance. When the body is healthy it vibrates in a harmonious manner. This we call health.

If a part of the body is unhealthy the frequency is inharmonious. This we call disease.

Through the use of the correct sound frequencies we can unclog and revitalize the different systems of the body, bringing them back to health.

In Shamanu we use the human voice, instruments, music and the sounds of Nature to re-align the body, heart and mind with the resonant field. The extraordinary power of the voice, coupled with movement can create frequency shifts that are transformational, connecting us to the resonant whole, while offering another source for communication.

The Sonic Sound Processes are explored in-depth in the Living from Your Heart trainings.

Wave Motion

Based on the processes of ‘Continuum’ developed by Emily Conrad, Wave Motion engages the organic fluid system through undulating, circular, non-patterned movement processes. Having been structured by billions of years of life forms that were shaped by the sea, our oceanic origins are maintained in our fluid and cellular systems. The Wave Motion reconnects us with the creative Life-force which is at our origins. It is the movement of Love.

Being the movement from which all life forms emerged, one experiences a profound sense of coming back to Self. Deeply nourishing, this elegant movement expression has the capacity to restore cellular damage, stimulate neurological growth and induce heightened states of bliss. “Undulating wave motion permeates tissue, softens boundaries and amplifies sensation. Wave motion is the primary access to our bio-intelligence that is not bound by time, space or condition. Emily”  

Wave Motion is a part of all of the trainings and is explored in-depth in the Primordial Movement training and Earth Wisdom Teachings trainings. 

Expressive Dance

Ancient and holy, dance says YES! to the authentic joy and celebration of who one is. Expressive Dance expands the ability to inhabit one’s body, releasing shame and societal imprints which keep us numb to what we truly feel and trust. We learn to develop an internal witness who listens to our expression with compassion and affirmation.

By moving from the spontaneous living vitality within, we learn confidence and self-love. We learn how to stay in connection with our world without sacrificing our felt sense of self. Energetic to subtle movements create a healing matrix which allows a dynamic interface between body, mind, emotions and spirit.  

Expressive Dance is explored  in-depth in the  Earth~Rhythms training & Earth Wisdom Teachings

Felt Awareness & Deep Listening

The philosophy of Shamanu is that lasting healing only happen through processes that ignite pleasure, joy and self-love. A large part of this work is to establish the value of felt awareness. The Felt Awareness practices teach us the art of listening to all that is alive in us and how to articulate this aliveness through movement, sound, words and silence. It awakens our direct connection with our intuitive knowing and the capacity to hear and follow our bliss.

Shamanu recognizes the felt sense as our ‘spiritual guidance system’, ushering us into the ‘mystery’ of what is yet to be realized, while informing us of the present.

Felt Awareness processes are explored in all of the Shamanu trainings

Ritual

Ritual has been used by ancient and modern cultures around the world since before recorded history. Ritual carries people across thresholds of transformation. It is the physical manifestation of the process of change – whether that change relates to personal growth, coming of age or the beginning or end or a relationship.

The purpose of ritual in Shamanu is to create a safe and sacred space for healing and transformation. Ritual is a way to access deeper states of consciousness and open to other dimensions. It creates an empowered container where we place our intentions and desires. Creating Ritual Space greatly supports emotional healing processes.

Ritual teaches us how to absorb and direct the powerful energies of Nature and the Cosmos for the purpose of personal and planetary healing. Earth centered rituals re-attune body, mind and emotions to the life-giving nourishment of Air, Fire, Water, Earth & Ether.

Ritual processes are explored particularly in the Primordial Movement, Earth Wisdom Teachings trainings, Living from Your Heart Trainings and Earth~Rhythms trainings.

Meditation

Meditation is the practice of inner stillness. A time to let the mind and heart rest and slip into ‘the gap’.  Moving into the Gap we enter into sublime silence, where absolute nourishment and rejuvenation is assured. To enter this field of dynamic stillness can take time and practice, but once attained there is a uncanny sense that you have just come home.

Meditation on the five Alchemical Elements, combined with breathe work and movement are used to guide the mind from the ordinary reality into deeper states of awareness and peace.

Meditation practices are a part of all of the Shamanu Trainings with a greater focus in the Living from Your Heart trainings.

Benefits of Shamanu: Earth Wisdom Teaching™

Consciousness:

Promotes the body, mind, emotion connection

Heals through pleasure, self love & compassion
Develops felt awareness skills – the art of deep listening
Encourages personal growth & self expression
Revives the ability for self-healing
Preparing one to receive the new

Personal Development

Supports self-esteem and self mastery
Develops confidence and self-love
Encourages social skills
Motivates learning and creativity
Supports the establishment of rapport
Promotes bodily enjoyment, fun and play
Heightens sensuality and receptivity
 

Physically

Restores sensitivity, vitality & an extraordinary sense of well-being
Increases spinal, muscular and skeletal suppleness  
Enhances structural alignment and balancev Develops agility, core strength & mobility  
Increases flexibility, fluidity & movement
Gently releases tension and pain  
Promotes healthy function of physiological systems

Psychologically:

Develops focus  
Motivates learning from the heart
Opens psychic abilities
Harnesses mental energy
Stills the mind and fosters insight

Emotionally:

Provides a safe environment for personal exploration
Catalyses the expression of feelings
Mobilizes grief, shame, anger and fear
Reveals the healing purpose of all emotions
Opens opportunity to heal past trauma  
Awakens the ‘emotional guidance system’
Creates emotional freedom 

Spiritually:

Expands intuitive and spiritual capacity
Develops the inner witness
Reconnects us with the Life-force
Awakens our at-one-ment with all Life processes
Connects us to Source energy

Environmentally:

Wakens bio-intelligence
Re-sensitizes us to natures rhythms
Opens communion with the Elements
Teaches directing Elemental energy for personal and planetary growth  
Establishes the ongoing unity of organism/environment

History of Shamanu: Earth Wisdom Teachings 

A Personal Note from Lorenna Bousquet-Kacera, founder of Shamanu: Earth Wisdom Teachings  
 
Shamanu began in 1989 birthed from my own healing crisis. After 20 years of being on a conscious spiritual path, studying and teaching wholistic health practices how could I get sick? Reluctantly leaving the spiritual community I was a part of I entered a brand new world where my body and my emotions became rich resources for healing.  
 
Connecting with a wisdom that transcends the mind I entered the space where spirit and body merged into a beautiful Oneness. Dance, movement, sound, drumming and rituals from the most primal to the most refined opened a whole new language – the language of the heart. Healing was swift and filled with joy. Childhood traumas revealed and healed themselves with little to no effort and I felt free for the first time in my life. I knew that healing must and can only happen through pleasure, love and the reunion of spirit and body with nature.  
 
Shamanu means ‘bringing heaven into the earth through em-body-ment’. It also means ‘becoming the Shaman U already are’. Supporting individuals in the art of living, reconnecting with ones inner ‘guidance system’, creating physical, mental and emotional vitality, resolving trauma, enhancing relationship, making peace with where you’re at, re-patterning your life and sinking into the wisdom teachings of the Earth, are what Shamanu is all about
 
Turning wounds into art, pain into compassion, shame into power, worry into possibility and fear into creativity and service is the invitation of Shamanu.
 
The compilation of this course has occurred over the last twenty years. As an organic process, which means it is, like life, in constant change and creative flux, I have hesitated to put structures around it. However, like a car, structure can be useful when used to get us to places that we wish to go.  
 
The Self will never stop its yearning for growth and expansion. Like the Divine Child within who instinctively knows the wonder of Life, the desire to ingest Life’s awesomeness with each breath lives strong in all of us. I offer you this program in the spirit of creativity, play, compassion and love.  
 
Life is Magic and each one of us is One with that Magic. All you have to do is create the space, guide your own emergence through attentional practices and receive the abundance that Life is waiting to offer to you. This is the invitation of Shamanu.
 
In the Spirit of Joy and Gratitude - Lorenna.
 
I honor and thank all my teachers who have inspired me with their teachings and their lives. Some of these include:
 
Continuum Movement – Emilie Conrad 1992
Continuum Montage: Somatic Experiencing - Susan Harper 1992
The 5 Sacred Rhythms - Gabrielle Roth 1990
Shamanic Journeying (Peru) - Don Augustin 1998
Ayurveda & Living Nutrition - Shantree Kacera, D.N., Ph.D. 1998
Council of All Beings - John Seed 1997
Healing Sound & Ritual – Emotional & spiritual healing processes 1989
Art of Living Spiritual Programs & Attunement Energetic Healing Course –  
The Emissary Foundation, Martin Exeter & many others 1980
International Institute of Reflexology Teachers Program 1985
Institute de Sante 1966
Tai Chi & Chi Gong – Bill Lee 1961