Voice Dialogue Camp
All Levels Residential Program
August 15 - 25, 2009
Still Meadow Retreat Center
(20 minutes out of Portland, Oregon)
59 CEU's
Origins of Voice Dialogue Camp
Voice Dialogue Camp Faculty and Staff
Registration Details and Application
Preparing for Voice Dialogue Camp
Downloadable PDF Flyer (2.84MB)
Dear Voice Dialogue Camper,
Our Voice Dialogue Summer Camp (VDC) is quickly approaching and I’d like to send you some guidelines for preparing for your journey.
Outer journey preparation:
Still Meadow is a gracious and restful private retreat center located about 30 minutes south of the Portland airport. If you need a ride to and from the airport, please be sure you are on our list of people looking for a pick up and we’ll connect you with Portland campers who are willing to give you a ride. I’ll need to have the times of your arrival and departure to post. It’s best to time your arrival so that you can get to Still Meadow any time between 3 –6 pm to sign in, get your room (or campsite) assignment and get settled in. If you’re depending on a ride from a local participant, please be mindful of their desire to come to the retreat center within that window of time, since it will take them about 1/2 hour to pick you up and the same to get to Still Meadow. is a psycho-spiritual approach to consciousness work; it is an awareness practice, forging a more conscious relationship between ego and soul. It is energy work, used to cultivate and feel, non-judgmental Awareness and Ego together. It has a natural resonance with meditation and can be used to ground our spiritual practice with our instinctual nature. It is used to discover, embody and then differentiate from the archetypal expressions of soul and nature and to learn how to compassionately operate with more choice and more comfort with paradox. It is used in therapy, coaching and spiritual practice to help subjects become energetically aware of their various inner selves, owned and disowned, that are lived out unconsciously.
Dinner is served at 6 pm and our orientation program begins at 7:30 pm. Voice Dialogue Camp ends at 2 pm on Tuesday August 25th. Please do not make airfare reservations that require you to leave the camp until we’re all finished together. You’ll probably want to leave a little extra time to say your good byes, then, it will take 30 minutes to get to the airport. My recommendation is to make your departure flight no sooner than 4 pm.
Still Meadow has gardens, meadows, grape and kiwi arbors, forest and, a short drive away, the Sandy River for cold dunks in hot weather. There is also a group sauna on the land for our use. In August, the days are typically hot and dry; the nights can cool down by 10 - 20 degrees. Rain is rare.
Bring: sun block, ear plugs (?), an extra towel (for the sauna or swimming at the river), sun hat or visor, water bottle, any special teas or treats that you’d like to eat (there’s several visitor mini-kitchens on site), batteries and tape recorders if you’d like to record your own sessions or the teaching sessions, bug spray if you’re camping, a journal for recording your dreams or notes.
When you arrive and check in, you’ll be given a notebook folder with the schedule of events. Most afternoons have 2 or more choices of what to do, depending on your experience level and interests. If you are a beginner, foundational sessions will be marked to guide your choices. If you are a therapist or counselor who needs the 71 ceu’s from the National Assoc. of Social Workers (NASW), your required sessions will be clearly indicated.
Inner journey preparations:
One way to consider your upcoming time at Voice Dialogue Camp is as an initiation experience. Initiation is an archetypal process that naturally happens at certain points of life when we are ready to transition from one way of being to the next.
Cultures have generatively marked these passageways with rituals to communally support these transitions. Some examples are: at infancy (baptisms, name blessings), childhood to adolescence (bar/bat mitzvahs, going to summer camp), youth to adulthood (graduation, marriage ceremony, enlisting in the armed services, raising children, ordainment), mid-life to elderhood (psycho-spiritual retreat, retirement) and the last rituals of transition ~ last rites and funeral. When this natural drive for passage is not supported, or is repressed, we go through them anyway, but usually for longer and in non-generative ways marked by crisis, for example as depression or mania, ‘soul loss’, confusion, illness and addictions.
Many people in mid life find themselves ripe for the support of an initiation experience, but there are few culture rituals or rites of passage to help us. The senior staff at Voice Dialogue Camp are all individuals who have done (and continue to do) their own inner work and have been chosen to staff based on their capacity to hold attentive space for other people’s process and their expertise in Voice Dialogue. The conditions at Voice Dialogue Camp have been designed to support this consciousness journey for you.
According to various researchers *, initiation is marked by different stages: Preparation, Separation, Trial/ Challenge to the old paradigms, Surrender and crossing the Threshold to encounter novelty/divine/soul, and finally, Assimilation/Integration/Return.
Preparation:
As you consciously prepare to come to VDC, your unconscious is likely already on its’ way. Take note of your dreams, particularly the ones you have in the weeks and days before you arrive.
Dreams are an essential channel of energy and communication between the conscious mind/ego and the unconscious sources of life, wisdom and soul. Even if you don’t remember them, this process still happens. If you do remember them, I encourage you to write or draw them and bring them to VDC.
I also suggest that you take time to set an intention consciously. It may be as simple as, “I’m ready to engage in the next level of my journey.” Or it might be as specific as “I intend to allow myself to make the shifts within myself that will clarify and improve my relationship.”
I’m also providing a short list of suggested readings you may find helpful to review before you come to VDC. (We’ll also have a bookstore set up one day at camp for you to buy Voice Dialogue books and cd’s.)
Separation:
Leaving your home, work and daily relationships behind and journeying to a new place are all elements of the beginning of an initiation process. In light of this, I encourage you to really leave behind your life. Try not to keep it going through email, texting and cell phone contact. Let yourself fully be in your process. Give yourself the opportunity to be in the liminal space of VDC.
Trial/Challenge and Threshold
At camp, there are two essential, interwoven processes offered: teaching, which orients you to the map of this journey and practice, to bring you in direct experience with your unfolding journey. The various teaching segments may be challenging to your familiar paradigms of self and relationship. And they will offer you comfort as you learn a new way to relate to your self and your relations. Separating from primary selves is a profound act of surrender to Mystery, since primary selves can hardly imagine why you’d ever want to embrace those disowned selves! Meeting disowned or undeveloped inner selves is crossing the Threshold into new territories of self. While VDC is an outer liminal time and space for your journey, the Aware Ego Process is an intra-psychic experience of betwixt and between.
Assimilation/Integration/Return
By the end of VDC, you’ve assimilated the map (teachings) in such a way that you have a new and likely, a more kindly paradigm for relating to your self and others. You’ve also encountered your selves through Voice Dialogue facilitation, movement practice and creative expression. Developing the capacity for an Aware Ego Process is a brand new way to be that by its very nature integrates selves with non-judgmental Awareness. This is for us the purpose and essence of the journey itself. Even people already deeply familiar with Voice Dialogue will find they have moved through another leg of their lifetime journey in the company of supportive community and allies and will need to integrate this new level of awareness into ordinary life
To support your return to your life back home, I encourage you to begin now to consider how you will support this final phase by giving yourself a non-stressful re-entry period from VDC. We end on a Tuesday. Perhaps you can arrange not to return to work until the following Monday? Once you get home, you may also want to resume or set up Voice Dialogue sessions with either your local facilitator, or even arrange to do some phone or Skype sessions with one or more of the experienced facilitator’s you connected with at VDC. This will help you to further integrate the new parts of yourself you’ve accessed and to strengthen your Aware Ego Process. This will provide you on-going support for your psycho-spiritual journey.
In closing, feel free to contact me if you have questions about coming to VDC. I look forward to being with you this August,
Warmly,
J’aime ona Pangaia
*e.g., Murray Stein, Malidoma Some, Victor Turner
Recommended pre-reading list:
Embracing Ourselves, and Partnering by Drs. Hal and Sidra Stone
The Benefit of People Who Bug You by J’aime ona Pangaia