Feeling Streams: Welcoming Sorrow in a Time of (Climate) Chaos

Join us for a workshop with artist, somatic movement educator, and therapist Michele Minnick.

The Peale’s exhibition, , invites visitors to contend with the remnants of a culture of disposability and the many scars it leaves behind. This ruinous landscape provokes waves of environmental grief as the items of our fossil-fueled present are laid bare before us. In order to create pathways towards healing both the land and ourselves, it is essential to open space for experiencing feelings of ecological grief and climate anxiety. This workshop will serve as a container for holding and moving what needs our attention in this moment, with a particular focus on welcoming grief, sorrow, and loss.

In the face of all there is to grieve, it is easy to think we will become overwhelmed, and to put up walls inside ourselves and between one another, to avoid feeling pain. When we work collaboratively with our bodies and each other, we can hold so much more than we think. According to Francis Weller, author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, “Sorrow helps us remember something long intuited by indigenous people across the planet: our lives are intricately commingled with one another, with animals, plants, watersheds, and soil.” Spiritual ecologist Joanna Macy says, “Planetary anguish lifts us onto another systemic level where we open to collective experience,” and urges that we cannot effectively do or change anything unless we actually open to where we are.

Drawing on The Vital Body’s framework of somatic ecology, in which we understand body and self to be entangled with land, landscape, culture, history, and dynamics of economy and power, we will perform an inner archeology of right now, in order to orient to the past, the present, and the future of here. We will engage simple, nourishing technologies of the everyday. We will breathe, slow down, and ground. We will notice the environment, with all our senses, and notice what is happening inside us. We will connect–to human and other than human beings, ask for consent, make contact through touch. We will sound and speak and sing, draw, write, move, and dance.

The first half of the workshop will focus on sensing into the body and identifying and working with essential inner resources. We will explore connections between water and emotion via the concept of rasa, a Sanskrit word meaning juice, sap, or flavor, and corresponding to elements of both the body and the natural world that supports it. We will briefly explore the fluid, musculoskeletal, and organ systems of the body, with a particular focus on the lungs. In the second half of the workshop we will work multimodally and creatively in direct relationship to the relics of the exhibit’s future worlds–finding ways to touch and share grief, anger, joy, laughter and other emotional energies through movement, writing, drawing. We will end by creating a communal ritual that considers mourning as medicine, and celebrates what can be found in the streams we walk along, and the feeling streams that move inside of us. We will welcome sorrow as a necessity for resilience and revolution.

All bodies welcome. All moods welcome. No performance experience required. Please arrive on time, as this workshop is cumulative. Dress in clothing you can comfortably move in, and be prepared to work in socks or bare feet. Please bring water.

Michele Minnick (PhD, CMA, SMT/E) is an artist, somatic movement educator and therapist, and founder of the interdisciplinary arts-based initiative Vital Matters, with which she has been curating and producing events related to climate change and environmental justice since 2021. For over twenty years, she trained performers in Rasaboxes (www.rasaboxes.com), and co-authored and edited the book Inside the Performance Workshop: A Sourcebook for Rasaboxes and Other Exercises. Today she incorporates rasa and principles from the Rasaboxes work into her work as a teaching artist with Arts for Learning Maryland, and her work with clients as a somatic movement therapist. Michele’s artistic work includes directing and devising, solo performance work, and performative interventions in everyday life (https://bakerartist.org/portfolios/michele-minnick).

She has taught extensively at New York University (where she completed her doctoral dissertation investigating relationships between trauma, performance, and somatic practice and theorized a “performativity of the breath”), at Towson University, and at various institutions in Brazil. Michele introduced Rasaboxes in Brazil in 2003, and has trained generations of teachers of the work there, also publishing various interviews and articles in Portuguese, including a recent piece on the revolutionary power of rasa to be published later this year. Practices central in Michele’s work that inform this workshop include Body Mind Centering, the eco somatic practices of Jamie McHugh, Petra Kuppers, and others, Resmaa Menakem’s somatic abolitionism, and the classical Indian theory of rasa, from both Ayurveda/wellness and performance contexts.

Host or Publisher The Peale Center for Baltimore History and Architecture