Sacred Groves: Cultivating Spiritual Practice with Trees and Forests

Event description: 

July 7, 14, 21, 28, 2021

6-8pm Pacific Time

Online workshop with Jason Brown, PhD

The Holyscapes Project is about facilitating workshops that explore our own spiritual ecologies. This can have a variety of meanings, but primarily it means exploring the contours of and relationship between our inner and outer landscapes. In a wider cultural context, spiritual ecology is about reclaiming our sense of the holiness of the world as sacred activism.

The Sacred Groves workshop is the seed of a much more extensive academic course I teach at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. In this workshop we will look at the history of trees and forest in the human imagination mostly through the lens of myth, spirituality, philosophy and literature. As a workshop however, the emphasis will be on creating spaces to explore our own relationships to trees and forests, and to develop a practice of literacy and familiarity with these sacred earth beings and holy places.

Learning Objectives

  • Define trees and forests in relation to human societies
  • Articulate issues facing forests and trees in urban and global settings 
  • Explore the role of trees and forests in the world’s religious and spiritual systems
  • Improve ecological literacy related to trees and forests
  • Deepen one’s personal relationship to trees and forest spaces
  • Cultivate a spirituality of trees and forests

Materials

  • Access to the internet, web camera and microphone
  • A field notebook and/sketchbook with reliable pen and drawing materials
  • A locally relevant field guide to trees

Assignments

Each week you will be given an experiential field journal writing assignment. The class will be divided between discussing the field journal tasks and instruction.

This workshop is a gift. Participation is by donation, based on what you can afford or how much you value the gift. You can pay at any time throughout or after the workshop. 

Register by emailing Jason Brown at jason[.]minton[.]brown [@] g mail dot com.

Weekly themes and course schedule forthcoming. 

Learn more about Holyscapes here.