Doris Maranda

Greetings to All!

About a month ago, my apartment was broken into & my laptop stolen. Unfortunately, my backup for my Continuum Vancouver list dated back to February 2009 which means that if you had sent me a request after that date to be put on the list or to be taken off, it may not be noted. From my other records, I have attempted to update as much as I can. We have put this list under another system, whereby you can subscribe & unsubscribe yourself so please feel free to take advantage of this.

Thank you for your understanding. Blessings, Doris

In the midst of the late summer warmth, laying back in the shade in my zero gravity chair, dipping into the cool ocean waves, watering & more watering of my garden, the lazy, hazy days of summer are still with me as I make plans for our fall adventures.

In June, I celebrated my 73rd birthday & it dawned on me that my mother died just before her 83rd birthday & my maternal grandmother died when she was 85, so I may be facing the last decade of my life! Dealing with the events & thoughts around aging, along with the added impetus of the health issues brought on by post-polio syndrome & hip replacement surgeries, has occupied much of my thoughts, as well as influencing my dreams & visions in this, the latter part of my life.

It is still a mystery to me of how exactly I will spend these coming years.
Needless to say, I will continue to enjoy & appreciate my life, my community of family & friends as well as continuing in whatever way emerges, to contribute to my community. However, what palette will my life enhancing paint brush bring to this period?

In listening to an interview by Tami Simon with David Whyte (who by the way will be in Vancouver for a day’s workshop on November 20, sponsored by Hollyhock), I was struck by his nuances on the initial phases of the transitions we face, where you are turning a page, ending a chapter in the book of your life, and things are starting to emerge which are somewhat unclear. It is important to be able to keep your focus on what you are entrenched on in your life, and also keep the edges of that peripheral vision, catching the shadows of this something else which is pointing to new pieces of this giant puzzle you call your life.

The following is a poem by David Whyte, entitled No Path, which speaks to this part of our journey.

There is no path that goes all the way. Not that it stops as looking for the full continuation. The fixed belief we can hold, facing a stranger that faces the trouble of a real conversation.
But one day, you’re not imagining an empty chair where your loved one sat. You’re not just telling a story where the bridge is down and there’s no where to cross. You’re not just trying to pray to a God you imagined would always keep you safe.
No. you’ve come to the place where nothing you’ve done will impress and nothing you can promise will avert the silent confrontation; the place where your body already seems to know the way, having kept to the last its own secret reconnaissance.
But still, there’s no path that goes all the way. One conversation leads to another. One breath to the next until there’s no breath at all, just the inevitable final release of the burden. And then, wouldn’t your life have to start all over again for you to know even a little of who you had been?

Hoping you will join us in sharing our journeys through the Continuum path,

With love & blessings, Doris

August 25, 2010

DORIS MARANDA, MA, is an authorized Continuum Movement teacher (www.continuummovement.com), a Registered Clinical Counsellor and a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (www.traumahealing.com). “To me, this work is a spiritual practice and has opened me up to possibilities of living embodied that I had only begin to envision in my work as a psyche/soma therapist and educator. It is the basis for everything that I do. In movement, there is no separation and as we begin to live, breathing, moving and expressing our experiences, there comes a joining and a wholeness that leads to healing and to a creative excitation that counteracts the insanity and fragmentation that we encounter in the world around us.”

PRIVATE COUNSELLING & SOMATIC MOVEMENT EDUCATION
SESSIONS WITH DORIS BY APPOINTMENT
604-254-0147 or doris@dorismaranda.com
Free phone consultation.

GREETINGS! Spring is such an especially beautiful time in our city – the colourful bulbs are peeking out from their winter habituation & the trees are dawning their fresh coats to salute the warmth & light emerging from the dark times. We are also celebrating the 14 bright gold medals won by our Olympic athletes! The streets are abounding in good cheer, pride & happiness. So we join with Mary Oliver:

Look, it’s spring. And last year’s loose dust has turned

into this soft willingness. The wind-flowers have come

from – “A Settlement”

I will be away at the Continuum Teachers’ retreat next week, returning to welcome you to the resuming of our “Winter into Spring” class series, and bringing with me new ideas for us to explore.

Classes: Fridays, March 12, 19 & 26 @Yoga on 7th from 9:30-11:45am. If you are just joining the classes, & wish to taste the Continuum experience, you may drop-in to the first class on March 12. Fee for the three classes is $84. (20% off for underemployed).

Mini-Workshop on March 27 from 2-5pm, “Tapping into Your Visionary Self.” (See www.dorismaranda.com for details)

PREVIEW FOR SPRING SCHEDULE:

INTRODUCTION TO CONTINUUM @ BANYEN BOOKS ON SUNDAY, APRIL 11TH – www.banyen.com

Classes @ Yoga on 7th: Friday mornings: April 16, 23, May 7, 14, 28 & June 4 with Mini – workshop on Saturday, May 8th, “Weaving the Extraordinary into the Ordinary.” Details to follow later.

Blessings, Doris

CONTINUUM VANCOUVER

NEWSLETTER – WINTER 2010

It is Christmas Day. I am sitting in my home basking in a shaft of sunlight coming through the window, reflecting on the passing of the darkness and the turning to the light, along with the soon to be passing of another year. What may be in store for my future and the future of our world? It is a time of gratitude for the blessings of my family and community and the abundance that we share, knowing that there are many of our brothers and sisters in the world who are suffering from the effects of war, violence, poverty and even starvation. One of the things we initiated in my women’s group last year, instead of giving material gifts, was to give each other a donation to an organization or charity of our choice which benefited some humans in greater need than ourselves. The giving of gifts is also a remembrance of the gift of life, that light burning within each soul and encourages the evolving of the inner gifts that each soul brings to the world no matter what the manifestation of their outer life.

Recently, I listened to a CD from a talk given by David Whyte, entitled “A Change for the Better, Poetry & the Reimagination of Midlife.” As usual, I am inspired by David Whyte’s insights into the human condition, in particular in this talk about the changes forced upon us by the limitations occurring in midlife. This evokes my experiences over the last two decades with the physical losses I have had to deal with and the truth of what David Whyte says in this talk, “To become a full human being, we need to confront and take it all in.” My teacher, Emilie Conrad, has said that when something passes, something else will come in to take its place. From David Whyte’s poem, “Millennium,”

The place you have fallen
refusing to rise again
becomes the spiral line of flame
where we turn
into the one desire
we have not lived.

While it is necessary to mourn our losses as something that is passing and the limitations that may follow, it is also important to keep opening up to “what else,” to other possibilities. One can see these situations as limitations and cling to what was or to see them as opportunities and challenges and began to look forward to new ways of being and perceiving. This has certainly been my learning, to be with what is, to learn from it fully and to move on with curiosity, compassion for oneself and with patience.

David Whyte quotes from “Weathering”, by a New Zealand poet, speaking to her experience of the aging process: “Now I’m in love with a place that doesn’t care how I look or if I’m happy, then happy is how I look.” “Whatever context you’ve arranged for your existence, there’s another that makes it absurd.”

With love and blessings for the new year,

Doris

December 25, 2009

CONTINUUM VANCOUVER – NEWSLETTER FALL 2009

With our beautiful and leisurely summer time coming to an end for this year, we turn towards the lessening of the light and the approaching dark time of the year, the entry into autumn and retreating within.

Michael Meade’s latest CD, “The Light Within the Dark Times” has inspired me, as Michael often does. He speaks of two movements, ascending into light/spirit and then descending into dark/soul and the need for both. In these difficult, dark times of our world (which is being reflected in many personal lives), our souls are calling us to gather and to deepen into ourselves. “If you’re falling fast, the only way to react is to dive down deeper.” Spirit is connected to faith and we are seeing a loss of faith in the systems, in our culture’s ways of interacting with our world. The soul brings the healing, the reconnecting to the eternal world, the world behind the world, touching once again into the mysteries.

This will be the theme of my second Mini-Workshop in November, recreating the path through our somatic realm to the depths of soul and the eternal world. The initial descent is through the body, perceiving through the senses which takes us part of the way, the soul the rest. That is the place of surrender, entering endarkenment, allowing the soul, moving from the inside out, to find the way.

From Rumi, You are uneven in your opening, sometimes closed, sometimes unreachable, sometimes with your torn shirt of longing wrapped around your heart. Your discursive intellect dominates for a time, then the universal, beyond time and intelligence, begins to come again. So sell your questioning talents and buy more bewildering surrender.

Following are my fall offerings for your contemplation. Would love to have you join us – we can perceive and descend together. Wherever people gather, it is a ceremony!

With love & blessings, DORIS

August 27, 2009

NEWSLETTER – SUMMER 2009

This we know………
The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth.
All things are connected, like blood which connects one family.
Whatever befalls the earth befalls the children of the earth.
Man did not weave the web of life—-he is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
—-Chief Seattle, l854

These well known words from Chief Seattle speak to what I see as enlightenment – connection to self and other. How could it be otherwise? Yet though we may agree with the importance of this, how do we live that out in our daily lives, in each moment?

Through the processes and tools of Continuum and my experience in the Portals of Perception workshops with Susan Harper & Hubert Goddard, I am becoming clearer about the “how to do this.” It is through awareness, a practice of mindfulness, that anchors me in where and how I am in each moment, whether it be walking, sitting, meditating, dancing or washing the dishes. As I discovered in my month long retreat in January, 2008, this practice is the key to becoming connected to self & other.

Remember yourself – again and again and again——

“To embody the spirit of this world such that others may experience it as well is what the art of blessing is all about.” David Spangler, Blessing

With love & blessings, Doris

June 6, 2009

Spring is in the air which is warming more each day.  The light is enhancing the budding on the trees, the shoots of the bulbs emerging with their delicate heads from the earth and the birds are joining in the chorus of sounds drowning out the city noises (at least in my auditory sense).   Such a renewal and affirmation of life!    Time to tune into the seasonal rhythms & what has been buried & hibernating through the dark times in us is beginning to emerge from the “composting within” new possibilities building on the “what was,” reseeding and bringing new aliveness to explore and express in various ways in our lives.
With love & Blessings, Doris

NEWSLETTER WINTER/SPRING 2009

Solstice greetings to All!!!  Looks like someone dreamed up a white Christmas for us this year.  I returned from sunny, warm California to a chilly -5 C.   Mostly, I am appreciating the beauty and softness of the white blanket world as it enfolds us in its mysteriousness and its quietude.   It feels like a continuation of the journey I have been on in the “Welcoming Dark” Continuum Intensive which I just returned from on Monday night.

As I entered the amazing cave/womb created at the Continuum studio for our 48 hour allnighter,  I experienced a powerful shift in my sensing and how I was locating my body & myself in space.    Finding myself pausing at the doorway, then crawling into the room until I adjusted to this new environment, I felt this in a reverse way that it must be for us as infants, emerging from the wet womb/cave in which we hibernated and grew for nine months.   With this change in context, there came a different sense of myself, or rather a questioning of who I am or what I am or even the disappearing of identity and form.  Somehow that did not even matter.

In my twentieth year of Continuum, I continue to learn new insights into how I have been operating both in Continuum and in my life.    For the past few years, with the onset of the deterioration of my hip cartilage and the ensuing hip replacement operations, I who was a doer and a giver have been learning to ask and to receive from my family and friends. It truly has been a gift (even though I didn’t see it that way all the time).   In the retreat I realized that in some ways, I have been “doing” Continuum and that it is extremely important that I open up receptivity on the biological level as well.  Otherwise, if the tissue is not receptive, no new information and consequently, no new growth or evolving is possible.   Learning to receive at deeper and deeper levels allows the penetration and sourcing to take place.

What I also learned in the next few days of the retreat is how strong the habits and the old defensive mechanisms still operate even after this profound insight.   It is almost like there is a recoil into the habitual defensive patterns which once served me but now limit me.   Peter Levine once stated that we let go of old patterns and holdings when we are resourced enough.   I truly feel blessed in the resources in my life, in my community, in the natural world around me and in my inner world.  I have never liked myself as well as I do now; it took 71 years but here I am!

As I return to my home and my life here in Vancouver, I realize upon reflecting and sharing with friends, that what I discovered in the retreat is all part of a process.  What has been occurring in my life over the past while, especially with my six month sabbatical, personal retreat from January to June, has resulted in my opening up to trusting, trusting that I’m not alone, that I have a community not just of the wonderful people in my life, but also the universe.  Increasingly, I have been experiencing that when I attend and participate as fully as I can, I can then trust that the universe will provide and assist me, maybe not in a way that I anticipated but for my and the greater good.  Even through the difficult global times we are experiencing, we need to build that inner heartfelt trust that we are part of it all and that it was all meant to be.    It is not so much the events we encounter in our lives, but our response to them that we realize our potential both in ourselves and in our world.

With love and blessings for now and for the coming season,
December 18, 2008                                                 Doris

GREETINGS! The dark is settling in along with the rain, the trees are becoming bare with the last glimpses of brilliant colour beginning to fade & yet there are days like yesterday when the sun shines through. All is good! I so appreciate the changability of the outer as well as the inner world and more and more am able to greet each day with whatever it brings.

With love & blessings, Doris

Greetings to All:

As summer is nearing its end, the season turns to the coming of fall, back to school days, the diminishing of the light, the anticipation of the shedding of leaves and the hibernating time of winter in the wings. For yours truly, coming from the leisurely expanse of my sabbatical/retreat time from January to June, I am back into planning, teaching, and counselling.

I thoroughly enjoyed the Retreat Day and classes at Source Point this summer and they provided me with a wonderful sliding into the “back to work” mode. I find the challenge of staying with my practice of “following impulse,” to be more difficult with the scheduling rather than the actual teaching and sitting with my clients which I find enriching and stimulating. So the challenge continues with paying attention to my somatic & feeling response to planning, scheduling and being “on” as teacher, guide and facilitator. The sabbatical also reinforced how absolutely necessary it is to continue to make time for myself, in my own practice, my study and my rest time. When we get busy it is so easy to slide into ways of rewarding oneself that are not particularly nuturing.

From an amazing evening with the incredibly human & knowledgeable Daniel Siegel on June 18, I was struck by how many practices promote mindfulness, which Continuum certainly does. So much of my practice for myself in January was in this vein – following impulse, paying attention to my somatic responses with curiosity, love & compassion & without judgment. As one does this with oneself, it then extends outward to others. Seigel himself came to this awareness through his psychiatric work with families.

Seigel spoke to the importance of relationships in mindfulness – to the interpersonal attuned mind. The social circuit of the brain is the regulatory circuit and social circuits are thicker in mindfulness practitioners. Practice generates a state of mindful attention in the present moment and promotes the integrative, transformative growth of the brain, those functions being primarily in the pre-frontal lobe of the brain. In addition, there is evidence of healing of a variety of clinical conditions with mindfulness practice as well as increasing the immune system and the neuroplasticity of the organism, the ability to shift & respond to changing context.

I leave on Saturday to join the amazing “Miss Em” for her “Moving Medicine” workshop at Hollyhock. I plan on extending my time on Cortes Island for another week of dipping into the retreat & playtime space at our cabin on Gorge Harbour.

With love & blessings, Doris