The weekend includes loving kindness and compassion meditation practices and collective embodiment practices to create healthy “villages.” Our mindfulness and awareness practices invite us to experience the interdependency and connection that we have with all beings.

This program qualifies as training in the Social Presencing Theatre Basics which is step one in training to become a facilitator of SPT. For those who have previously done this training this weekend will be a further opportunity to do further practice in SPT. The Atlanta Shambhala Center aspires to develop a cohort of SPT practitioners.

Co-Created by Arawana Hayashi, Social Presencing Theater is an embodied social art that makes current reality visible and explores emerging future possibilities. This is not “theater” in the conventional sense, but uses simple body postures, movements, and spatial design to dissolve limiting concepts, to communicate directly, to access intuition, and to make visible both current realities, and the deeper–often invisible–leverage points for creating profound change.

SPT is a set of practices that synthesizes embodied presence, movement theater, stillness, and dialogue. It can reveal insights for individuals, teams, organizations, and larger social systems. The practices have been used for over fifteen years in business, government, and civil society settings, in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and the United States.

Open to everyone.

For questions and additional information please contact Brenda Collins at [email protected].

Limited scholarships are available for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Email finance@atlantashambhalacenter.org for details.

Arawana Hayashi co-founded Social Presencing Theater and is the author of “Social Presencing Theatre: The Art of Making a True Move”. Her pioneering work as a choreographer, performer and educator is deeply sourced in collaborative improvisation.

Arawana’s dance career ranges from directing an interracial street dance company formed by the Boston Mayor’s Office for Cultural Affairs in the aftermath of the 1968 murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, to being one of the foremost performers of Japanese Court Dance, bugaku, in the US. She has been Co-Director of the Dance Program at Naropa University, Boulder, CO; and founder-director of two contemporary dance companies in Cambridge, MA.

She has been practicing and teaching meditation for more than four decades. Arawana is currently on the core faculty of the Presencing Institute. She joins Peter Senge and Otto Scharmer for the Executive Champions Program co-hosted by the Presencing Institute and the Center for Systems Awareness. She co-hosts social arts residencies with Claudia Madrazo and Ricardo Dutra in Mexico and joins Michael Stubberup and Ninni Sodahl for the Sustainable Co-Creation program in Denmark. She co-teaches with Phil Cass in the Physicians Leadership program in Columbus, Ohio.

Arawana lives in the Hudson Valley of New York with her husband Gaylon Ferguson and is the proud mother of Ayla Teitelbaum and Kobun Kaluza.