You are warmly invited to join us for this six week exploration of Spiritual Flow. We will be asking: What does spirituality mean to us? What have been some important spiritual experiences in our lives? What excitements and fears arise for us when we share our spirituality with others? How might a deeper befriending of our spiritual longings enrich our everyday relationships?
Each of the weekly sessions will begin with a workshop oriented around a particular theme. The list of possibilities is long and includes: Sacred space, forgiveness, prayer, ritual, devotion, the divinity of the everyday, love, awareness, wholeness, life and death, and God.
The second half of the session will be a Relateful Flow session. Relatefulness is a set of ever-evolving practices for bringing awareness and creativity into our relationships. You might think of it as “mindfulness-in-relationship”, or as “fulfilling-relating”. Flow is a type of Relateful practice in which, as a whole group, we collaboratively witness what is arising (flowing) in us and between us.
As we practice Flow together, we will have an opportunity to explore both how we have been impacted by that week’s spiritual theme, and to see how the theme continues to influence and guide us from moment to moment. A guiding question will always be: How is spirituality flowing through us, here and now?
This six-week group is primarily aimed at people who have prior experience (20+ hours) of Relateful Flow practice, or of similar practices. If you are interested in joining and are new to Relateful Flow, please email us to explore if the group will be a good fit for you ([email protected]).
We hope that the assembled group will embody a rich variety of religious and spiritual backgrounds. Needless to say, you are warmly encouraged to join whatever your background is.
This group will run online, for 6 x 2 hour sessions, taking place on Mondays.
- The group will start on Monday 2 February, and run weekly through to Monday 9 March.
- The sessions will take place on Zoom at 12-2pm US Central Time* (6-8pm UK time, 7-9pm Central European Time).
- Group size is capped at 10.
*On Monday 9 March, the session will take place at the usual time for Europe based participants (6-8pm UK time, 7-9pm CET), but due to daylight savings changes in the US, the session will take place one hour later for US based participants, at 1-3pm.
To further convey the atmosphere we hope to cultivate, we each share below some words about why we feel drawn to offer this group experience.
Jayne:
I did not connect to the early experiences of my family’s religious traditions and because of this I thought spirituality was not for me. It left me with a loneliness and a sense of missing something I could not put into words. This shifted for me when I first encountered relational practices. The invitation to connect with another person through their meaning-making, their embodied experience and their longing matched my own searching. It struck me that meeting each person in this way was seeing another facet of god. I now have a desire to explore and share these more intangible aspects of relationship. I am looking forward to being in a group where we know that we are meeting in a sacred space and we can explore what emerges when our spirituality is explicitly invited.
Will:
“You know nothing, John Snow” (Ygritte, in Game of Thrones)
“To love another person is to see the face of God” (from Les Miserables the Musical)
“I once was blind but now I see” (John Newton)
These are a few quotes that come to mind as I write this. At the moment, I visit my grandmother every day for around an hour, as she moves through the final stages of her life. My spiritual practices are: Holding her hand, reading to her, and helping her shift position and sip from her cup of water. In return, she is teaching me invaluable lessons: How to receive help, how to let go, and how to love.
I wish to cultivate the courage to adventure more deeply into my spiritual longings and I am hoping this is a space where we can inspire each other to do that.
About the facilitators:
Jayne Jones and Will Jefferson are colleagues and friends, and have been exploring practices of spirituality and Relatefulness together since 2021. This event has emerged through years of experimental collaboration.
Jayne has been a creative practitioner and educator for over 30 years. Her art practice expresses the relationship between surrender and agency in the painting process. Alongside this she has been a tutor in both Fine Art and Critical Theory. In 2018 Jayne co-founded the Feral Art School (https://www.feralartschool.org) which she now manages. An independent cooperative, it offers visual art courses, studio provision and supports the creation of emerging artist groups fostering community, confidence and well-being. For over a decade Jayne has been engaged with relational practices and is a facilitator with the Relateful Company.
Will is a philosopher, a facilitator, a poet, and a lover of co-creative practices. He leads Relational Mindfulness (Relatefulness) with The Relateful Company, and offers 1:1 sessions to individuals to develop their skills in mindfulness, communication and creativity. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Oxford, and wrote his dissertation on the moral significance of empathy. He regularly leads Poetry and Presence groups. He was a founding member of a theatrical improvisation group in Oxford, and co-directed an improvised play at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
If you have any questions, please email Will Jefferson at [email protected] or contact our team at [email protected]