Summary

Workshop Number: P-02
Leaders: Barbara Birch
Who May Register?: Adults Only (high school with permission)
Worship/Worship-Sharing: 15%
Lecture: 20%
Discussion: 35%
Experiential Activities: 30%

Who May Attend?
only full time attenders (participants should attend all week)

“I will come in and eat with you, and you with me (Rev 3:20).” This workshop is for Friends who want to embody Spirit when they make choices about food, drink, and physical activity in daily life, recognizing that Friends’ embodied stories are unique and subject to forces beyond our control. Although the inspiration is…


Workshop Description

“I will come in and eat with you, and you with me (Rev 3:20).” This workshop is for Friends who want to embody Spirit when they make choices about food, drink, and physical activity in daily life, recognizing that Friends’ embodied stories are unique and subject to forces beyond our control.

Although the inspiration is Revelations 3:20, where Christ says ‘Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me’, this workshop is inclusive to Christian, theistic, or non-theistic spiritualities.

Intended Audience:
Friends who want to eat, drink, and enjoy movement in a Spirit-led body-intentional way

Purpose:
This workshop recognizes that the embodied stories that root people in the world are unique and uniquely influenced by genetic, cultural, and societal pressures, including discrimination, violence, and food inequalities. Embodied experiences are personal and individual but also social and political. The primary idea of the workshop is spiritual embodiment, the idea that we can experience our bodies as wholesome and lovable, as the earthly home to the Indwelling Spirit, and as the basis for our Quaker testimonies. Our body selves are grounded on the earth (hence earthcare), united to others by relationship (hence love) and buffeted by genetic, social, cultural, political forces (hence peace, social justice, equality”¦.)

Specific Topics: Christian, theistic, and non-theistic ideas of embodied spirituality and spiritual embodiment within Quakerism; the science linking spiritual embodiment with attitudes towards the body; Quaker testimonies; spirit-led body-intentional eating and movement; personal intentions for a preferred future; support from Friends and Meetings.

Objectives:

  1. Participants will co-create a safe, brave, accepting, and tender space to share (and laugh about) our experiences with our bodies, especially with respect to weight and health.
  2. Participants will become aware that body image and weight can be addressed openly without shame, embarrassment, or fragility, and with love and humor.
  3. Participants will explore how our spiritual lives can be more coherent by aligning our personal daily choices with our testimony through the lens of spiritual embodiment.
  4. Participants will discuss how we (and our Friends) can love, help, and support one another to enjoy longer healthspans if possible.

Activities: Each daily meeting will include a brief check-in, a brief guided meditation, a short interactive lecture, worship-sharing and friendly discussion, and body prayers, always allowing time for humor and camaraderie.

Mission Statement: There are already a number of Quakers who believe that:

  • Spirit can free us from internal conflict around food and body image.
  • Spirit can restore our felt sense of wholesomeness.
  • Love’s healing embodiment is abundant and available to us all.
  • We can love ourselves just as we are with self-compassion and self-forgiveness.
  • Loving our existing bodies is compatible with efforts to prolong our healthspan.
  • Spirit-led body-intentional eating and movement are attainable with divine assistance.
  • Faithfulness Groups can hold us and support us with love and tenderness.

Leader Experience

Barbara Birch brings over a 50 year of experience, both a leader and a participant in learning situations. Having both the leader and the participant perspectives makes her humbly aware of the strengths and weaknesses of weeklong workshops. Each daily meeting will be interactive, active, and collaborative. Barbara acknowledges that overweight, body image, and health are delicate topics with a lot of shame, fragility, and embarrassment involved, so they are not easy to bring up and explore. She hopes to bring these topics out in the open in an accepting and nonjudgmental way, with humor and sensitivity.

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