David Whyte – ‘A Seeming Stillness’

 

‘A Seeming Stillness:
Becoming a Separate Self while Learning to be Selfless’

We invite you to join us for this special extended one-off salon event with David.

This salon was postponed from April. We have provisionally rescheduled this to start at 6.00 p.m. on Sunday 23rd August with an evening session followed by a three course meal and finish with lunch on Tuesday 25th August.

A stillness we can carry with us is the doorway to any real forward movement in our outer world, whether in our relationships, our work or our self development. Join David Whyte for a scintillating but easeful look at joining the ability for rest with the necessity for action.

When we wish to act bravely we often leave a centered stillness behind. Courage is often a word that tempts us to think outwardly, to run bravely against opposing fire, to do something under besieging circumstance, and perhaps, above all, to be seen to do it in public; celebrated in story, rewarded with medals, given the accolade, but a look at its linguistic origins is to look in a more interior direction and toward its original template, the old Norman French, Coeur, or heart.

Courage is intimately connected to stillness, the origin of our caring and our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future.To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.

To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we find we already care deeply about: a person, a professional future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on.To be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.

Much is said in today’s world about “just being.” But human beings have never had the luxury of choosing between an untouched and interior foundational self, and the necessities and often overwhelming vulnerabilities of achievement, in the outer world. We are conversational creatures who shape a real identity only at the edge between the self and the world, between the here and the there, between how we need to be and what we need to be, and especially between the ground beneath our feet and the far horizon to which we go.

Through the revelations of poetry and the poetic tradition David will guide us to look into some of the bold, sometimes courageous, always robustly vulnerable and sometimes painful steps in bringing our seemingly interior states out into the world, to be and to do, to achieve and above all to give.

Dates & Times:

6.00 p.m. Sunday 23rd August – opening session followed by evening meal

9.30 – 4.00/4.30 Monday 24th August plus evening meal

9.30 – 12.30 followed by lunch Tuesday 25th August

Venue:
The Green Room, Eynsham Hall,
Witney,
Oxfordshire,
OX29 6PN

Eynsham Hall is an old country house set within 47 acres of grounds situated at the heart of a 3000 acre estate in the beautiful Oxfordshire countryside. Participants will have access to their spa facilities and grounds,. You will be able to check in at Eynsham Hall from 2.30 p.m. on Wednesday 1st April.

Fees: All prices below include two evening meals, two lunches and refreshments.

Fee without accommodation: £475 +VAT

Fee with two nights B&B accommodation in a main house bedroom: £680 +VAT

Fee with two nights B&B accommodation in a smaller new wing bedroom: £620 +VAT

The venue is reserving a number of bedrooms for our use. We recommend booking early to secure one.

A few ‘pay-it-forward’ bursaries are available if you are on a low family income. Please email with your request info@thebeyondpartnership.co.uk

Booking:

To book please email your  name and invoicing address to info@thebeyondpartnership.co.uk indicating which of the three fee options above you are applying for.

Click here to read David’s poem, A Seeming Stillness, from which the title of this salon is taken