Dear Friends of the Magellan,

In January 2012, I was enjoying eight weeks of winter break from my previous career. I took advantage of this time to adapt a simple blogsite (then “BiFFnet”) to host a circle of people who were interested in experimenting with new ways of learning together, new ways of sharing ideas, insights and inspiration through online learning circles and teleconference conversations, new ways of exploring territories of thinking, being and playing that might arise if we carried our deepest felt-sense from our hearts, forward into a kind of collective body-mind where new, co-created worlds would appear across all the horizons beyond which we wanted to sail.

Without a task list or plan of any sort, I wanted only to hear your beating hearts drumming alongside mine, in an orchestra where joy and enthusiasm played with nurturing concern and basic human kindness. Oh what music has arisen to propel this ship toward discovering wholeness once again.

Today the Magellan Courses welcomes its 200+ member– with the ability to participate on different levels, a richly layered tapestry is being woven. Some of you are helping to steer this exploration into new waters. It is exciting for me to see courses led by others, and to think that all around the globe people are participating in leaning into their own (un)knowing in a way they have not done before. All of this because of you. Because of all of us.

Today I am introducing some initiatives being brought forward through the help of many of you working behind the scenes to develop the Magellan Courses. We are really enthusiastic about these, as we feel they are ripe for our moment. I hope you find them enticing.

~ as the heart shines, voice sings, and body dances, in light and love

within and through, all of us,

Bonnitta Roy

                                                                                                       

 The Magellan Fellowship

Think of The Magellan Courses as our flagship, and then imagine a real-life embodied “ship of fellows” — this is the Magellan Fellowship– a collaborative envisioned as an international, inter-generational society of fellowship who contribute by being mentors and benefit from receiving mentorship from others.

Our Fellowship is an open, self-organizing fellowship of personal commitment and shared response-ability, in an intimate field of deep interpersonal relatedness and care. This “ship of fellows” is envisioned as a fluid, flexible, living field of human care and concern, where fellows are held in a sacred space of shared endeavors around meaning-making and visioning. In this field, we are better able to develop clear mind, right body and vital spirit– our personal journey toward self-mastery. But it is also evident to the Fellowship, that the greatest strength and power resides in the relational ground that unites each fellow into a more excellent whole.

The programs offered through the Fellowship focus on discovery and wisdom, and the processes that enrich the qualities of interdependent care, integrated development, and deeply shared trust that arise from basic human kindness and well-being, as generative of transpersonal fields of Love, that are capable of acting in the world in powerful and extraordinary ways.

The longer-term mission of the Magellan Fellowship is to develop and deploy a global field of inter-generational fellows to enter into and transform the existing structures of education, politics and business.

Today, our Fellowship offers two inter-enactive programs:

The Magellan Fellowship Artist Series launches soon with Earthanima artist, Thomas Arthur hosing a 4-part teleconference series of meditations on Elemental Voices designed to facilitate our awareness of the individual, collective and natural subtle energy fields. His work is innovative and experiential, and guarantees to have some surprises in store.

The Magellan Fellowship Retreats is a series of venues designed to deepen our engagement with each other, and expand the kinds of encounters we can experience together. Three retreats will be offered this fall and are highlighted below. I believe that we can benefit tremendously by being together in the same place at the same time, in deep relational engagement, surrounded by nature, to fully presence The Magellan Courses journey together. With some of your help, we have put together 3 weeks for collaborative retreat designed to intensify our work towards creating a new understanding of ourselves as intimately entangled living centers of embodied spirit-as-wholeness, with the intention of producing extraordinary artifacts– documents, video, audio, a presentation for next summer’s ITC 2013 Conference– that can be shared with a larger audience, and serve as the core “navigation log” of The Magellan Fellowship.

*****

2012 Magellan Fellowship Retreats

The Retreats are an invitation to co-create the emergent possibilities we hold in our hearts. Our gifts of imagination, creativity, spontaneity, intuition and artistry flourish within generative fields of people and nature in intimate, embodied relationship.

We gather together because in order to feel, we need to be touched.

Human, animal, natural and elemental relationships organize in complex, generative constellations. Each of us is a living center that both radiates and receives the wholeness that flows from and pours through myriad constellations upon constellations of intimate inter-penetrating encounters– self to self, hand to leaf, eye to light, mouth to water, sperm to ovum, urchin to coral reef.

Alone, we are the night, holding onto stars.

Together we are light reflecting as open sky.

This fall the Magellan Fellowship will be offering retreats designed for intimate and intensive group process on core themes that have wider implications for all-of-us. There will be three separate retreats– in September, October, and November. Each retreat will support a group of six to eight people, in a process of what I am calling natural fellowship– emergent constellations organically formed around basic human sensitivity and kindness toward our needs for intimacy, trust, nurturing, mentoring, mutual care, concern and support. Natural fellowship engenders collective spaces of open awareness, where individuals can be deeply seen and the group field intuitively felt– places where separateness transmutes as wholeness– the presence of Love.

Naturally, we thrive in fellowship.

*****

Gather together to Hear the Call (Sept 10-16th) 

What is calling to emerge just beyond, piercing the edges of our collective moment? How does being together increase our capacity to hear this calling? What is my own unique purpose in this process? how can my deeply personal core self speak from the universal, arriving as the future of our in-becoming? What are the magical processes in play, gathering us together? How do we immerse in the free-flow of being as the deeper presence of the always already in-becoming Spirit that we are individually and collectively?

Listening to being as strings being tuned in order to play together.

This first retreat will set the trajectory for the next two. Our experiences will be chronicled as a collaborative journal that will support the retreats in a generative way– to dip and cross and carry the vision forward.

*****

Spirit Becoming Body (Oct 1st–7th)

In becoming body, spirit realizes ever-emerging wholeness, fullness and freedom.

What is our natural, ground state of being? How do we access the deeper, more profound levels of enthusiasm, joy and love? How do we journey, guided by our innermost beacon of felt-sense, toward levels of intuition and insight, and the free-flowing delight of becoming an enmeshed and embodied, en-light-ened spirit?

Dance of energetic primes, primordial elements, archetype and angels.

Can we learn to dance with the primeval forces of the universe– the pulse of Eros and Chaos set to a timelessly infinite rhythm? How do spirit and body interpenetrate through the impulse of energetics and elementals, to dance as archetype, angels, animals and human? What are the multiple streams in which we are afloat, the complete harmonic resonance that sings to us– as the wisdom of light becoming love becoming logos?

*****

Fall in Love with the Future (Oct 29th–Nov 4th)

Who are we?

Where are we headed?

We are together always as one.

The Earth knows where we have been.

She follows our lead.

The Sky above

The Ground Below

Are always here.

They know us well.

We follow their lead.

Wherever we are headed

Whoever we become

I know the One I Love.

Always, the future emerges upon us now. What is the nature of our anticipation? How do we free-flow with impermanence as the ever-arriving moment of birth?

Is time a riddle to be solved?

What does it mean to co-presence with source? How do human choice and free will inter-course with that which is always already evolving at a scale beyond human action? Will the answers to our biggest questions unfold, or does our existential condition reflect a greater unfathomable mystery?

What are people for?

What is our role within this evolving wholeness– both as individual, species, and life itself? How does our involutionary inheritance complete the evolutionary impulses?

*****

The retreats will be hosted at Alderlore

Alderlore is the location of a non-profit environmental-education farm situated among the Berkshire hills of Northwest Connecticut. Alderlore is a place of exceptional natural beauty and diversity– gardens, farm, meadow, pond, surrounded by deep Hemlock forest. Participants will share rooms in the Studio (2 double bedrooms and a 4-bed big room) which has a full bath, breakfast kitchen, and offers light and spaciousness overlooking the pond from the 2nd floor. There are also 2 private rooms available in the main house for those who need more privacy. All meals will be home-cooked and shared in communal fashion in the main house.

Use the registration form below to reserve your place. The retreat rooms are available Monday — Sunday, with the main workshops starting on Thursday.  Choose which workshop you are attending, and the length of your retreat stay from the drop down options below. Check the payment option to send a check,  pay through the WePay or PayPal button on the right side bar of this site.

Those who plan to arrive early, can make arrangements to work with The Horses at Alderlore.

Prices and Accommodations

Workshop Fee (Thursday– Sunday Events) $ 380

Meals & Shared Rooms (Thursday–Sunday) $ 200

Individual Room + add $ 100

Early Arrivals + add $ 60 per day

Discounts: Those who have already donated to the Magellan Courses, can deduct their 2012 donations toward the cost of the retreat.

REGISTRATION FORM

Videos of an Interview with Bonnitta about the Retreats: