Drop in with Damian’sAuthentic Relating Practice, and More Spirituality Matters

It’s been about two years since Damian Gallagher last offered his Authentic Relating Group (ARG) events at Yoga Soup, ending a more or less monthly tradition where participants could simply come to the yoga studio and find themselves painlessly easing into connection with others in the room. ARG offers a unique opportunity to connect deeply with others through facilitated activities that are called games, because they’re relatively short and often playful. All participants have to do is show up and be willing to be present in a supportive environment designed to make vulnerability easier and more accessible. 

The reason we’re writing about it now is that Gallagher is next up in the Embodied Arts Workshop series at CEC’s Environmental Hub downtown with an event titled “Being Here.” The series is part of the Community Environmental Council’s A Year of Active Hope, free events hosted by CEC to unite the community and create space for courage, connection, and change. But you don’t have to think about that on Friday evening, September 25, where the focus is on a space of warmth and openness rather than any sort of agenda. There’s always plenty of room to engage in whatever manner feels right for you. 

If you’re new to the games, it’s almost surprising how these activities – which gently encourage honesty, openness, and genuine interaction – can foster real connections, both with yourself and others. The processes are crafted to help you explore, share, and celebrate being real. It’s about making new friends and deepening relationships in a fun and meaningful way.

In full disclosure: I’ve known and participated in workshops with Gallagher for more than eight years, and in my experience there aren’t very many individuals more attuned to himself and others as well as the moment, a human whose curiosity and self-awareness never come off as anything other than fully authentic. He often goes at a rather slow pace that feels comforting and encouraging at the same time. 

Gallagher spent more than six years teaching relational skills and online facilitation at The Connection Institute, an organization centered on Circling, before launching his own platform. Gallagher is a personal development coach, relational facilitator, and host of the Relational Literacy Lab, which is a weekly online gathering dedicated to the pursuit of becoming more skillful at being human together. Those events are also free, and in a way serve as the next step after getting into the groove with the games. 

Gallagher is also one of the founders of Santa Barbara Contact Improv, which also has a weekly class and jam every Monday evening at the Dance Hub downtown. The sessions serve as a consistent space to explore movement, presence, connection, and community through the practice of Contact Improvisation, which sometimes looks like an even more amped up version of Ecstatic Dance, with participants swirling, lifting and gliding with one another, giving, taking and sharing weight, and exploring other methods of physical connection through movement. 

Details at https://tinyurl.com/FB-ContactImprov-26. To register for Friday’s free event, visit https://tinyurl.com/CEC-EmbodiedArts-26. Learn more at www.DamianGallagher.com and www.RelationalLiteracy.life.

Funny Business in the Carpinteria Hills

Given these almost fully fractured times in our country and around the world, it may seem disingenuous for Pacifica Graduate Institute to be offering a workshop called “Laughing Matters: Jung, Comedy, and the Transformative Power of Humor.” After all, according to Pacifica’s program description, Plato and his friends considered humor not just unworthy of extended discussion, but an actual danger to be actively avoided. Dismissal of humor in Western philosophy and academic circles continued for more than a millennium, though of course humanity was enjoying a good laugh long before Aristotle tied his first toga. But the concept of the course is that when thinkers who champion the rational are confronted with humor, it makes them uncomfortable in ways they can’t explain, logically at least. Depth psychology with its characteristic embrace of the unseen, unknowable, unruly, and unexpected, provides an explanation that recenters humor as central to the psyche’s experience.

The class explores Jungian concepts such as the tension of opposites, the transcendent function, archetypal energy, the shadow, the use of the imagination, the importance of play, and the somatic benefits of laughter to reveal that humor can be a powerful tool of expanded perception, an opportunity to explore and utilize unconscious energies, and an optimum strategy for survival in an oft-tragic world. The four weekly online sessions, slated for October 7-28, aim to delve into tricksters, clowns, and humor as both weapon and medicine. 

“Laughing Matters” is just one of eight online offerings from Pacifica that begin by early November.  

Visit https://extension.pacifica.edu