Welcome to Mother's Day Global Peace Uprising
MDGPU Explores the Art of Dialogue (both verbal and non-verbal forms of shared embodied mindfulness) as a social meditation, relational yoga and spiritual activism.
Mission: To Promote Global Peace through Dialogue that engages Somatic Intelligence bringing greater coherence to our thinking process, as thought becomes self-sending, self-organizing, self-correcting and self-renewing.
Celebrate the full landscape of human experience to...
Awaken compassion.
Reveal the beauty and power of our vulnerability.
Nourish and enrich us from the depths of meaning.
Reclaim the courage and voice of people facing adversity. Having been touched by their courage we can call upon it - empowered by our collective human ancestry to live a self-authorizing life.
Remythologize our lives, anchoring ourselves in a historical context -- the evolution of humanity as a whole.
Establish a new referent for personal, from self-referential -- being about me, to expressing what is most deeply felt and embodied, and thus what connects us all
Memorialize moments of significance in the flesh of memory -- informing our actions and the legacy we leave for generations to come.
Grow an ecology of affect that is soul-engendering.
Engender transformative learning and change -- challenging us to receive what is, as it is, without the fragmentation, mechanization and reductionism of consensual thought.
Disenthrall us from mistaking the world of appearances for the ground of reality, that we may break ground, falling through a rabbit hole in the realm of possibility beyond images.
Differentiate our senses, feeling, knowing at the depths, so we can navigate the ocean of meaning, finding what truly sustains us, even when we can trust no one, not even ourselves.
Illicit lucidity in the diurnal dream -- to no longer see ourselves solely as observers, but must recognize the primary causative reality of consciousness in inventing and discovering the world through participation.
Cultivate an orientation of gratefulness -- rendering us, at once, innocent and fruitful in the face of the great mystery.
Celebrate the infinite in all that is.
Risa Kaparo, Ph.D.
Executive Director
Author, spiritual activist, psychotherapist, master yoga teacher, dancer, poet and songwriter, Dr. Kaparo has been teaching meditation since 1972. She successfully healed herself from a painful and life-threatening illness as a young adult. The discoveries she made led her to create a methodology to transform pain, stress, trauma and aging and promote wellness, embodied mindfulness and vital longevity. This system, called Somatic Learning, is based on a synthesis of psychological, somatic and meditative disciplines, having been developed during 35 years of research, clinical practice and training of healthcare practitioners, as well as yoga and meditation teachers. Her latest book, Awakening Somatic Intelligence: The Art & Practice of Embodied Mindfulness (North Atlantic books, 2012) and its companion DVD's and CDs, capture the wisdom of her teachings. See www.somaticlearning.com
A long-time student of Jiddu Krishnamurti, Vanda Scaravelli and David Bohm, Dr. Kaparo has taught Somatic Learning and Co-Presencing, a form of dialogue work she developed and has taught at many institutions internationally, including MIT, China's Dalian Medical School, JFK University, California Institute of Integral Studies, Kripalu, Esalen, and Jindal Global University, New Delhi, India. A licensed psychotherapist and Somatic Learning facilitator, Dr. Kaparo practices in the San Francisco Bay Area and Kauai, and by Skype, offering her unique approach to self-healing to thousands of individuals around the world.
Risa is an award-winning performance poet and songwriter with two CDs of poetry and music, Awaken and Grateful. Embrace, her book of poems, has been described as "a poetry of soul-making." Among her prestigious awards, Risa won the grand prize of the John Lennon International Songwriting Contest. Risa developed a performance and healing art, called Luscious Movement, an outgrowth of her explorations in Movement Meditations and her work as a professional dancer (Modern, Butoh and Tango) that have served many in healing from injuries, dissolving scar tissue and regenerating the nervous system.
In her new TV series Awakening Somatic Intelligence: Dialogues on the Science, Art and Practice of Embodied Mindfulness, Risa's deep commitment to the art of awakening will intrigue, entertain and inspire you to engage the power of your own somatic intelligence.
Her forthcoming book and video series: CoPresencing: The Art of Dialogue as Social Meditation - supports the evolution of human consciousness by transcending the incoherencies inherent in our system of thought. As thought itself becomes more self-sensing, self-organizing, self-correcting and self-renewing through awakening somatic intelligence. This relational yoga empowers people to participate creatively and compassionately, in addressing global challenges by dimensionally extending awareness, so we no longer attempt to solve problems from the same level of thought that created them.