THE BLEEDING CIRCLE
A 9 MONTH APPRENTICESHIP TO THE SPIRIT OF BLOOD AND MENSTRUATION THROUGH ART AND CEREMONY
Blood is the portal and the teacher. Blood is the disruptor and sustainer. Blood is the living prayer of our origins. Join Larissa for a 9-month small group container to build creative collective ritual around the ongoing initiation of blood and culture-making, for people who bleed, have bled, or are in a changing dance with the monthly blood rite . Sept 2024 through May 2025. Deadline to Apply is September 2nd. Over zoom, with potential for in-person meetups in the Portland, OR area
Centering the artistic process as our shared ancestral technology of culture making. Blood and menstruation serve as a creative center of gravity, an artistic starting point for cosmic principles that make our existence possible. Not only the biological precedent for physically being born that blood and menstruation offers, but the many, less tangible elements that orbit around the menstrual mind, like Death, Rhythm, Renewal, Love, Expression, Violence, Separation, and Dissolution.
Initiation is inevitable. Are you ready to listen, stay awake & play inside of it?
What if using your creative power for personal and collective benefit was a universal initiation that belonged to all humans?
Humans have unique gifts and impact on the planet. One of these great avenues of impact is the way we make culture. Culture manifests through shared language, concepts, narrative, art, and ritual (repeated actions or behaviors), and determines how we think, what we prioritize, and how we relate. Culture-making is an inherently creative and artistic process.
In the origins of human culture, there was an understanding of the importance of menstruation as a reflection of cosmic life and death principles. In this series we will learn how those ancestral memories are looking to be born continually Now.
Practitioners across the globe are hearing the need for the re-emergence of cosmic principles and ways of relating that have been exiled from domineering supremacist cultures. Healthy relationship to Death, Mystery, Darkness, Change, the Wild, Creativity, Community, the Erotic, the body, vulnerability, Violence, and Nature are missing from many of our daily experiences and commitments. To be out of alignment with these elements, all of which have direct tethers to Blood and Menstruation, is to be out of alignment with Reality and existence. It drains our energy, creates desperation and despair, and makes us incapable friends and family to other humans and the many beings we share this world with.
What does it mean to participate in culture-making that reorients toward these exiled principles?
For many eras in our ancestral history, and in contemporary subcultures and original cultures across the globe that have been somewhat insulated from the effects of westernism, people use basic ritual/theater and creative structures to externalize inner knowings, clarify necessary communications, and revitalize the community and local ecosystems with deep listening, play, shapeshifting, and tending. They use these communal structures to "think out loud" and transmit inner knowings and reinforce essential wisdoms.
In the Bleeding Circle we call upon this shared ancestral technology to usher in the exiled aspects of ourselves and human culture(s). Steeping ourselves in the "menstrual mind" (Grahn, 1993) we dance with Death, Love, Renewal, and Rhythm, and partner with them as teachers for our current context.
The Bleeding Circle itself is a participatory art project. Culture making requires time and consistency, and our aim is to make this art project evergreen; occurring year-round over multiple years.
By apprenticing blood and menstruation, we are apprenticing to human creativity and holistic culture making. The exiled and taboo elements are rewoven with the favored and palatable, allowing the totality of reality to be deepened and recognized. Birth, growth, love, expression, violence, death, and dissolution all speak to one another and require one another. This inescapable truth has been reiterated through myth making, ritual theater, art and communal practices. We continue this human act.
Blood is the portal and the teacher, to the way in which we are all implicated in world-tending. Blood is the answer to chronic cultural avoidance of taboo subjects, and the suffering that we and many other beings are reckoning with. Blood points us to surprise and depth, to source our ritual artistic expression from the place where emotion becomes sacred and uncategorizable.
This crucible is possible because of the love that flows unconditionally, timeless and vast, from the centerless center of all things, The Original Mother, Absolute Nature, or nondual wisdom.
The nondual principles of this work require us to recognize the interconnection between all names, forms, and systems that have developed over millennia in response to this knowledge. We will not be following one specific lineage, but speaking directly with the energies and forces as they show up for us authentically.
Bleeding and menstruation calls us into necessary responsibility, a gravity of vision, creativity and strength that does not show up as easily in other spaces, under slightly different intentions.
OUR JOURNEY
APPLICATION DEADLINE SEPTEMBER 2ND
September : INTIMACY IN CLARITY. Introduction to primary material, group micro-culture, research inquiries and commitments
Meet and Greet (9.12.24) 6-7:30pmPST
Main Session (9.26.24] 5:30-8pmPSTOctober: THE PRIMAL DARK. Ceremonial space to deepen our relationship to the taboo, the feral, the primal, and the growing dark.
Main Session (10.24.24) 5:30-8pmPST
90 min Art Making Party TBA
November: ANCESTORS OF BLOOD AND MENSTRUATION. Ceremonial space dedicated to nurturing the human lineages of practices related to blood and menstruation.
Main Session (11.21.24) 5:30-8pmPST
90 min Art Making Party TBADecember :THE STILL POINT. Ceremonial space touching open potential and stillness, Deep Dreaming Constellation, Solstice. Live offerings to the Spirit of Blood.
Main Session [12.19.24] 5:30-8pmPST90 min art party TBD
January: LIMINAL RECKONING. Looking toward the precarious and unpredictable process of bringing the liminal into form. Group salon for works in progress
Main Session [1.23.25] 5:30-8:30pmPST90 min art party TBD
February: RENEWAL AND REFINEMENT. After our group salon, an opportunity to reflect on our time so far and hone the gifts that have been offered.
Main Session [2.20.25] 5:30-8pmPST90 min art party TBD
March: LIVING BALANCE. Meditation and ceremony dedicated to the dynamic dance of life/death/life (Pinkola-Estés) and the paradoxes of the dual world.
Main Session [3.20.25] 5:30-8pmPST90 min art party TBD
April: FEEDING THE SPARK. Meditation and ceremony for rising to meet what blood, menstruation, and Nature are asking us to grow into for the benefit of the whole.
Main Session [4.17.25] 5:30-8pmPST90 min art party TBD
May: RETURN. Our final catalyst session to solemnize our cycle and how we have been worked by the container. Culmination in a works in progress show as an offering to the public.
Main Session (5.8.25) 5:30-8pmPST
WORKS IN PROGRESS SHOW [5.22.24] 6-8pmPST
The timeline gives an overview of the arc of our journey, but keep in mind that Larissa is an intuitive improviser and may choose to make changes to the content of sessions.
In THE BLEEDING CIRCLE, we center the artistic process as a shared ancestral technology of culture-making
Blood and menstruation serve as a creative center of gravity, an artistic starting point for cosmic principles that make our existence possible. Not only the biological precedent for physically being born that blood and menstruation offers, but the many, less tangible elements that orbit around the menstrual mind, like Death, Rhythm, Renewal, Love, Expression, Violence, Separation, and Dissolution.
We will use meditation, energy work, contemplative movement, play science, sound and theater techniques, ritual systemic constellations, large group and small group reflection, and any form of creative expression that serves (poetry, singing, dancing, drawing, painting, etc).
What people say about this experience:
