Dark-Adapted Eyes
hosted by Jane Brendgen
A two-hour introductory session on meeting pain as a portal to wholeness
We’re living in a threshold time of disequilibrium, rapid change and systems breakdown. This external chaos mirrors the poignant inner reality of our disconnection from ourselves. Most of us are caught in our heads, our attention hijacked by the relentless churn of thinking, doing and scrolling. Rationality has become our primary compass for navigating life and we’ve lost touch with the deeper waters of our unprocessed emotions, our innermost needs and the intuitive relational wisdom of our bodies.
This alienation from our tender embodied humanity ripples outwards - into our relationships with one another and our felt belonging within the natural world. As Joanna Macy reminds us: “Of all the dangers we face, from climate chaos to nuclear war, none is so great as the deadening of our response.”
In the process of expanding our worldview, sense-making, and identity to include greater complexity, depth, and integration, the question we are being asked to hold now is this: Can the developmental mind descend into the body and rediscover love as the intelligence that moves development itself?
As humans we’re being called into an initiation process, to develop our capacity to see with what the Zen teacher Susan Murphy calls “dark adapted eyes”, to compassionately drop below our conceptual meaning-making into the fertile darkness of our pain where the raw materials for alchemy lie.
In this two-hour session you’ll be invited to touch into a deeper and more intimate relationship with pain as a portal to transformation and wholeness. Through shared inquiry, poetry, film, somatic practices and silence we’ll gently open to the deep intelligence that lives within discomfort and discover how pain, when held in the warmth of mutual presence, can become a surprising source of grace.
Jane Brendgen is a transformational coach, accredited master executive coach (APECS), supervisor, columnist for Coaching at Work and published author. She completed her LDP accreditation in 2021. In August 2015, Jane experienced a psychospiritual awakening that opened a profound chapter of transformation her life. Fierce grace took her into the dark dungeons of unprocessed pain where the knots of childhood and intergenerational trauma began to loosen and release. Through lived experience, Jane came to realise that it is in the opening of our hearts to ourselves that our hearts open to the world.
DATES: 12 March, 11am-1pm
COST: £70 (+VAT where applicable)
