Lyric Attunement (in DC!)
A Circling & Embodiment Workshop
led by Dechen Ellen McSweeney, Tara Dougans,
Tyler Stuart, and Garrett Jones
Join us — a quartet of devoted Circlers, artists, and humans — for two days of Circling inspired by the Lyric sensibility.
On March 29, 9:30am-6:30pm and March 30, 9:30am-5pm
At Journey Space in Glen Echo, MD
Cost is $103.80, with the invitation to gift more if you can
To read testimonials, go here. To register, email Dechen at futurevessel.art@gmail.com
About the workshop
How do we feel more deeply into what is here and alive between us?
Circling is a form of relational meditation in which the focus of contemplation is the shared real-time experience of being with. This 2-day workshop is suitable for new and seasoned Circlers, offering an opportunity to deepen your study of the form among friends. We will practice playfully attending to the 'most minute details of difference' in support of developing greater capacity, language and skill for both personal and relational coherence; creative interplay, lyrical unfolding and love.
About Lyric
“Lyric thought springs from love, love that attends to the most minute details of difference; and in this attention experiences connection rather than isolation.” — Jan Zwicky
Lyric is an intersubjective research vessel composed of Dechen Ellen McSweeney, Tara Dougans, Tyler Stuart, and Garrett Jones. For the past year and a half, they have been engaged in the practice of Circling as a quartet, exploring what happens when the form is practiced within committed friendship. Their Circling work is an ongoing practice of reciprocal devotion, attunement, compassion, courage, and truth. The first Lyric Attunement workshop was held in Vancouver, BC in July of 2024.
Circling reveals truth in unexpected and paradoxical ways. When we share our sense of isolation, for instance, we tend to feel more connected. It was Hermes, the divine trickster, who created the first lyre — from which we inherit the word “lyric.” From the entrails of cattle and the shell of a tortoise, he fashioned an instrument that would become an emblem of human praise. Praise for the world and its ecology of meaning; praise for idiosyncrasy and communion.
Our circle is called Lyric because we want to attune to the music always being made between us — whether resonant or dissonant. We play our song with what we’ve been given — our shells and our guts — and listen for its hidden wholeness.
About Us
Dechen Ellen McSweeney lives in Washington D.C., where she practices body-focused psychotherapy, leads Circling, writes songs, and weaves intimate webs of relationship. She is grateful to her many teachers – in Theravada, Zen, Circling, Soulmaking, psychoanalysis, experimental music, poetry, and nonviolence — for their gifts of ruthless wisdom and ecstatic embodiment.
Tara Dougans is a Tiohtià:ke-based artist whose sculpture and field coherence work explores silent-level sensing through touch. Drawing from a both visual and contemplative arts background, with a strong somatic focus, they are interested in non-linear pathways into subtle body awareness; as well as improvisatory, playful and emergent processes.
Tyler Stuart lives on Lək̓ʷəŋən territory and works with the Xʷsepsəm community as an afterschool tutor and a men’s group facilitator. He is a writer and a dancer, a peregrini, a pond of images.
Garrett Jones is a carpenter living and working on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ nations know as Vancouver. He is a walker, a runner, a crawler, a jumper, a sitter, and an asker of questions, such as: What do we need to become to leave a living world for future generations?
Photographs by Garrett Jones