Stephen Jenkinson will be back to west Wales between 17th and 21st May 2017 for the first of his UK Orphan Wisdom School sessions in Llanrhian, Pembrokeshire. This event is run by Orphan Wisdom, please direct all enquiries to Nathalie Roy nathalie@orphanwisdom.com
Details about the May 2017 session can be found here http://orphanwisdom.com/event/orphan-wisdom-school-new-overseas-class-come-from-away-1-4/
Scroll down to read comments from people who have attended our other events with Stephen.
Stephen Jenkinson Archive
Following the overwhelming response to his previous visit in 2014, Stephen Jenkinson, founder of the Orphan Wisdom School returned to the UK in 2015 for a number of events, including four dates with Holy Hiatus in Wales.
Friday 6th November 7-9 pm – Evening talk at Bridges Community Centre, Drybridge House, Monmouth, Wales
An Introduction to Dying Wise
Die Wise teaches the skills of dying, skills that have to be learned in the course of living deeply and well. Not a seven step coping strategy, not an out-clause for trauma or sorrow, Die Wise is for everyone who, hell or high water, is not going to pull off eternity after all. Dying is not the end of wisdom and wisdom not exhausted by dying. Dying could be and must be the fullest expression and incarnation of what you’ve learned by living. It’s a moral obligation to die well. If you love somebody, if you care about the world that’s to come after you, if you want somebody to be spared the lunacy of what you’ve seen, you’ve got to die wise. This evening begins to imagine a way of doing so.
Saturday 7th November 9.30-3.30 – One day teaching at Bridges Community Centre, Drybridge House, Monmouth, Wales.
Making Meaning of the Ending of Days
Many among us now are crazy for meanings, and crazed by seeking them out. The meanings of life aren’t inherited. What is inherited is the mandate to make meanings of life by how we live. The endings of life give life’s meanings a chance to show.
The beginning of the end of our life, and maybe our way of life, is now in view. It has always been there. This isn’t punishment, any more than dying is a punishment for being born. Instead, the world whispers: All we need of you is that you be human, now. Our work is to sort out what being human should be in such a time.
Friday 13th November 7-9 pm Evening Talk at Theatr Gwaun, Fishguard, Wales.
An Introduction to Dying Wise
Die Wise teaches the skills of dying, skills that have to be learned in the course of living deeply and well. Not a seven step coping strategy, not an out-clause for trauma or sorrow, Die Wise is for everyone who, hell or high water, is not going to pull off eternity after all. Dying is not the end of wisdom and wisdom not exhausted by dying. Dying could be and must be the fullest expression and incarnation of what you’ve learned by living. It’s a moral obligation to die well. If you love somebody, if you care about the world that’s to come after you, if you want somebody to be spared the lunacy of what you’ve seen, you’ve got to die wise. This evening begins to imagine a way of doing so.
Saturday 14th November 9.30-3.30 – One day teaching at Trefacwn, Llanrhrian, Pembrokeshire, Wales.
Making a Village Whole: Caring for the Living and Carrying the Dead
In a culture without much real ceremony, that doesn’t tolerate endings of any kind, it’s a necessary and proper thing that all of us learn about dying and about death. We must learn how to care for the dying people in our midst, and how to die when it is our turn, well before the time of being tested and told comes. This teaching is for people who will die, who are dying, and who love or care for those who will die. It is for those who wish to live deeply and to die well. It teaches the dying time as a place to learn our humanity and the noble, courageous skills of village-making for those we will not live to meet. Chief among these are the willingness to remember sorrow, to start with cultural poverty, to grieve together, and to gather the dead into your village.
Some comments from attendees from Stephen’s previous Holy Hiatus events:
“I was profoundly affected by the weekend, so much so that I brought my partner in halfway through Saturday. It’s hard to put into words how it left me, devastated maybe? Heart-broken but hooked. I can assure you any chance I can get to hear Stephen speak I will take like a shot”.
“A Stephen Jenkinson event is not a refuge for those seeking anodyne spiritual consolations and neatly worked systems. He expects that you pay him the respect of listening attentively to his message, and if you’re wise you will. What he has to tell us, is of the profoundest significance. He speaks hard-earned truths of the Soul that have been won through far reaching reflection, deep immersion in authentic living and long, long apprenticeship. They are inescapable, yet unwelcome in a world distracted by the techno-fantasies of limitlessness and psychically numbed by collective death denials, on an epic scale.
But fear not, the tone is of a heartfelt seriousness, not one of gloom. The style of the telling is nothing short of astonishing, masterful, riveting, and genuinely, genuinely Bardic and with an effect that I thirst to repeat…
I came away Joyful, resolved to live and to die well.”
“Stephen’s teachings devastated me and I didn’t know initially how to translate the new paradigm to my existing situation. It changed radically the way I work with clients as a counsellor. The event has given me a language by which to communicate what I have been feeling and sensing about our culture”
“I particularly value the way we were able to not be in our heads; I have experienced a good deal of meditation and teachings, retreats etc…Stephen seemed to be reaching directly into our hearts. Yes, some of that is painful – “harrowing”, I have a sense of everything being pregnant with death, it grows within us all, everything…I have a stronger sense that life and death are not separate”.