

ROSE & LOTUS PRACTICE currently offers the following modalities: 1) SPIRITUAL COUNSELING: This is very much tailored to the individual, her/his spiritual tradition and personal objectives. 2) THE ROSE & LOTUS CONTEMPLATIVE CIRCLE This has much in common with various Buddhist, Yoga and Sufi meditation circles. It starts from the simplicity of "beginners mind" -- and ends there as well. It exposes participants to a range of contemplative techniques, without being specifically tied to any religion. The teacher also takes time with participants to discuss their experience, and their individual quest -- in some cases, if they are prepared, sending them in the direction of spiritual traditions and teachers who may be a right "fit" for them. 3) BABEL WORKSHOPS IN AWAKENED MOVEMENT: is for actors, dancers and people looking to simply open up their spontaneity. It makes advanced students more mindful, focused and precise, and allows aspiring and less experienced people to learn to move and work with an ensemble of others without the clutter of prepared scripts or choreography. We work with space and time, employing body and mind. The goal is to increase creativity through "no -mind" but with the intelligence of mindfulness. The workshops employ the Viewpoints from actor and dance training as used at Shambhala University and Saratoga International Theatre Institute, the Yoga of action, in certain sessions martial-arts-based movement, and techniques of employing the voice and texts with special meaning to the individual students. Rose & Lotus: Teachers and Guides: Primary teacher, Joe Daoud Martin is an ordained interfaith minister and essayist, playwright, director, fiction writer, and author of books on arts and spirituality. He also teaches meditation and spiritual performance techniques. A recipient of two Rockefeller Foundation grants and three grants from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, he has travelled extensively in India, Turkey, and the Maghreb. In 2001, he held a Senior Fulbright Scholarship in Eastern Europe, and has twice worked in Jerusalem and Palestine as a Senior Fulbright Specialist. He has several times directed his stage version of Rumi’s MATHNAVI as a "theatre for peace" project. During his time in India he studied at the Institute for Buddhist Dialectics in Dharamsala. A student of Buddhism and Sufism for 38 years, who has also worked with Christian contemplative teachers at The New Seminary, he has maintained long ties with various Sufi orders and Buddhist Mahayana lineages in the US and abroad. These include the Mevlevi order (the lineage of Rumi), Naqshbandi and Inayati lineages, having been initiated in the Nimatullahi Sufi order in 1993. He maintains ties with the Zen Peacemaker Order and Vajrayana teachers in Dharamsala India, where he studied at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics. Martin’s decades of research and practical studies of the spiritual traditions and contemplative practice around the world are synthesized in one of his various books The Rose and the Lotus: Sufism and Buddhism – Two Wisdom Traditions. For eight years he has been serving as an associate instructor at the El Haddawi Winter School in spiritual performance in Germany. (Rose & Lotus in the past has been the central theme at El Haddawi, and included Sufi and Buddhist artists/teachers.) Currently, Joe is a senior lecturer at Johns Hopkins University in Theatre Arts and Studies, and recently a resident Fellow in Arts and Peace at the Center for Global Peace in Washington DC. His current interfaith work also extends to peace-building and conflict resolution. Visiting Teacher: Ingo Taleb Rashid, artistic and spiritual director of the El Haddawi Winter School and performance group near Munich, Germany. A Shaikh of the Naqshbandi Sufi Order, Rashid has studied and integrated martial arts from Japan, where he trained, into his work. He has been spending much time in recent years with practitioners of the Altaic shamanistic path in Siberia and Asian Russia, which has been integrated into his teaching at El Hadawwi. Rashid has choreographed and directed large scale works in various countries, including his "Danse Macabre" which took place throughout the city streets of Lucerne Swtzerland, and later in Wasseburg in Bavaria, with the crowds being led from the city streets to a theatre where they witnessed a perfomance version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. He continues his work as a spiritual teacher of his Sufi tradition. For more information on El Haddawi or the Winter School in Europe go to:
teacher with extensive training in Western and Eastern traditions. He has traveled extensively in Asia and lived in Japan for a dozen years, working as a journalist and studying martial arts, meditation and dance. He trained for five years with famed dancer-choreographer Kei Takei, performed as a member of her dance company Moving Earth, and founded an improvisation collaborative called Human Garden, which brought together dancers, musicians and martial artists. A lifelong student of the movement and meditation art Shintaido, he taught for eight years in Tokyo and since 2000 has led classes in the Baltimore-Washington region. He specializes in radical movement training for actors and dancers. As an actor, he performs professionally in local theatres and video and is a member of Actors’ Equity Association. He also is an associate instructor with the El Haddawi Dance Theatre Company of Bavaria, Germany. |
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