BEYOND ECSTATIC playshop — The Delicious Delight of Living

BEYOND ECSTATIC®

Sublime Dance Art Meditation Nature

5-day Workshop Playshop

Tuesday 6 - Sunday 11 August 2024

Samma Karuna Healing and Awakelking Center, Koh Phangan, Thailand

with and by

THE DELICIOUS DELIGHT OF LIVING

raphael jay adjani

accompanied by associates

Exchange: 700 Euros / 26,000 Thai Baht

Exchange places will shortly be available via Samma Karuna’s website

To provisionally reserve one of the limited places: email Raphael

See below for details of all exchange packages and scholarships

BEYOND ECSTATIC is a celebration of the divine, including our own divineness
BEYOND ECSTATIC is a space of connection, engagement, belonging and play
This playshop is a synthesis of creative development, healing, and meditative training. This is enabling living our most authentic selves in an imperfect world.
BEYOND ECSTATIC is an exquisite blend of: dance; visual art; yoga; play therapy; meditations spanning breath, body, nature: embracing Zen playfulness and Japanese Shinto harmony with the natural world.
It is a playshop cultivating connection with spirits of land, sea and air, wherever it is located. It is a symbiosis of movement, stillness, pleasure, pain, sound, silence, wonder, awe.
Raphael and spirits of the natural world take you on a personal journey toward sublime stillness.
BEYOND ECSTATIC is open to anyone ready to cultivate their inherent creativity. Once learned, it can support you better being your own teacher: creatively surfing waves of life.
Raphael is: artist; performer; teacher of art, dance-theatre, and meditation; academic researcher and integrative psychotherapist. BEYOND ECSTATIC has been created through personal inter-connection with spirits of the playshop location: feeding evolving research of art, dance, meditation and philosophy, spanning 40 years, in India, Japan and beyond.

Raphael is a wonderful guide on this journey within

And holds the space

With tenderness, care and good humor

You are in very safe hands

Mel, Previous Course Participant

Exchange Possibilities

Full Exchange: 26,000 Thai Baht / 700 Euros
Enabler Exchange: 30,000 Thai Baht / 813 Euros
Enabling us to provide scholarships to people in under-represented populations to join the Samma Karuna community
Inclusive Accommodation Packages
Contact Samma Karuna for inclusive packages

Early Bird Exchange
20,000 Thai Baht / 542 Euros for payment by 1 March 2023
Super Early Bird Exchange
18,000 Thai Baht / 488 Euro if booking by 31 January 2023

Filmmaker Exchange

1 place is offered to a person in exchange for documenting the process and creating a short BEYOND ECSTATIC dance-film

Photographer Exchange

1 place is offered to a person in exchange for documenting the process and creating a BEYOND ECSTATIC exhibition

Dramaturg Exchange
1 place is offered to a person with appropriate experience to work as a “Dramaturg” to work directly with Raphael to evolve BEYOND ECSTATIC

Samma Karuna Volunteer and Regular Teacher Exchange

Places, subject to availability, offered to volunteers and long-standing regular SK teachers, on application, at 20% discount.

N.B. We invite participants to find their own best way to offset the carbon footprint of their travel to the playshop

More about Raphael and their philosophic approach to BEYOND ECSTATIC

Raphael on BEYOND ECSTATIC:-

This playshop begins from a very personal connection and engagement with spirits of the natural world at Haad Chao Phao beach, Koh Phangan Thailand.

This sacred site-specificity is crucial to each playshop creation and manifestation. It is an evolving listening, developed further by playshop participants through their listening allowing it to be further steered by spirits of the natural world.

I arrive at this space and place through a practice where art meets philosophy meets ecology meets science meets technology meets therapy for the soul.

This includes research of Tantric architecture, art, philosophy, geometry and wider mathematics. It embraces interactive art installation and happenings such as the multi-sensory Japanese Tea Ceremony, Sado: the way of tea.

It engages with Deep Ecology, and Neuroscience that evidences ‘our brains being hardwired to react positively to water; and that being near it can calm and connect us, increase innovation and insight, and…heal what is broken’.

I share things I have assimilated through inner inquiry; and . through my practice as: artist, integrative psychotherapist; teacher of art, dance-theater, meditation; and researcher.

Raphael’s art, teaching, and research, formerly at Goldsmiths University of London, University of the Arts London, is critically acclaimed, award-winning and internationally presented.

At Samma Karuna, they teach meditation for Tantra Teacher Training, Yoga Teacher Training, Breathwork intensive and its overall Awakening and Healing Program.

Details and Sign up for their latest online course and preceding free introductory workshop: Mindful Self-Compassion

Raphael has supported many people globally, to become the most creative, authentic, healed, and fulfilled versions of themselves.

Raphael has a way of immediately making people

feel at ease with the present.

Feelings and thoughts are validated in that moment.

This made it possible for communication and engagement to flow.

The students valued Raphael's demystification of quite complex philosophical ideas.

They were able to examine their everyday experiences and

appreciate the art of simplicity and conviviality in a present and authentic way.

Dr Daniel Somerville Senior Lecturer, University of Worcester,

commenting on Raphael’s playshops with his Masters students

BEYOND ECSTATIC More about its Philosophy

Inspirations and Influences include:

Spirits of the natural location
Tantric art and philosophy in India, Tibet and Japan
Buddhist philosophy and practice as a creative art form, including Noh dance-theater, and the Japanese Tea Ceremony, 茶道 Sado, which could be conceived as an organic installation
Contemporary dance-theater, such as that of Pina Bausch and Tatsumi Hijikata
Shinto: animist way of living equitably, relationally, with all beings
Ma 間 a Japanese word that can mean space-time, interval, pause and emptiness: an emptiness that is spacious snd full
Contemporary Psychology, Neuroscience; and Deep Ecology

Spacefulness

The cultivation of what Raphael conceives as spacefulness: an organic integrative body, mind, and space. More details. below.

Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC)

The understanding of Spacefulness is supported by components of this internationally recognized program that Raphael also teaches. MSC’s scientifically evidenced 40 practice toolkit supports: achieving goals based on our personal core values; reduction of stress, anxiety, depression, and an inner critic. MSC involves 3 key components:-

Sati: an ancient Indian practice which can be translated as “lucid awareness of present happenings”; & commonly as Mindfulness.
Metta: ancient Indian practice of cultivating “Friendliness” to one self and all beings. Research shows many find such self-kindness hard. Metta cultivates healing & life-long warm self-parenting.
Common Humanity practice: evolving understanding of the inter-relationship of human beings. It moves us beyond self-criticism and self-isolation in challenging situations. Raphael expands this to awakening to Deep Ecology, and the Buddhist concept of Inter-relational Origination: the inter-relationship of all phenomena. This moves us beyond a singular ego mind toward understanding of Relational Being: “the community and equity of all beings”.

Lotus Flower symbolism

BEYOND ECSTATIC supports us to accept, embrace, and utilize all aspects of experience. In this we epitomize the Lotus Flower: blooming most beautifully in the muddiest of swamps of life.

Being Danced

The playshop is not only about dancing and painting, but allowing ourselves to Be Danced, to Be Painted. Being Danced goes beyond musical rhythm, allowing, in silence even, of creative energy to flow through you, move you; allowing your paint brush to paint you

Raphael was one of the most gifted students

I had the pleasure to teach.

I cannot forget the moment when they presented to me their final PhD artwork,

the film:

“naka-ma”

It was so serene…

Just magic!

Professor Toshio Watanabe, Former Director of TrAIN, research centre in

Transnational Art, Identity and Nation, University of the Arts London

Indicative Program

Daily Themes

Each day will have:

Specific creative, healing and meditative focuses: exploration of the creative body, the healing body, the belonging body in diverse ways, in relationship to the natural location of the playshop
Guided engagement with physical and metaphysical space

Core Foundational Training involves:

Natural Meditative Dance

creative meditative exploration, specific to the natural location, with different focuses for the body in relationship to space

Natural Art

creative meditative exploration, specific to the natural location, with different focuses for the body in relationship to space

Ecological Ritual

ritual dance and art engagement to honor spirits of the location

Spacefulness

an integrative meditation practice that cultivates mindfulness, self-care, and connection with the world around us. It nurtures dance, art, yogic exploration and deep ecological engagement.

Spacefulness is cultivated also by the foundational components and other training. Together support us to think of our being as a relational body-mind-space. More about Spacefulness below.

Supporting this Core Foundational Training:

Individual Creative and Reflective Exploration

Yoga Nidra

A deeply restorative meditative yogic practice

Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC). Raphael is a certified and experienced teacher of this life development program and they input key MSC elements here. MSC is scientifically evidenced to support good mental health and living life attuned to our personal core universal needs

Details of their online MSC life development program

Other Yogic and Meditative practices

A range of inputs here, including Laughing Buddha practice. Playshop participants can also access some of the daily yoga sessions of a range of teachers at Samma Karuna

Evolving of conceptual understanding of core creative and philosophic foundations of the program. This takes place through talks, videos and collective sharing

Life Transformation one-to-one strategy meetings

This involves ongoing life development coaching, mentoring, and psychotherapeutic process, and reflective space. This facilitates greater creative and existential development

Full Details of the 5-day playshop including the indicative program, email Raphael

The full BEYOND ECSTATIC Syllabus including Teacher Training

The full BEYOND ECSTATIC comprises

1-day introductory playshop
10-day playshop
1-month full program , which also embodies sate 1 and Stage 2 of the Teacher Training program
4-stage Teacher Training program to begin in 2024
Online program to begin in 2024

The 5-day and 10-day playshops are condensed and introduction versions of the 1-month full program . The 1-month full program embodies Stage and and Stage 2 of the Teacher Training program.

To Host a BEYOND ECSTATIC playshop and training program in your region and for more details