Dear friends, welcome to my new course! For the first time in an online format I will share the basics of my home workout. Throughout the mini-course we will cover fundamental exercises such as planks, push-ups, abs and squats, as well as light dumbbell training. We will go through a checklist of essential knowledge for safely and gradually expanding endurance, strength, muscular tone and flexibility. The course will start with Pa Tuan Chin – an ancient Chinese practice which combines postural training and breathwork –, and will end with a session of lengthening.
Requirements:
– comfortable clothes;
– a yoga mat (or a carpet).
Optional:
– if you have them, feel free to bring a pair of light dumbbells or two bottles filled with water or sand.
Date of the course: Sunday 26th June 2022, at 12-14 (time zone: Finland).
Online platform: Zoom (the Zoom link to the mini-course will be sent after your registration)
Languages: English and Italian
Registration period: 17.6-25.6.2022.
Registration fee: 40 €
For registering to the mini-course, please send an email to gabrielegoria79@gmail.com , reporting your full name, home address and email address: the bill will be sent you by email.
Dear friends, welcome to my new course! For the first time in an online format I will share the basics of my home workout. Throughout these lessons we will cover fundamental exercises such as planks, push-ups, abs and squats, as well as light dumbbell training. We will go through a checklist of essential knowledge for safely and gradually expanding endurance, strength, muscular tone and flexibility. Each lesson will start with Pa Tuan Chin – an ancient Chinese practice which combines postural training and breathwork –, and will end with a session of lengthening.
Requirements:
– comfortable clothes;
– a yoga mat (or a carpet);
– a pair of light dumbbells (between 2 and 10 kilos, according to your preference and physical possibilities – as an alternative you can use two big bottles full of water or sand).
Dates of the course: Tuesday 7th, Thursday 9th, Tuesday 14th and Thursday 16th June 2022, always at 19:00-21:00 (Finnish time zone).
Online platform: Zoom (the Zoom link to the mini-course will be sent a few days before the event)
Languages: English and Italian
Registration period: 26.5-5.6.2022.
Registration fee: 75 € (55€ if you register by 3.6)
For registering to the mini-course, please send an email to gabrielegoria79@gmail.com , reporting your full name, home address and email address: the bill will be sent you by email.
Dear friends, the summer season of Kung Fu outdoor training begins on Saturday 14th May, and will continue throughout the whole summer.
We will train every Saturday at 12-14, with any kind of weather: please dress accordingly. Our practice includes workout, Ch’I Kung, T’ai Chi Ch’üan and Shaolin Ch’üan.
Participation fee: 5€. Place: Hesperian puisto (Töölönlahti, Helsinki), in the park beside the Opera house.
Feel free to join at any time, and to invite new friends.
Dear friends, it is with great pleasure that I invite you to my new workshop. This event will provide a comprehensive synthesis of my favourite breath-work practices, including my original ‘inner heat’ technique. If you are interested in exploring various traditions and approaches to conscious breathing, and wonder how breath can improve concentration, health, stress management, as well as resilience to extreme temperatures, this is the workshop for you!
Date of the workshop: Sunday 20th March, at 11:00-13:00 (Finnish time zone)
Online platform: Zoom (the Zoom link to the workshop will be sent a few days before the event)
Language: English
Registration period: 5.3-19.3.
Registration fee: 45 €
For registering to the workshop, please send an email to gabrielegoria79@gmail.com , reporting your full name, home address and email address: the bill will be sent you by email.
TOPOGRAPHIES OF SILENCE is a durational work, which started ex-tempore in January 2020 with no rules and no preconceived outcome. By falling into stillness and silence – which are not necessarily the opposites of movement and sound/voice -, another space opens up; highlighting other voices and other movements. Beyond the personal perceptive and self-reflective framework, the process has raised larger discourses around our relation to power, to free-will, to production, and to the unknown. The visitors, inevitably lending their bodies to the landscape, are welcome to witness and /or experiment the potential of ‘nothingness’ and essential movement.
On August 12th 2020 artists Ingrid André and Gabriele Goria will perform at RAW – Relational Art Week, between 17:00 and 19:30, at Myymälä2 Gallery (Uudenmaankatu 23, Helsinki). RAW is an event produced and curated by Myymälä2 since 2019, and this year dwells on the challenge of sparing energy in an urban context. The full program is visible on myymala2.com, as well as on RAW’s FB page. Warmly welcome!
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INGRID ANDRÉ
(Belgium, 1977)
Ingrid André’s artistic practice is informed by a professional background in dance which carved a resilience to being shaped and reformatted continuously. This malleability, juxtaposed with an interest in the potentialities of ‘presence as a catalyst’, has fueled a yearning for transfiguration and transgression of accumulated relational patterns. Through exposing herself to less familiar media – painting, installation, video – while following a self-reflective approach, she explores the vulnerability of moving beyond certainty and preconception. Besides her own practice following her art studies at Art school MAA in Helsinki, Ingrid continues to work as a freelance dancer, choreographer, and movement facilitator. Ingrid is a member of Pixelache collective since 2019.
GABRIELE GORIA
(Italy, 1979)
Gabriele Goria’s artistic practice intertwines various forms of expression, ranging from physical theatre to martial arts, meditation, drawing, and music improvisation. Actor, theatre pedagogue, and martial artist, Gabriele teaches tai chi, meditation, and shaolin kung fu at different departments of the Theatre Academy of Helsinki. As a doctoral candidate at the Performing Arts Research Centre (Tutke), he is currently developing an artistic research on meditative silence. Anchored in the dialogue between art and spirituality, his work brings him to lead workshops and seminars in various institutes of adult education and interfaith studies in Finland and Italy.
As a child, I loved to stop by my favourite shop window, and stare at the mechanic clocks displayed behind the glass. I got enchanted by the intricate choreography of dancing gears, each of them waving to a different rhythm, their pace varying according to the diameter and the function of their wheels.
This spectacle acquainted me with the sense of time. The perfect synergy of the clock mechanisms gave me the same thrill I had while listening to the performance of a skilled percussionist. Such a dynamic symphony produced the illusion of a control over the force of time. Time was not untameable: to some extent, it was possible to play with it.
Together with the fun, concerns and existential questions emerged. I wondered if my whole existence was a simple ‘passing by’. As the clocks were clicking their own way through the river of time, my thoughts and actions too, as well as my breath and heartbeat, were enchased in this same flow. Was it so, that my days on earth did come from some ethereal future, were lived in an elusive present, and instantly cast into the past?
In my teenage years, I began to look at the problem from a different angle. I imagined a state of consciousness beyond individual awareness, where each and every moment of past, present and future – including the alternative streams of possibilities – would be accessible at once. In such a place, the flow of time would be stretched into an infinite and multi-layered film, where every single bit of existence would perpetually exist and be meaningful. I named this state of consciousness ‘eternity’.
Recently, I have found myself dwelling on similar conjectures. It is not unusual that, during an intense session of meditation or tai chi, vivid memories of events of my far past emerge spontaneously from some hidden storage of my mind. When these memories reach my awareness, I do nothing. I let them be. And yet I feel lighter, as if old burdens had just been processed in a new and fresh way.
At times, intuitions bring glimpses of future to my awareness. Accurate guesses about coming events might arise. One hour of silence can also be herald of sharp ideas and projects to be realized later.
However, the core of a meditative experience is not defined by these occasional ‘side effects’. At the base of any meditative practice lies the art of being present. In my experience and understanding, when the state of ‘nowness’ is no longer just a series of single and separate dots on a timeline, but develops into a longer and continuous trait, eternity occurs.
Eternity manifests in me when a feeling of timelessness overlaps the awareness of now. Time becomes a flexible mental construct. The fear of letting go melts into a peaceful state of lightness and fulfilment. Love becomes natural and spontaneous; love and eternity belong together. The ego-led interpretations of my personal history shatter in front of an ocean of compassion. There is no need to believe that everything happens for a reason, nor to deny the meaningfulness of things. Life is purpose in itself.
I do not consider myself a great meditator. Sparks of light visit me quite rarely, and when they do, they remind me of how attached I am to my small world. This makes me humble. Yet, such fleeting intuitions encourage me to live my life a little bit more bravely.
If something very disturbing and painful occurs, I know in my heart that everything finds its place in the perspective of eternity. And when something remarkably beautiful comes to an end, I whisper to myself: “Don’t worry, let go now. Nothing lasts forever. Nothing is lost.”
Nothing is lost. Everything is written on the pages of eternity. Is this the comforting illusion – or the hope – of a romantic dreamer? If I were to meet myself as a child in front of the window of that clock-shop, would I honestly share this intuition as an ultimate answer?
Most likely, I would rather keep listening. The experience is tangible. Every single breath of life is ephemeral and eternal. Yes, I would share my silence. Time needs time for unfolding its lessons.
A friend recently asked me to elaborate a reflection on God as a Creator. Especially in front of the compelling arguments by Richard Dawkins on ‘God’s delusion’, I feel cautious at falling into this kind of debate. However, my friend’s request allows me to look closer at my current worldview.
I share this writing as a poetic window onto my quest for a meaning, and surely not as a lecture. Like a curious child, I want to explore what I see, to create connections and to play with them, asking myself once again: what does God mean to me?
God is love. Love is an experience. God is an experience. Experience is real to the extent it transforms. God is the peace which reconciles paradox and contradiction.
God, the Father: the cosmic Consciousness beyond creation. Transcendent. The Tao. The infinite. The experience of Nirvana, or Moksha. But also the Nothing from which everything originates. The number zero.
God, the Son: the all pervading consciousness within creation, from subatomic particles to human consciousness. Immanent. The God who sleeps in the stones, dreams in the flowers, wakes up in the animals, in the humans is aware of being awake, and in the saints finds Himself again. The consciousness which realizes its full expression in a Christ, or a Buddha, bridging immanence and transcendence. The Dharma: the order of creation, or law of nature. The Tai Chi: the archetypical Supreme Polarity, guarding the seed of duality within its oneness. The number one. But also the Wu Chi, the non-Polarity. The non-one.
God, the Holy Spirit: the Amen, the Word, that is: the conscious Sound/Vibration manifesting the Creation; the energy behind the matter. The intelligent love interconnecting the whole; the spring and the engine of creation and life. The laws of physics; the Karma: the law of cause and effect which rules the Samsara, from a cosmic scale to a human scale, to the wave-like dance of particles and anti-particles. Yin and Yang in action. The number two.
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: the number three. The “three which generates the ten-thousands beings” (Tao Te Ching 42).
Creation is related to God as the body is related to the soul. The soul is both individual (atman) – to the extent a footprint, or a memory of individuality persists – and absence of an ‘I’ (anatman) – when interdependence and impermanence are found in the middle path between independence and dependence, and the soul is nothing but a pouring, a flow of consciousness constantly changing, interrelated with everything. In the same way, God is both personal – the God within me, to whom I turn and whom I listen, not in order to obtain favours, but to transform myself – and impersonal – the Being, where there is nothing to attain, where the path is the goal, where life validates itself as the sole purpose.
God happens. God is the voice whispering: why does God allow all of this? Why does God not intervene? God is me. God is the Sun reflected in thousands mirrors. Each mirror is an illusion of separation, an ‘I’ defining itself as an independent individual. God is Father, Mother, Daughter, Son, Friend, Lover. Each expression of love is a reflection of the one Love.
“The Tao which can be described by means of words is not the eternal Tao” (Tao Te Ching 1). The God you can speak about is not the true God. Words are symbols referring to an ungraspable ‘beyond’, even when they are created to indicate a very concrete object, or an experience.
But there are also performative words; expressions which form and transform. Like the sentence “I love you”, which is not a mere report, but reaches out for a connection and creates worlds of possibilities. Therefore, if “in the beginning was the Word, ad the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1,1), this Word was not a word-symbol, or a ‘finger pointing at the Moon’.
In the beginning, was the Word. I like to think that this original and almighty Word – the Amen of Christians, the Amin of Muslims, the Hum of Tibetan Buddhists, the Aum of Vedas – cannot be but one. The whisper, beyond time and space: “I love you”. And there was light.
The artistic work of Giorgio Morandi – the renowned Italian painter and printmaker specialized in still life – is a manifest example of the artistic fertility of silence. This seminar opens a discussion on the poetics of simplicity, where the process of artistic creation is intertwined with the experience of silence and emptiness. The creative dimension of emptiness shows a path for ‘touching the essence of things’.
This seminar is open to all interested people, and will be facilitated by Rev. Henri Järvinen and Gabriele Goria. The event will take place on 2nd November 2018 at 14:00 in the Auditorio 2 of the Theatre Academy of Helsinki (Haapaniemenkatu 6).
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Paolo Scquizzato is a secular Catholic priest, theologian, and teacher of meditation in the tradition of the Benedictine monk John Main. His research on meditation brought him to explore other traditions, in particular Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism.
Aware that our cultural age makes the encounter with scriptures and meditative practices of other religions essential, Scquizzato claims that it is no more a matter of engaging in a peaceful ‘dialogue’ with various traditions. Rather, it is fundamental to let us ‘be fecundated’ by the truths coming from elsewhere. Paolo Scquizzato is author of several books and publications on the topics of meditation and spiritual life.
Urban Fairytale is a short art film written and directed by the dancer and choreographer Laura ‘Swan’ Pentzin. The work explores the themes of connection, breaking free and finding your own way.
Once again, Laura ‘Swan’ Pentzin performs with the actor and martial artist Gabriele Goria. Contemporary dance improvisation, and the traditional Shaolin double-sword form Meihua Shuang Chien come together to build a symbolic tale around the topics of rebirth, dialogue, liberation, and self-realisation.
The choreography develops on the soundtrack ‘Higher State’, by DJ Orkidea, and the graphics are created by the motion graphic artist Hugo Kiekeben. Urban Fairytale is featured at Art Society Soho Helsinki digital exhibition: Augmenting Reality. You are warmly welcome to visit the exhibition at Culture Factory Korjaamo (Töölönkatu 51) from 18.10. to 17.11.2018.
Director/performer/costume designer: Laura ‘Swan’ Pentzin
Gabriele Goria 