Heart Minded Dedication to the Present and Future – Even Now: The Healers’ Intensive

June 14 - 20, 2025

In retrospect, in the dream I was walking in the neighborhood where I spent my childhood and where the streets are named after trees. I was on Laurel Avenue and Lime was to the south and Cypress to the north and the gates to enter are at Neptune, Mermaid and Surf Avenues, but it wasn’t evident while dreaming.  Everything was dark, even though it wasn’t night, and my friend, the poet, was earnest, well because of the times, you understand. The conversation was about the play and the need to perform it and the danger of performing it.  It was an old play to be performed in a contemporary setting, perhaps Shakespeare, perhaps something like Enter Ghost, by Isabella Hammad about a performance of Hamlet in the West Bank. Or we would rewrite the play so there would be no avoiding what needed to be understood.  But ... watch out! That’s the dream – essentially the need and the danger, the need and the danger, which is where we are. We need to meet these times and there is increasing danger each day.  

Dreams Against the State by Deena Metzger first performed in various homes, apartments, churches, lofts, basements, odd venues 1981.

Today I switched from texting to Signal mid sentence. A new survival reflex.  My friend was writing from out of the country where her on-going flight was cancelled.  To Israel.  Another friend had a similar flight cancelled yesterday and will, perhaps, travel next week to see her grandchildren, but this friend needs to be in Jerusalem on Friday for the People’s Peace Summit on May 8^th and 9^th. We’ll see.  I hope she gets a flight. Afterwards, I hope she gets to come home. I hope she enters the country and returns to her own house and suffers no handcuffs or ICE detention on the way.  

Changes happen in an instant.  Read the morning papers and develop a new strategy to fit the entirely new circumstances.  Understanding how to negotiate the grave irrationality of these times whether you are a Palestinian, a Syrian, a Yemenite, an immigrant, an Irish green card holder who has lived here for 30 years and just wanted to see your father who is ill in Ireland, whether you are a whale, a sea lion, a bee, a wolf is extremely difficult, is almost impossible, is essential.

The Healers’ Intensive!  Do I think the Healers’ Intensive will provide a formula?  No. No formulas, please. Nor do I think the only answers for how to meet these times are sending money to a political party for an election 18 months away, signing a petition or holding a sign on the city street with other like-minded people.  What are the ways then?  

We each, individually, have to find them as they derive exactly from our values, our histories, our studies and skills, memories, and most specifically our dreams, also from the land where we born, from the land we walk on each day, the communications of the news we read, the strategies of the wind, the songs of the finches and owls, the footprint texts of lizards, our spiritual lives and companions and our original, particular, precious smarts and visions.  And even as we find our individual paths, we also know we can’t meet these times alone. 

What will be this years focus of this Healers’ Intensive? We will know when we gather together and explore the urgencies and possibilities. When we invite Spirit, when we are awakened by stories, when we step out of the conventional into the context and world to which we are now, and have for so long, been called.

A week of deep inquiry inspired and inspirited by heart.

We have been meeting this way since 1999. In 2012 , the 19 Ways arrived to help us focus and gain insight. Since then many lives have changed. – have developed the pragmatic assistance of heart and new necessary ways of thinking – that is heart mind.  Our hope is that as our individual lives change, the lives of those around us will change, the world will change – even this world going to rubble so quickly – will transform and dedicate itself, eventually as we do and with our help, to that new and hardy green stalk rising up from between the stones. 

This is the time to register and begin to prepare for an amazing week because we will be there with each other. The Healers’ Intensive will be on Zoom from June 14-20. For further information and to register email Jude Weber at deenaworkshops@gmail.com

(And if you want to bring this consciousness to writing, the Writing Intensive, meeting on Zoom May 24-30, is open for registration for a few more days.)