Self Made ☀️Summer Camp☀️ starts 7/14
A gently structured, virtual, *choose your own adventure* ☀︎SUMMER CAMP☀︎ for grown-ass humans
Good morning everyone. How are you hanging in?
Today’s inspiration:
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
~Albert Camus
Thank you to everyone who’s signed up for Self Made’s second annual SUMMER CAMP, a five week hybrid summer course that combines asynchronous lessons and community, 1:1 coaching, and a choose your own adventure experiment.
SUMMER CAMP IS FOR YOU IF~
🌀 You're ready to loosen the grip of your inner critic so you can stop getting in your own way when it comes to pursuing the deeper longings of your heart
🌀 You want to define success on your own terms rather than through external validation or capitalist metrics
🌀 You long to unleash a bolder, more creative, rebellious side of you—but you are stuck on where/how to start
🌀 You sort of kind of understand what it means to trust the unfolding of your life, but you could use some support actually doing so
🌀 You're caught in cycles of overthinking and control, wanting instead to trust divine timing and co-create with reality
🌀 You are curious about your curriculum and having conversations with other like-minded individuals who are also curious
🌀 The thought of a flexibly structured “choose your own adventure” summer camp experiment sounds fun and admittedly haven’t had much of that in a while
Keep scrolling to read the inspiration for ~SUMMER CAMP~
One of the primary conversations I have with people is how much time they spend time traveling. And though I wish I were referring to spaceships, blackholes, wormholes, and time machines, alas, it’s nowhere near that exciting.
“Time traveling” is what I call it when people spend large amounts of time either ruminating on the past, or future tripping. They are either lost in elaborate do-over fantasies, or they’re magically thinking light years ahead. They spend so much time time traveling, they get confused. They begin to mistake time traveling for reality. They are so deep in their own minds, they forget about bare feet on dirt, warm sun on skin, cool breeze lifting hair off a salty neck, stone fruit and summer squash sending taste buds to Saturn, spontaneous human connection, boredom, downtime, the languid quality of a summer afternoon. They are time traveling, which means they are missing this moment, which is to say, they are missing their life.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how so much of the past bunch of years have been about getting through. Getting through the ups-and-downs of an all-over-the-place economy. Getting through a certain presidency. Getting through a pandemic. Getting through endless wars, endless national and global instability. Getting through climate chaos.
I had a moment recently where I thought,
if a bolt of lighting were to smite me down right this second,
I would be so disappointed.
I’d be disappointed because I don’t want to die feeling disconnected from the miracle of it all. I don’t want to die feeling like most of my efforts were spent either getting through my life, or careening around past and present on a time machine of my own making (which is to say, one I could kick to the curb any time I want).
Getting through is a natural, common-sense, understandable response to the ugliness, trouble, chaos, and uncertainty of the world. I just wonder—and worry—what if there isn’t somewhere to get through to? What if this is it? If this *is* it, how do I want to be? How do I want to feel? What do I want to devote myself to—what would I be a disciple of? What would be required to stay in conversation with my higher self, my creative spark, the fullness of an uncluttered attention span?
Summer Camp seeks to experiment—in community—with having a go at some of these answers.
The Details
Each week will kick-off with a video lesson (you can find information about the lessons here). Each lesson will have an associated practice or tool, plus a guided visualization, meditation, or breath exercise.
In addition to the above, you will choose one path of focus - you get to choose your own adventure.
Paths include:
🪐 5 weeks of daily meditation or mindfulness practice
🪐 5 weeks of NO SOCIAL MEDIA
🪐 5 weeks of creative practice
🪐 5 weeks of…??? (sobriety? spending time in the garden? moving your body every day? You get to choose.
🌻 You will stay connected asynchronously via Slack as your schedule suits you.
🌻 You’ll get two 1:1 coaching sessions with Dani on the topic(s) currently closest to your heart.
🌻There will be multiple ways to connect live throughout the five weeks if you so desire.
❤️🔥 Listening to Ram Dass as I traipse through the neighborhood with the Tater;
showing up sweaty and stressed to an in-person meditation group after hustling across town to make it on time and immediately remembering the sweetness of sitting with other humans;
❤️🔥 head thrown back in the biggest laugh I’ve had in weeks at dinner with two best friends;
❤️🔥 last minute burritos with visiting family whose flights got delayed;
splayed out on the gym floor, salty and spent after a workout;
❤️🔥 the open space of curiosity and possibility, wonder and imagination that arises with a client;
❤️🔥 lavender spears in the neighbors yard that demand a squeeze and sniff;
❤️🔥 sharing a smile with a stranger;
❤️🔥 chit chat in the line for coffee…
These moments of presence are so fleeting. But they matter. Because these are the moments that place us in reality, that have us alive and awake to life. And this is what Summer Camp seeks to explore—our aliveness and presence, our focus, our creative ✨spark✨.
This summer, let us fortify the quality of presence not so we can hurry up and know, but so that we might bask in the process. Let us be free from our obsessions with figuring out. Let us loosen our jaws, smooth out our foreheads, relax our shoulders. Let us unspool from the contortions of our pasts. Let us imagine into what it might be like on the other side of control, that place where we take care of ourselves and each other, where we are forgiven, where joy and delight are just as present as everything else—
what a spectacle, so unexpected
—and we are radiant and at ease, more wild than ever, spines straight, skin soft, and oh, so this is it, this is what it looks like, this is everything we ever wanted.
Sign up. Let’s play!
Friendliest of reminders that you are always invited to grab an hour of my time.
SELF MADE is a call to deeply connect with the self—self-knowledge, self-trust, self-development—and then to make, small step by step, a life that you savor. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Certified Integral Coach, and Holistic Recovery Guide, based in San Francisco, CA.
Click here to learn about working with me 1:1 and/or here to sign up for a complimentary Alignment Session. Let’s talk!
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