Creating Ritual for Times of Change: Mastering Life’s Transitions Sunday, April 6, 2008 – 9:30 am - 4:30 pm
Presenter: Andrea Sherman, PhD. and Marsha Weiner, MA
Learn new skills for mastering life’s transitions. The second half of life frequently provides major changes such as launching an encore career, celebrating a landmark birthday, accepting an empty nest, rethinking one’s attitudes towards aging or caring for an aging parent. Those in-between times, frequently marked by confusion or anxiety, can become springboards to personal meaning and growth. Experience how ritual can help provide order, clarity and integration at times of major transitions. This workshop offers an integrative, experiential approach to honor the past, accept the present, and move gracefully into the future using sense memory, theatre, movement, humor, meditation, and storytelling.
Exploring the basic components and function of ritual will help you:
• Focus your vision for the future.
• Identify what you are leaving behind and what you will take from the past.
• Re-connect to community with confidence, strength, humor, courage and renewal.
This program has been presented at various conferences nationwide including Kripalu Yoga Center for Yoga and Health, American Society on Aging, Eckerd College Annual Conference on Creativity and Aging, The Jewish Home & Hospital, and Lifecare System Fifth International Palliative Care in the 21st Century.
Andrea Sherman, PhD, is a gerontologist, choreographer, ritualist, and president of Transitional Keys, a nonprofit organization she co founded. A teacher for more than 25 years, she taught at New York University and is on the Leadership Council of the American Society on Aging. She holds a doctorate in dance and gerontology and is a fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine and the Gerontological Society of America. She has led rituals that span the life cycle. Marsha Weiner, MA, is a dancer, teacher, writer, producer, and former volunteer hospital chaplain. Her master’s degree in ethnology and an ongoing interest in folklore enrich her ability to adapt the elements of ritual to a wide variety of populations, circumstances, and needs.
Andrea and Marsha co-wrote the Transitional Keys Guidebook that will be used in the program.
