CU Denver Faculty Training and Events

This Embodied Sonic Meditation workshop, designed to serve and celebrate the CU Denver faculty community, will engage participants in contemplative sonic methods that inspire individual and collaborative creativity. The goal is to foster diverse, inclusive, and creative practices for all educators of any musical/creative ability. This activity-based workshop focuses on a series of sure-fire ancient methods and practices from Tibetan Yoga techniques and chanting performance to guided sonic meditations and embodied music improvisation, using body, instruments, and multi-sensorial group activities engagement. It appears to be the perfect timing for this (post)-COVID CETL workshop to be held to open up this safe, reflective, and renewal space for our community to combine these practices that unify ancient traditions and worldviews with contemporary music technologies and aesthetics. We cherish how far we have come so that we can begin healing the immediate wounds and start reimagining how to rebuild a more just and resilient global society. It is the facilitator's mission to create, provide, and expand this high-vibrant space for our community to regenerate ease, peace, and exuberance as a collaborative effort. The facilitator proposes this sonic and multi-sensorial creative way to heal and renew, where we can move forward with resilience.

Workshop Description

This workshop includes a series of physical and mental activities that were formalized by the ancient Tibetan contemplative traditions that unify the body and mind at the present moment, using sound arts and bodily activities as training vehicles. Different breathing techniques, grounding and centering techniques, and high energy inducing techniques will be introduced and practiced. Through a mindful, cheerful, contemplative, and interactive workshop, the facilitator hopes to deepen a sensibility of multisensory awareness through the body, our sense of presence, artmaking, and being joyfully included.

Practice Focus

The 60-minute workshop will follow a structure/format:

●         10 minutes: Introduction of the workshop

●         10 minutes: Tibetan breathing meditation techniques with sonic attention regulator for relaxation, focus, and purification. This guided sonic meditation will be using a soundscape composition that helps people to settle down and meditate with sounds.

●         10 min: Sonic Focus Meditation with Singing Bowl

●         5 minutes: Embodied warm-up exercises, Taichi Cloud Hands Techniques, and other mindfulness embodiment techniques 

●         15 minutes: This sonic meditation improvisational session brings in elements of actively listening, making, and meditating sounds. This15-min sonic meditation performance engages all the workshop participants and will be generative and improvisational that builds the community.  

Participants can feel free to choose to sit there and meditate with the presented music, or actively join the improvisation using their own instruments, voices, body movements, non-verbal communications, or silence.

●         10 minutes: Q&A, discussion and sharing conclude the workshop.

NOTE: Please wear comfortable shoes and pants for the Embodied Sonic Meditation session.

Presented by Jiayue Cecilia WU, PhD, Assistant Professor and program director for the Masters of Science in Recording Arts and a CETL Faculty Fellow.