Join us — a quartet of devoted Circlers, artists, and friends — for a day of relational practice inspired by the lyric sensibility.

We will practice a form of relational meditation in which the focus of contemplation is the shared real-time experience of being with. This daylong workshop is suitable for new and seasoned practitioners, offering an opportunity to deepen your study of the form among friends. We will practice playfully attending to the 'most minute details of difference' in support of developing greater capacity, language and skill for both personal and relational coherence, creative interplay, lyric unfolding, and love.

Before each workshop, Lyric gathers days beforehand to practice and prepare a shared harmonic field. What we offer you during the workshop is the natural flowering of that field.

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About Lyric

“Lyric thought springs from love, love that attends to the most minute details of difference; and in this attention experiences connection rather than isolation.” — Jan Zwicky

Lyric is a four-person intersubjective research vessel. It is composed of Dechen Ellen McSweeney, Tara Dougans, Tyler Stuart, and Garrett Jones. For the two years, they have been engaged in the practice of relational meditation as a quartet, exploring what happens when the form is practiced within committed friendship. In that time, they have led workshops in Vancouver, BC and Washington DC. Their work is an ongoing practice of reciprocal devotion, attunement, compassion, courage, and truth.

Relational practice reveals truth in unexpected and paradoxical ways. When we share our sense of isolation, for instance, we tend to feel more connected. It was Hermes, the divine trickster, who created the first lyre — from which we inherit the word “lyric.” From the entrails of cattle and the shell of a tortoise, he fashioned an instrument that would become an emblem of human praise. Praise for the world and its ecology of meaning; praise for idiosyncrasy and communion.

Our circle is called Lyric because we want to attune to the music always being made between us — whether resonant or dissonant. We play our song with what we’ve been given — our shells and our guts — and listen for its hidden wholeness.