“School” (greek: scholè) originally referred to empty time, a time to rest and be free from public duties, a time for personal development. The school of loving and dying wants to rebirth “school” in this original meaning. Its aim is to suspend the (neo-liberal and patriarchal) pressures to perform, to be useful, efficient, purposeful, healthy, and beautiful, by detecting and dismantling power structures that limit how we think, feel, speak, and move.
Using carefully selected techniques from eastern and western (embodied) philosophical traditions, bodywork, martial art, dance, theater, and so on, a process of deconstruction is initiated in the intimacy of our private lives: in how we love and how we die. Both are in need of rethinking. Without alertness, there is a risk to reenact the conventional: disguising a need for safety and fear of being alone as ‘love’ and seeing the grasp for eternity and the fear of dissolution as ‘dying’. In an indirect way, this reenactment is an outsourcing of ourselves. Without intentional care, (implicit) beliefs (about who we are, what it means to be human, and what is legitimate knowledge) become porous gateways of external influence through which we hand over our autonomy.
This school supports you in reclaiming your own way of loving and dying, and through it explore and express your own way of being human.
To facilitate this idiosyncratic process, the school places diversity and difference at its core. The learning process it proposes is a “being-different-together and becoming-together as an expression of differences, as part of a shared process participated in differentially” (Manning & Massumi, 2014). Designed as a tender institute, the school can take different shapes to align itself with the needs of its current members. All learners are welcome, regardless of their philosophies of life, traditions, religions, gender, or sexual orientation.
If you want to join the school of loving and dying, please take a look at our activities.