With David “Lucky” Goff & Wendy Miller
Smith Center will be offering an online Healing Circle via Zoom in the spring of 2019 with David “Lucky” Goff and Wendy Miller. Those who have been most gravely tested by life have the most loss, and potentially the most to gain. Yet it is in how we respond to these conditions – which come in many complex and subtle forms such as grief, illness, injury, injustice, war, and other unknown heartbreaks – that defines us and defines our life.
This bi-monthly circle is an opportunity to create a cyberspace community, connecting with others as we learn to grow through the hardships we have experienced in life, not in spite of them, but because of them. Healing becomes a by-product from our shared culture of community, connection, and mystery. In such a community, our flames of creativity can be lit, as we discover ourselves as more sensitized and adaptive human beings.
This Healing Circle meets online on Wednesdays twice per month from 1:30pm – 3:00pm EST / 10:30am-12:00pm PST.
Pre-registration is required prior to attending your first group and receiving Zoom connection information. Please RSVP via the link above or to Kiersten at 202.483.8600 / kiersten@smithcenter.org.
About David Goff
David “Lucky” Goff, Ph.D., M.F.T., served as adjunct faculty at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, where he employed large group processes to promote community and personal development. David also assists organizations, including therapeutic and spiritual communities, in their quests to create and sustain genuine community. His research into the “psychological sense of community” is the first to examine and describe the conditions that facilitate collective consciousness. In 2003 David had a brain aneurism. As a result of his stroke, and the onset of a rare brain syndrome, he nearly died and ended up permanently disabled. This experience had a transformational effect on David, which made him “Lucky,” and cued him into how radically connected all things are. This broader awareness now informs his approach toward what it means to be human. He maintains a psychotherapy practice specializing in psycho-spiritual development. He also writes extensively about a psychology of interdependence, community, elders and the conditions that lead to a social and ecological sense of connection. He can be reached at dg1140@sonic.net .
About Wendy Miller
Moving here many years ago from the SF Bay Area, my relationship with Commonweal led me to Barbara Smith Coleman. I am proud to have been part of an early group of people with Shanti Norris who met with Barbara to envision the cancer retreats, a healing center, and gallery for Smith Center. Years later when my late husband Gene Cohen was facing metastatic prostate cancer, he went to Commonweal for his cancer retreat. The gift of community support, reflection, and care guided the choices we made through the many years of living with cancer in our family body. I became a widow in 2009.
Wendy Miller is an expressive arts therapist, artist, and writer living in Kensington Md. In 2016, she published the book, Sky Above Clouds: Finding our way through creativity, aging, and illness, about her life and work with her late husband. It is a spiritual treatise on love and creativity during life’s major transitions. Wendy Miller can be reached at wendmiller1@gmail.com.
