Celebrating twenty years of Lightning in a Bottle, this year’s festival overflowed with a diverse spectrum of workshops and talks, which powerfully contributed to the festival’s overall theme. The learning and workshop circuit was the constant “buzz” with an enormous variety of wellness talks and activities, creative presentations, and eco-advocacies that hopeful and eager presenters seemed to wish attendees might carry forward in their everyday lives. Daytime at Lightning in a Bottle served as the ideal time for attendees to learn various yogic techniques, kitchen recipes, or art techniques at the renowned “Artclave” tent.
The central meeting point of numerous ideologies, theories, and notions of consciousness, Lightning in a Bottle offered various workshops daily. Some workshops seemed to focus on healing; there were more than five alone directly related or tangentially related to trauma. If traditional religion and societal archetypes were too much for attendees, Lightning in a Bottle also offered Astrology and Human Design lectures to provide you with more information about who you are and what to be mindful of, so attendees might be able to find their path using these social maps. Such workshops strove to rip away old layers of conditioning and healing, so they might be replaced with new forms of pressure to care about X, Y, or Z. In one workshop Soul Transcendence was equated with Stoicism and tightening up emotional reactions as much as possible.
Moreover, Lightning in a Bottle took yoga to new heights by offering courses such as Afrobeat Yoga, Inversions, Acro Yoga, Yoga for Healing Trauma, and more as a way to activate inclusivity in local communities. At Lightning in a Bottle, yoga became a way to heal the world of body image issues by making yoga Instructors more inclusive in their local practices. There is much to enjoy about instructors loving their specialty so much that it transcends its original fundamentalism and wakes up attendees as to how they might use yoga to influence culture and society at large.
Not-so-subtle social activism workshops included one taught by CIBER, the Center for Integrative Bee Research, as well as the Hidden Heroes presentation, which examined how social media and film can make an impact. The CIBER students work in a lab that tries to explore organic medicines for bees and to understand sustainable beekeeping practices in rural farms. On the other hand, Hidden Heroes and their Only.One platform globally connects small villages facing erosion, resource depletion, and corporate chemical spills with resources. Hidden Heroes’ work is all conducted by local laypeople, resounding the glowing message that we can all be heroes if we choose to be. Audiences were highly engaged in such educational workshops promoting advocacy, forming questions such as “what can we do to help?” and “how can I get involved?”
This year Artclave put attendees in the creator’s chair by providing them with the tools to make clay pots, popsicle stick calligraphy, and aura portraits while the Learning Kitchen transpired attendees with new ways to cook health conscious meals. In a way, spending an entire day going between the Artclave and Compass Tents (Beacon, Crossroads, Eco Hub, Memory Palace, Cauldron) can potentially feel more emotionally draining than a full day of rocking out to your favorite musical sets due to that various moods and themes each of the workshops provided. Elements of Artclave felt more freeing than the spiritual workshops, aiming to liberate LIB attendees from “other” ways of being. In addition, the Learning Kitchen was full of handy recipes and tips that at the very least could elevate one’s culinary vocabulary and at best taught which flowers are safe to eat if one was ever lost in a meadow or forest.
The nexus of this wide-array of connectedness, earthiness, and meaningful activation was powerfully represented at the workshop “Sounds of Bohemian Glass and other Experimental Instruments”. It takes panache in 2022 to invent a new instrument, let alone an acoustic one that doesn’t fit into the string, wind, or percussion groups. Lenka Moravkova did just that with a kinetic music sculpture that can best be described as what happens when you throw a harp into a black hole. The instrument plays sound by transferring the kinetic vibrations between your fingertips, through glass rods of different lengths, into and out of sheet metal bent into an outwardly facing inverse cone. Lenka is originally from the Czech Republic where creating homemade instruments is a common practice as it is throughout Eastern Europe. Lenka’s instrument blended creative courage, glass art, music, vibrational ascension, and globalism into one while evoking sounds similar to the Interstellar soundtrack, which when played right could be heard up to 150 ft away. There was so much beauty in seeing someone make and hone musicianship with a one-of-a-kind musical instrument.
Ascension is seeing the beauty in how others light the way – whether through movement, communication, environmental advocacy, cooking, arts & crafts, performance, or so explicitly showing how the tactile vibrations between your fingertips can play notes you never thought possible without external power. Lightning in a Bottle’s 2023 workshop offerings truly lit the way to a brighter future for society at large.
