Join me on Saturday, January 21st, 2023, for an exclusive, interactive Masterclass.
Cinema &
The Yoga of Beauty
Increase the beauty you’re able to perceive in the midst of daily life.
Saturday, January 21st, 2023 | 3pm CET
$99 Regular | $65 Members
What Is It About Art That Can Sometimes Change Our Lives?
Session recordings and resources will be accessible for six months, until July 31st, 2023.
Background
FOR THE CINEPHILE…
For better or for worse, some men have an aesthetic tendency: a way of becoming so enraptured by some nuance in life that it lifts our spirits to the sky. The downside to the aesthete, as you may well know, is that the absence of beauty can be distressing.
Other men, however, have little aesthetic tendency. This is incredibly useful for dealing with the mediocrity and conformity of our modern culture, without suffering any perceivable loss. A lack of the aesthetic is terrible for our relationships and spirituality, though. For it is only when we notice the delicate, intentional underglimmer that a woman—or an artist—adorns life with, does the bliss of meaning shine forth.
It has to be said: every great lover throughout history had an aesthetic sensibility. But is this way of seeing life something we can hone?
For decades, art has been an inhospitable world. Modernist experiments dismantled the universal, moral aesthetics that produced classics and masterpieces. Postmodernism went further, deconstructing all of art, so that the gallery experience has become one of philosophical in-games: a narrow, painted conversation reserved for the intelligentsia and their cliques. It seems the ‘aesthetic’ has never been further from the reach of common man.
Yet cinema, in particular, offers us a route back. Image, story, theatre, sound: everything beams down onto us from the silver screen, and the wildest adventures—and deepest human tragedies—are brought to us in visceral, immediate ways. I believe cinema is a mass-culture, fast-track vehicle for reclaiming our aesthetic birthrights.
Here’s a question:
Can you widen your appreciation of the artistic experience, and build for yourself the rich inner life of the ‘afficionado’?
Better still, can you use art as a tool for self-knowledge, healing, and spiritual transcendence? Can you access the sublime through art—and let art teach you how to access more of the sublime throughout your everyday life?
In this Masterclass (and it’s my pet favourite of the Masterclasses), we will begin right here.
In 'Cinema & The Yoga of Beauty'
we will address:
- The nature and mechanics of the ‘aesthetic experience’ (the sublime moment)
- Developing a personal taste for art (trusting yourself as the connoisseur, rather than leaning on other’s ‘respected opinions’)
- Identifying and dis-identifying with protagonists and archetypes: shadow-work and self-understanding through immersion with story
- Refining your palette and seeing an artist’s deeper intentions (noticing ‘good’ acting, music, directing, technique)
- Theory of Rasas: how to transform your darker emotions into light ones, through the power of art
- Specific yogic and meditation techniques to heighten your absorption into the moment
- How to open yourself to a wider range of the human experience (even if uncomfortable and tense), and translate this depth into your relationships, too
- Defining your own gifts and self-expression—not through analysis, but in symbolic and intuitive ways
- The true meaning of the ‘masterpiece’, and how this might inform your own work in the world
To create great art, and to appreciate it well, requires a heightened form of masculinity. Investing the time to appreciate beauty meticulously will deepen your masculinity, too. How? Well, beauty needs a witness. And the more you’re able to witness the subtleties of beauty—and be impacted by this beauty—the stronger your internal witness. And the more beauty will reveal herself to you, too.
I believe the art life is the greatest life. To revel each day in beauty, hanging in its current, satiates the deepest parts of us. When you come to know great art, you hone your self-expression, and become a more beautiful person yourself.
Art history is huge, offering us many aesthetic portals to the sublime. In this two-hour Masterclass, we will lean towards cinema as our guide to spirit and ourselves, and uncover the life-changing potential that film can bring.
Many say they’ll get around to the classics when they’ve retired. But what if you began giving yourself the gift of mysticism and culture… today?
$99 Regular | $65 Members
'Cinema & The Yoga of Beauty' begins
Saturday, 21st January, 2023,
at 3pm Central European Time
How the MASTERCLASS Works
Cinema & The Yoga of Beauty is a brand-new, two-hour zoom webinar, hosted by Jordan Luke Collier.
Following a couple of brand-new lectures and some guided ‘aesthetic meditations’ and classic film clips, I will open a space to discuss the nature of great cinema, and the yoga of beauty. I will answer your questions, offer you many new inquiries of my own, and together we will explore how you can draw more meaning, and more transformational power, through your interaction with all the arts.
Even though you’ll be on a webinar with many others, the fact that we are like minds, all gathered around one essential topic, means that you will pluck insights from everyone’s questions and answers — not just your own. Come prepared for a rich and a fast-paced time, and be ready, also, to meditate. In the follow-up, you will also receive a number of specific assignments that you can do to implement the practices from this Masterclass into your life.
*If you would like to go further into the yoga of beauty with me, and spend more time exploring great cinema after the class, I will host an added 90-minute ‘after-hours’ session for everyone who wants to stay on, straight after the main two-hour webinar. In this bonus session, we will continue from where we left off in the Masterclass: more practice, more distinctions, more excitement.
To join this exclusive ‘after-hours’, simply add the VIP option to the cart (if there are spaces left), just before you check out.
Two-hour Interactive Zoom Session with Q+A
The Masterclass group format is compelling and energising: watch your own deeper questions be answered while someone else is being coached. Capture the excited energy of a whole group learning: people who share the same aspirations as you.
Recordings & Community
Recordings of the two-hour session are stored on our customised online platform, and will be available for 180 days. You will get access to a private group for participants of this Masterclass, where you can share insights, questions and stories, long after the event has finished.
Personalised Practices
By adding all the practices we explore together, you will leave the call with many specific things you can do to deepen your connection to all forms of art… whether you’re a relative newcomer, a seasoned afficionado, or a writer, painter, composer, director at your peak.
ABOUT
JORDAN LUKE COLLIER
Music was a huge part of my upbringing, and by my teenage years I had developed a particular taste and style. With some college friends, we offered raves in the forests of Wales, and hosted raucous, multi-room house parties. I was the DJ.
With film, I didn’t venture too far beyond things like Goodfellas or Scarface: safe gangster bets that the cool kids liked. Then, one day, my world flipped entirely when I watched Hable con Ella by Pedro Almodóvar. This film opened up topics like obsession, lust, desire—themes and feelings that British or American filmmakers were (in my judgment) too disembodied and unemotive to make. Feeling somehow mirrored and recognised by such films, I got to explore some of my shadowy, primordial nature, and it changed my life. I traveled and lived among new cultures. I sensed new aspects of myself could come out.
For a time, the arts took a backseat in my life as I explored personal growth, depth psychology and spirituality. Almost by accident, I came across some Kashmir Shaivite teachings on aesthetics and aesthetic meditations—simply known as the ‘yoga of beauty’—which has been part of my daily practice since. I still take a retreat in this tradition each year. The effect of this ‘aesthetic path’ (as with all meditation) on my life has been a deeper appreciation of everyday beauty—an ongoing glimpse, to quote Basho, of the underglimmer.
Now when coronavirus came along, I found myself for many months at home with little to do. Literature started to fill the void, and after the purchase of a monster TV and soundbar, I have watched over 200 cinema classics. Half of these must have been old black and whites. But what I witnessed in this re-encounter with film astounded me: all the themes of narrative and character transformation I’d studied in psychology, the careful alchemy of emotional and spiritual states I’d wandered so far to understand, and the simple, playful moments of aesthetic wonder, made for an entirely new cinematic experience. I was ripe to fall in love with film in this whole new depth.
I do not know where this love affair will go. All I know is that I long to live more and more ‘the art life’, and to leave in this world—before I die—my own attempt at an aesthetic masterpiece. This is a passion that now throbs in my veins.
It is time to geek out and dissect: the ways in which cinema will improve your everyday life, and propel you to the outer edges of your inspiration.
So jump onto the meditation cushion beside me, grab your popcorn, and get excited for the miracles of art.
$99 Regular | $65 Members
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. We will convert the recording and the follow-up resources into a digital product, and make it available on the Ars Amorata store. The recording will be available to purchase for 180 days after the live event. The product recordings will be taken down on July 31st, 2023.
We are expecting some 50-60 people to join us for this webinar. So of course, not everyone can share. If you want to share, you can type your question into the Q&A box during the zoom call, or put your hand up. The moderator will choose the order of the audience questions/shares.
The Masterclass goes live on Saturday 21st January, 2023, at 3pm Central Europe Time. The call will be exactly two hours.
The ‘After-Hours’ session takes place on Saturday 21st January, 2023, at 5.15pm Central Europe Time. This call will last for 90 minutes.
You will receive a notification 48 hours before we go live for the Masterclass, containing the log-in codes. You will receive another notification an hour before the Masterclass, so that the log-in code sits at the top of your inbox as we go live.
Please ‘whitelist’ any email communication from Ars Amorata, to ensure the codes reach your main inbox (and don’t get lost in some promotions tab).
No problem, we will post a video recording onto our member’s platform 24 hours after the live Masterclass. You will have access to the recordings until July 31st, 2023.
When you register, we will send detailed instructions for downloading Zoom onto your computer or phone. You can also find helpful information and tips at Zoom’s Help Center.
Yes. You can connect via the Zoom app on your mobile device, or call in from a landline phone. For those interested in listening on a landline phone, we will send the phone number prior to each session, including international call-in options.
Sometimes course emails end up in Spam or Promotions folders. Please also check you are looking in the inbox of the email address you used to register for the course. In addition, we recommend adding ‘info@arsamorata.com’ to your email contact list to ensure messages are delivered to your inbox.
This Masterclass is one of four brand new Masterclasses, offered by Jordan Luke Collier and the Ars Amorata. Each Masterclass centres around an urgent and popular question shared among our audience, and in each Masterclass we share some unique and unconventional ways of looking at that question.
Future Masterclasses will cover topics such as The Art of Initiatory Travel, Foundations of Aesthetic Leadership, Challenges of Intimacy and Commitment, Re-Igniting the Spark, and Relating Across Cultures. Through his unique blend of teaching, storytelling, live coaching and break-out group interaction, Jordan offers ways to completely re-interpret some of the challenges that touch right to a man’s heart.