We open acknowledging the gift and miracle of life, remembering how to expand our hearts through gratitude and honoring the abundance of life and we contemporarily become real about the pain and suffering in the world. Grief and gratitude have always been eternal sisters, meaning that one cannot exist without the other. As we become aware of the sorrow we carry in our own bodies, as we become aware of the suffering of the earth and our ecosystems we are re-awakened to the preciousness of being alive. Without gratitude, grief would be an endless fall. Without grief, gratitude would be disconnected from the reality of our current world. We need both. We will open with both. Calling them in to infuse our whole journey. 

Practices will include: opening ceremony, gratitude practices, honouring our pain ritual.

We acknowledge that we live in a disembodied culture that encourages separation and alienation from our own embodied selves, pushing us to live, for the most part, in our heads. We often suffer from a profound sense of alienation and incapacity to genuinely connect. To return home in our bodies means to start to inhabit our own flesh, to enflesh ourselves, to dismantle old colonial beliefs that live deep in our own tissues, to nourish our hungry selves with true nourishment, to slow down, to rest and become porous enough to be able to listen to our needs and the needs of the earth. To embody our physical selves means to live in the present moment, to be able to create connection and relationship with the natural world, allowing it to shape our own sense of self and meaning.

Practices will include: radical embodiment practices, earth-body connection, deep nourishment, body as the landscape of transformation, body as compass. 

How can we disrupt our current perception of earth which sees her as a separate and inanimate, as dead and without agency? How can we begin to restore kinship with all beings, including the plant beings, the water beings, animal beings and so forth? In this module we will explore what it means to give back animacy to the world, what it means to learn and become humble students of the earth, to create relationship and build practices and rituals of re-connection. We will work with shifting and expanding our perception of the world around us, learning simple and practical ways to establish communication with the plants, with the mountains and all the nature spirits. We will guide you in remembering our interdependence with the earth, giving voice and full sovereignty to all “people” here on earth, acknowledging that as we connect with the sacredness of earth we return to living a more harmonious and magical life.

Practices will include: intuitive herbalism, indigenous ways of knowing, earth-based rituals and practices, wild foraging, becoming students of the green world.

As we stand at this great threshold as a humanity we are invited to reconsider our role and relationship with the world and earth. As we begin to reside more in our own bodies, healing old wounds and beliefs, as we invite the sacred back into all things, giving voice back to the earth, we start to acknowledge that, as humans, we have been handed down the precious gift of “singing back the earth to life” meaning to create beauty, to use our hands to evoke the magic of the earth, to become oracles of creation and give form to the formless and majesty of the natural world. As humans we have lost our capacity to praise the earth and we often create out of greed, manipulation and oppression. To create from earth and right relationship is to invite more awareness, slowness, patience and reverence in our lives; it teaches us to listen and get “out of the way”, becoming true vessels for creation, it invites us into taking deeper response-ability in how we mold and weave our reality and, lastly, it brings back joy, pleasure and playfulness in our own living. 

Practices will include: opening our vessel through song, earth as oracle, ancestral crafts, basket weaving, natural dying, earth pigments and more.

As we reappropriate ourselves of our creative and visionary qualities we are called to imagine new paths for ourselves and our communities. These call forth all our imagination and capacity to carve together a “new world” which does not mean rushing into any easy solution, nor birth these paths from the same paradigms our current world is emerging from. On the other hand, it calls forth our full participation and capacity to be challenged, to stay with the inquiry, to get our hands dirty and do the world that is needed to create a new vision for this earth and our lives. Only when we allow our minds to change can we become embodied, empathic, grounded and authentic agents of transformation, weaving together past and future, birthing a new vision for our world. 

Practices will include: Ancestral skills, re-imagining civilization, ancient maps, the medicine wheel, leadership.