Rebirthing a Sacred Life

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The other night we watched a documentary on a modern day horse whisperer, a man who has learned to train horses in a non-violent way that honors and allows for a harmonious and powerful relationship to rise between horse and rider. It brought me to tears to see this beauty.

Once again I pondered how ever single aspect of our western colonialist society from birth to medicine to education, schooling, farming and agriculture, to the way that we treat our infants, letting them cry it out alone at night, and the way that we forget our elders, letting them die alone in places that know nothing about the rebirthing process of death, every aspect of our culture is permeated by a great illness. This illness from my perspective is a misunderstanding of the most fundamental kind, a divorce from ecology and the natural world and nature herself, as a feminine force. 

For years this has been the foundation of my work in somatic re-education — about how this paradigm manifests in relationship to how we live inside of our bodies. Our culture knows nothing of working with the natural and cosmic forces that rise and fall - and knows only how to intimidate, dominate, colonize, bully and punish into being. People force themselves into physical practices that only enforce this subconscious mind state. It is violence to its very core. It is divide and conquer. It is black vrs white, it is red vrs blue, it is male vrs female, it is dualistic by nature, and the paradigm refuses to acknowledge the multiplicity of life, reality and nature herself. It is a paradigm that has lost it’s humanity. And it is deeply simplistic to think that it is one person’s fault, one man’s fault, one political parties fault. 

They say our nation is great, but a nation founded on domination knows nothing about the sacred order of things. It is the entire system itself that is sick, has been sick since it’s inception, and we all have played our part by keeping our eyes shut and our hearts closed. Let us listen deeply, feel deeply, honor deeply, make sacred again the land and the body and our enemies as well. For as this nation crumbles, and division rises, we must make space for the sacred to rebirth herself and to re awaken in our very bodies. Our future depends upon this simple act of rebirth. 

On Threshold Space

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This week our little one is one year Earthside ~ and we are grateful • A dear friend of ours who also just had a baby said that she believes that the wave of children coming in now is incredibly strong, resilient and ready to bring about the next chapter of this world, and I feel the very same way • This little spirit of a human came in strong — and we are honored to be his parents. He instantly created sweeping shifts all at once in our lives and those around us — ripples everywhere — as if to say get ready, heal your relations but also stand in your truth, and live your deepest destiny, no matter what.

He has transformed our world and re-birthed us all at once, and the incredible experiences that we have gone through have shifted the pendulum and the gravity in our world. In this line, I have been in the process of feeling the trajectory of my own life, and my life's work as a whole...

All of the work that I have engaged in over the course of the years is based around threshold space. For example, there is a piece, SHED, that I facilitated in 2015 with three women, including myself, and only the trees as witness. Within this piece each of us took a walk naked through the woods after the falling of a heavy snow, and in frigid temperatures.

Why, one might ask? I could speak endlessly about the symbology of the woods and of women and of finding the wild self and one’s embodied voice through the darkness, but more importantly this is an example of the kind of ritual work that I’ve done all of my life. Even as a child I was drawn to ritualize experiences in very specific ways, including walking labyrinths, building mandalas and creating dances.

This is because ritual marks a moment. Ritual forges meaning out of suffering and experience, which is the material of life, and ritual assists us — as Joseph Campbell speaks so eloquently about — in moving into more expanded states of our own consciousness. Otherwise, we remain trapped in the same state of being through the course of a lifetime. That was never the life that I wanted to live — and I identified early on that we live in a culture that has forgotten how to do this — a culture that honors celebrity and wealth above all — and that cares very little for the spiritual and psychic life of an individual.

And so I, we, forged our own threshold spaces, made our own meaning out of rituals that are long dead and disembodied. And I have made a lifetime of work out of doing just this in both teaching, and performing.

And now, as I’ve crossed a new threshold into motherhood, I am re-imagining many things. I have felt the calling very specifically to provide ceremonies for women as they prepare for birth, postpartum an beyond. When we honor the mother, we honor the child as well. These Ceremonies will be a great joy for me to offer, as I hold a sacred space for these profound rites of passage within a woman’s life.

This is in no way a career change, my work in a sense has always been women’s work from my dance ritual to somatic movement teaching, healing and performing, all of which I will continue to do.
But I do also feel drawn now to help women navigate and above all protect these threshold spaces, drawing a boundary around what is sacred.

And so our transformations continue as I expand as mother — carrier of medicine — and we look to the future as well.
to be continued…