On Sunday, I returned from a 5-day unplugged retreat at the Rocky Mountain Ecodharma Center. The retreat was called Healing, Belonging, and Kinning and it was hosted by Boulder-based Zen Buddhist teacher, climate scientist, and eco-/social-justice liberation fighter Kritee Kanko and profound mexica facilitator, guide and educator Bianca Acosta, combining indigenous teachings and Buddhist practices for a profound journey into recovering kin-making and belonging with the living world, to help rekindle and sustainably fuel our fires π₯ for activism in the heartbreaking fights to defend Mother Earth in these dark times.
During this retreat, we engaged in group practices such as a grief and rage ritual circle, joy and communing practices, a "council of all beings," and each person immersed in nature in one spot for 10 hours. It was exactly the remedy to allow for a new version of myself to emerge, that was ready to be (re)born.
I was so fed by the opportunity to deepen my existing practices of communing with wild beings in the setting of a 5-day community with new friends and old alike. And I was profoundly fed and led by the teachings they provided me. Matched only by the sensitive, nuanced teachings by our human guides and kin, Bianca and Kritee.
From a clump of Spanish moss advising me that the work of transforming the shape and structure of life happens over many many generations (more than my human mind dares fathom), that life and death are co-existing and simultaneous, and that "what you shed, we (the living world) will eat." π²
To the mountains delivering a song into me that I couldn't remember, but could only access while standing in the same spot by the river and attuning myself, two days apart. π» πΆ
To the conclusion of a reverent personal release ceremony π¬οΈ which, in the exact moment of closing, I turned and was met with an encounter of a mule deer antler, elevated off the ground by inches, magically suspended across a couple of twiggy young shrub stems, and directly on my path back to camp, yet unseen until that exact moment. π¦
Deer medicine is said to testify to gentleness. And I was reaching new depths of capacity for gentleness during this period.
Even before the retreat, I sensed something big was coming through my life. Unlocked by finding a suppressed No within me, and, through attuning to this "no," then encountering a delightful and refreshing release of energy (specifically Qi) that has been coursing through my life day by day since. The "No" that was authentic yet avoided/suppressed, once reclaimed and allowed to reorganize my life, helped unlock my own aliveness.
At the retreat, teachings about the "mirror" nature of us as beings, circulating and revealing our patterning to one another, and the invocation of "what is it I want to reiterate into this world, from all the patterning I contain?" And, "what do I want to take from and reflect back with another being?" β‘ I was jolted like a circuit to recognize the eerie synchronicities leading up to the encounter with this teaching and realizing it was exactly what I needed to encounter at that moment to take the next step.
The next courageous step of believing that humans are fully an extension of the living world. And it is truly and fundamentally our job in life to reveal and reflect our good patterning to one another, and synthesize out (through healing processes) the patterning that does not serve.
Although I have done considerable amounts of kinning with the natural world over the past 15 years, and even have taught social permaculture for multiple years (which explains how ecological patterning is mirrored in human social, cultural and organizational systems), I wanted to believe that humans were somehow separate from me, separate from "Life." Because I was afraid of them, their complexity, their ignorance, their capacity for harm. Yet finally, like the last domino in a chain, that piece fell into compost ecstatically during this retreat. π
Despite how I used to defend that worldview, and clung to it: It would be too much work now to believe humans are separate. It is much more elegant to see them as continuous, and thus, contiguous, with ME.
And with: the solutions to our serious plagues.
I will continue to prune what does not serve. Death is rebirth. The putting up of boundaries is a kind of death. It is a space-taking, indeed, a space-making. And rebirth thus becomes possible, as the existing energies get reinvented and reorganized.
So I stand before you devoted to abundant sharing of the materials tied up in this jumble-complex I've come to call Fractal Praxis. I will share effusively, finding the intrinsic organization as I grasp my way through this jungle. Fractal Praxis is a worldview, carefully and rigorously refined over decades, and it is also a mystery way, like a forest: because it is whole, and how do you begin to grasp something that is whole?
But there is absolutely no more shred of hesitation in me that this is what I must do. I feel at ease now, like never before, about sharing what is truly mine to offer with the world, and, to receiving what is mine to receive. Books, courses, talks, trainings... these are bound to flow, for I am bound to the future in which what I've labored to harvest belongs to us all.
To allow people to live in ignorance of me and my offerings is a kind of sin that I've tolerated too long, wound up as I was in my overly retentive ways. Now I will undam and flood your beautiful systems like the raging wisdom and beauty that I am. π
To begin with: Here are SHARES from the Kinning Retreat.
Two songs I channeled, one for a meal blessing, and one for unrepentant JOY:
There's also the Mountain Song, but that one is sacred, and meant for sharing another time. β°οΈ
And here is some writing that emerged while sitting in my "nature kinning & remembrance practice" ("solo" in nature).
There is such a difference for me in knowing that what I am shedding is going to be received. And even eaten as nourishment by the Earth. And so to hold onto it, to hoard it, to keep it all locked up inside, in judgment, in analysis, in critique, and in extensive terms for repair... and then the further need to enact that repair, even if it's through a private process of writing, wrongs-sorting, critique, analysis...
It's so different to believe that that stuff belongs released. Held only as long as a sense-making process (in a whole body-mind experience) requires, and then released. Because it's food π₯ for the wild world, for future relationships, for repair of existing relationships, if and when the time for repair arises. Feedback is food. And I've been withholding it.
For decades now, I've written everything down in dozens of journals and recorded thousands of these voice recordings because I thought that I had to hold onto it all until it all made sense inside of me, through me. But now I see that: I don't have to witness me alone. Because in reality, the people around me have some shared reference points, some shared experiences, to what I experience. And the more-than-human beings around me ALSO have pattern-knowledges that match my experiences. And it's a gift to interact about it, to share about it, to come to greater clarity through connection, through empathy, through relation, through relating about our experiences! It's food. Nourishment. It brings us closer, on multiple levels. Including to the truth.
People are mirrors πͺ β their hurt, loneliness, rage, wounding, hope β I share. Freeing me into an experience of people as available to me for relating, as extensions of the living wholeness, just as I already know the wild beings β trees, birds, fungi, stones, etc. β are available for reverent relating.
How/what parts of you are like a mirror to parts of me?
And how would the relationship be benefitted if I simply mimicked the parts of you I felt worthy of reiterating β those good and needful parts?
And, what am I still carrying that mirrors my childhood distortions, but doesn't serve people to have reflected to them?
The past 30+ years of my life have been this kind of hoardingβeven many of the insights I've gained, I've kept to myself. And the next era will be one of yielding, back in the giving and receiving flow mirrored by nature. No longer terrorized by the notion of you not understanding or not wanting what I offer. You'll receive it either way. Because it's what and who I truly am.
And I once again acknowledge/uplift/invoke that I'm entering a phase: No more keeping me to myself. No more holding me apart as a false form of protection. For it is starving me from the world, and the world from me.
I am wise enough to choose more wisely the relationships I curate around me in my life. Choosing wisely the channels, venues, types of work I put out into the world. Choosing wisely keeps me safe. Not holding myself apart, or them apart. I need not cling to any lies, even if they are my pet perversions, born of true hurt and good reason. I must once again submit and be digested by truth.
WOW, it is so different to orient to people as reservoirs of experience and knowledge, full of pattern! Pattern awarenesses, even if not fully developed, pattern intuitions let's say, about this living world. What a gift, these sentient beings we are. What a gift it is for now to me to see how the people can be an extension of the natural world. To really grok that at a cellular level. And all of this material, including society-scale capitalism and the colonizers' dying myths, is just material to be integrated, because it's experienced, not imaginary. So let's find what's there in our body's wisdom. Let's lean on collective digestion and composting processes. But it will only move through our system if we actually digest it, not bypass it.
There is a type of contraction, contractedness, that is departing my body lately. Perhaps it is being digested. Progressively, slowly, but it keeps reaching new peaks of expression. What I find is an increasingly and effortlessly open heart.
I've inhabited a contracted state, at various scales (fractally) and severity, throughout my entire life. It began early, from suffering emotional abuse in early childhood that I couldn't make sense of. It took me a long time to learn how trauma distorts the perception of real world information, so I would frequently conflate severe disappointments about people with my own extreme retaliatory contractions, furthering the belief that people were inherently untrustworthy, self-ignorant, and self-centered, and using that belief as a wall to try to protect myself from their further damaging me.
For years I've had this pattern of being overly retentive (something a trusted healer and muse Eutimia Cruz Montoya called out in our healing session that one time seven years ago(!) at Alchemy Ritual Goods). But if I'm being honest now, there could be way more flow in my world. The lover I've finally left recently is generous with his love, and thus gets to harvest bounty from his connections. I am a profound lover and witness, and there's no reason I cannot harvest plentifulness from my love and relations, too, except for this excessive practice of over-retention. Holding onto things too long, as if to try to make sense of everything. As if to promote a chronic state of scarcity. Or that the insight that might come after overwhelming labor from cracking even the toughest nut of understanding would be essential to my very existence. Reinforcing a stance that the world is unsafe; I must figure everything out before it hurts me; I mustn't let anything go.
But it's just not so. When I hold onto everything as if I have to make sense of it, I'm not letting anything GO, if you catch my drift. It's a blessing and a curse of too much memory, and, ironically, too much self-importance: thinking all the world's ills need to be integrated and healed on MY own shoulders, lest anyone, especially me, get hurt again.
Thus I'm not sharing the sense-making and integration burden WITH my allies: the Earth, wind, trees, fungi, creatures, and non-form-taking beings, like spirits and ancestors. I'm giving them nothing to chew on, and I'm trying to eat too much, stuff that isn't even for me! I'm retaining too much. By holding back my writings and voice recordings about Fractal Praxis from the world for over 10(!) years now, I exemplify a fear-based hoarding of the gift. I've received a TON of insights from myself in partnership with the natural world during that span of time, but I haven't given enough back to my world. Enough of what I truly and honestly have to give. And once I give what's truly mine to give, I see how it will immediately, and fluidly, convert into receiving for me.
Just like I close the release of one part of my life, and turn around, and receive the deer antler. We release with one hand, whether unprocessed muck or beautiful finished product, and we receive with the other, instantaneously. THIS is the model of the living world. Only once I'm giving without hesitation, without any shred of separation, will effortlessly receiving be, too, truly unlocked.
Why have I not shared? I've not wanted to be seen, to attract the attention of the nefarious icky people. I've been convinced I've not needed their validation, and so could just keep my gems of wisdom to myself. But it's not about validation, ugh! It's about keeping the gifts circulating. If I don't share who and what I'm really about... how on Earth could I expect to receive what's really, uniquely, for me?
I've been too contracted for too long, trying to protect myself from phantom harms, blown out of scale by a developing brain. I've been softening gradually, but now all of a sudden, it's more integrated: I don't have the need to contract as severely any more and as much, as often... but this new capacity is learned too. It's what it looks like when I finally learn that I'm safe to live and thrive in this world.
And I guess this is a new side to the mountain of what liberation feels like. I can afford now to let my whole being be more open. Because now I am a wise, competent adult (not a helpless child who cannot choose her attachments). And: if people are indeed an extension of a natural world and all we are doing is mirroring parts of this world's patterning to one another... then...
I'm good, we're good, and it's safe to be here. Better yet, healing our wounded trauma patterning is possible and it is the way to return to feeling, and thus to being, and thus to a greater, grander, life-wide sensemaking process that includes and reveres us. And thus: to belonging and re-inhabiting this living world.
Life is trying to save itself through us, trying to evolve to a more integrated (higher-order) world story. We participate in that. Humankind's healing and evolution into stewardship species-cultures would be the greatest gift and boon to all-life of all time.
That gift is ready to be received AND given by us.
It is anything but hopeless, even as the road is rough, long, and non-linear. We are integrating karma. How much of that can we handle in one lifetime? Which karma is ours to come to understand and integrate within us, so its harmfulness and cycling is neutralized, and its wisdom can be put to work instead? How many generations will it take to get through all this muck of trauma, caused by distorted culture across multiple generations? What is our part to play in this life time?
If you like what you're receiving from this newsletter, please donate to Bianca's sacred work by way of Kritee who is collecting dΔna on behalf of Bianca. Put "Bianca" in the donation line.
And follow their work: Kritee, Bianca.
In closing:
Right before I left on retreat, I decided to restructure the $8/month Fractal Praxis membership tier to reflect the prolific, disciplined production phase I am now entering.
It is now called Engager Membership. It is for folks who want insider access to works-in-progress (including books, course contents, tools, and training materials) of Fractal Praxis, pre-publication. Engager members have the power to comment directly and discuss on these private posts. Your feedback will help shape the emergence of the finished products. Plus these members get a discounted price on Fractal Praxis offerings.
Show your support for Fractal Praxis and be the first humans in the universe π to receive early works & give feedback on Fractal Praxis offerings, before they are released to the public.
If you are feeling called to dive deeper, and/or to simply align and encourage in solidarity with Fractal Praxis, I invite you to join as an Engager Member.
With immense love and gratitude (and increased reciprocity β so may it be!),
C./Caroline