Continuing on with the Let's Coevolve thread from last week... I'm in an active stage of conjuring the contents of visions and dreams I've received and interacted with over the past decade.
Here is some more of what of what I'm conjuring.
Priceless Ceremonies
We cannot put a price on people's liberation and our becoming reunified with nature, one another, and ourselves.
Although, in late stage capitalism, some of us will certainly try to.
As you may know, Colorado passed a law decriminalizing possession, cultivation, and sharing (gifting not selling) of various psychedelic substances, principally psilocybin mushrooms. It also lays out a regulatory model for licensing official (clinical) facilitators, healing centers, producers, etc.
This law is not without its flaws and harms. However, the local organizer community (which I am proud to be in relationship with) fought hard to protect what's known as "legacy" medicine work—healing work done in community. They achieved this through advocating and winning the decriminalization language related to growing, sharing and gifting.
Community organizers fought hard for these protections because, as we community practitioners believe, the healing MUST be done in community. In fact, community is the ultimate medicine, and such sacred medicines as psilocybin mushrooms are simply guiding us to that remembering.
Now imagine that there is a group of devoted community facilitators and trip sitters who believed that not only the medicines, but the healing services itself should be strictly gifted. Who understood that these natural medicines are best received and administered in the model of the Gift, mirroring the ways nature operates. (Here is an intro text to gift economics and how this is modeled in the natural world.)
In gift economics, the wealth we enjoy exists through the circulation of gift-giving as an active, meaning-making process. When I give you a gift, you feel gratitude. You may even naturally feel inspired or compelled to give back. This is what's known as a spiral of abundance in social permaculture texts.
We ensure abundance for our communities by providing what's needed, and gifting what we can afford to share. This is an abundance model of economics (which is how ecosystems work), versus a scarcity model (which is how capitalism works). When we keep the gift cycling like this, as Robin Wall Kimmerer discusses in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, we are generating true wealth. Cycling our gifts like this, we engage in generative interactions that form and strengthen kinship ties—meaning, needing and loving each other. And these ties are truly our greatest wealth in times of need, scarcity, or crisis. Wise people and indigenous peoples of this earth know this!
Priceless Ceremonies is a framework for facilitators to offer ceremonies of the highest integrity, expressing respect for the medicines and the people, through a devoted gift economics practice.
How does this work? We gift ceremonies, and people financially or otherwise gift back to us to sustain our operations. We only ask that the gifts remain in circulation in our communities. Folks with financial abundance are encouraged to give directly back (or rather, "pay it forward") on the costs related to providing ceremonies. Others may refer people to us or link us with people in their networks... still others might volunteer or provide in-kind resources in support of our ceremonies... and still others may express their gratitude and generosity in any number of other creative ways.
To situate an offering firmly in the Gift involves breaking and frustrating the internalized logic of capitalism. Those who still operate from their capitalist conditioning may indeed simply "take" the ceremony, and give nothing back. But by setting up even the exchange/economics part of things within a sacred ceremonial way, we hope to invite people into an alternative (and ancient) way of being—one that truly alters the chemistry of their lives, and reminds them of how to return into practices of right relationship and true community building. Inviting people to remember how to consistently operate from their gifts, and keep generosity circulating, and thus: foster the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
Priceless Ceremonies' design and methodology is inspired by various authors and educators on gift economics, including Charles Eisenstein (Sacred Economics), Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass), and the gift economics model practiced by East Point Peace Academy (led by Kazu Haga). Here's a stellar resource on their gift economics principles and practice.
The infrastructure surrounding Priceless Ceremonies at a beta-test level should be up and running within ~6 weeks (even faster if some of my dear friends reading this can lend a hand! Computer nerds, hit me up ❤️🤖)
If you're interested in what we're doing with Priceless Ceremonies, you can let me know how you're interested, what you're interested in, and I'll be happy to talk with you. Simply direct message me @ Priceless Ceremonies.
I'm incubating Priceless Ceremonies as a way of extending my own gifts as a business "doula," to support the emergence, collectivist practice, and development of facilitators providing medicine work in this region.
Coevolve in general is a 13-years-long way I've used my personal gifts to help ensure that our gifts stay circulating in our communities in robust and systematic ways. I hope that Priceless Ceremonies, or any of the other incubations I'm tending, can soon serve as a source of income for me, covering my basic living expenses. With this level of care, I would be able to carry on the most important work of my life, ministering, modeling, building and growing so these integral community-centric systems can serve me and us for many years to come, no matter the apocalypses that may await us. As it is now, my own earning ability and financial circumstance takes the hits as I serve, guide, and lead on behalf of my core kin relationships.
So please, if you're feeling financially abundant: help me help us build resilience. I welcome you to make a donation in solidarity with Priceless Ceremonies today.
Join me for a new embodiment-based ritual space: WORK/FLOW STATES!
Y'all are invited to the first ever Work/Flow States, an embodiment-centric ritual space, happening this Saturday 5/11, 10am to 12pm MT. The event is free, and is held hybrid: both online AND in person.
Here’s the details and link for joining online:
Work/Flow States! A Movement & Creativity Drop-In Space
Saturday, May 11 · 10:00am – 12:00pm
Time zone: America/Denver
Google Meet joining info
Video call link: https://meet.google.com/yte-otmz-zxt
And if you want to come in person and are local to Denver area, please text or email me personally for the address.
SAVE THE DATE: Purge Church arrives Saturday June 22nd, 6-9pm!
Purge Church is a ritual cauldron for shedding the stuck shit and gunk in our nervous systems, specifically the so called "negative" emotions (grief, rage, angst, etc.) that accumulate on a daily basis from living as an aware, informed human being in our destructive & falling-apart modern world. And, also that have accumulated over generations in our colonizer/oppressor society perpetuation of mass trauma.
Bearing witness to the truths of ancestral wrongdoing, systemic injustice, disastrous world events, and signs of systemic collapses... All of that information has to go somewhere. And it gets lodged in our BODIES. Especially when there are few socially acceptable ways & spaces in which to PROCESS these things.
PURGE CHURCH is a remedy. This high-voltage ritual space is a dark, dank, damned portal. It is a cauldron for you to tap into your suppressed anger and grief and MOVE, shake, rattle, roll, scream, wail, shudder and shed those “stuck energies” that have been built up and pent up in our bodies.
It is actually a sign that your body-mind is HEALTHY that you feel such "awful" emotions on a regular basis. Yet mainstream society rejects these feelings as "bad" and thus offers almost no healthy communal ways to deal with them. So we lack access to socially accepting, shared ritual spaces for us to express these hard emotions honestly, without shame.
PURGE CHURCH is your permission to FEEL it, EXPRESS it, & WITNESS it—in an embodiment- and movement-centered ritual space.
Like a deer will do after a life-threatening encounter with a predator, we sometimes just need to SHAKE the cortisol out of our system. There’s nothing more natural than that!
Subscribers to the Fractal Praxis mailing list (that's you!!) get early access to Purge Church tickets when they get released. So stay tuned... ticket sales will open soon!
Other things in the field:
🕸️The LSI potluck and fundraiser was a success! Over the last six weeks we raised nearly $1,800 for our educational programming work. Thanks to all who showed up!
📎The latest newsletter by Regenerate Change talks about cultivating the inner prophet who sees the world through a lens of wholeness, transcending colonized, inherited fragmentation. Worth a read.
📎Check out this psychedelic incubator for creators, artists, and entrepreneurs, located at Drala Mountain Center being put on by my colleagues and comrades at Cosmos.coop in August 2024. https://psychedelicincubator.com/
My beloved friend, somatic embodiment coach & Purge Church co-creator Phannie Krentzman is putting on a solo dance show, Despite Not Because on May 16th. Please check out the trailer video here and get tickets here.
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In love & faith,
C.