“May this year bring you well-being, joy, and limitless opportunities to grow. Let’s be fierce in our commitment to value and utilize even the most challenging circumstances as a way to deepen our understanding and cultivate compassion for others (as well as ourselves.) Let’s continuously find creative and skillful ways to serve living beings and this precious planet, our home, and look at life around us as the rich ground for awakening from self-absorption.
If we can do this, how can we possibly lose?”
– Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel
My mama took this photo of me in her garden a few weeks ago. I’m so grateful to be alive and so grateful to be connected with you!!
A note from Erin Nov 8 2025
I’m sending warm greetings from a gorgeous fall day here on the Wasatch Front.
Earlier this week, I had a birthday, and it felt like a significant one. I turned 52, and my beloved likes to say, “Now you’re a complete deck.”
Several times over the past decades, astrologers have told me after studying my chart, “When you’re in you’re 50s, it will all come together.” I held onto that as a beacon in my 20s and 30s, and then got busy with parenting and work in my 40s and forgot their comments for years until my beloved reminded me. This birthday feels like that prediction might just be starting to resonate.
You know that saying: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you,” from the Gospel of Thomas? Well, that also resonates. I’ve been on a difficult underworld journey with my health over the past several years, and I’m happy to say I’m climbing out of the hole and feeling vibrant and well. (And knocking on wood as I type those words!) I wonder if part of the illness journey, which demanded I change my life in significant ways, was this need to bring forth what is within me so it didn’t destroy me. Because y’all, all that reading and learning and training and studying and being cooked by my practices and sitting with wise elders over decades means that I’m full. So full. So clearly needing to bring it forth and give it back to the world. Thus, I’ve been working on bringing forth the body of work I’ve named Refugia, for the past several years.
Is it any coincidence that as I’ve been in the deep work of bringing this forth, I’m feeling well again? I think not. I couldn’t be more excited about this training program! I’ve been cooking this body of work down into a concentrate that is so delicious and nourishing. Picture me at the beginning of 2025, in an empty house with several giant 25 x 30″ pads of huge sticky notes and a cup full of colorful Sharpies, alone for 10 days, the giant papers full of my notes and diagrams spread around the kitchen table, the island, the coffee table, stuck on the walls and spread over the desk in the office, mapping out all these lineages and practices we carry and wish to share. After many days alone, drawing, crossing out, listening deeply, putting tiny sticky notes on top of the big sticky notes, and arranging and rearranging, the current iteration of Refugia showed itself to me. I couldn’t be more proud of it or more full of enthusiasm to share this sacred curriculum. It is going to be gooooood.
So, I’m celebrating my birthday, but even more than that, I’m celebrating giving birth to something so dear to my soul, and as our dear friend Francis Weller says of Refugia, “offers such potent and precise medicine for these times.” After distilling the model onto those many giant white pads, it took me another 9 months to craft the curriculum and make a webpage to describe it. It’s been a labor of love and oh, how I love it!
Today is the last day to receive the $500 registration discount. We have a wonderful group of folks signed up already, and I’m thrilled about the potent year ahead. Would you like to join us? I promise this training will offer deep nourishment to your body, mind, and soul. We’d love to welcome you to join us.
I echo Carl in sending big heartfelt thanks for the many applications, reflections, kind notes, and excited responses about our opening the doors to Refugia!
The invitation I sent last week is below in case you missed it. And for those who have a bone-knowing of “I’m in,” a gentle reminder that we are happy to offer a $500 discount until the end of the day, today, November 8th, as an expression of our thanks for your enthusiastic yes. (Carl is taking me out for a birthday dinner and a house concert tonight, so please jump in soon!) I’ll be checking email and applications before bed, but I invite you not to wait until the very last minute.
As the saying goes, “We were made for these times.”
Refugia aims to ensure that the times are also making us into the most authentic, wise, and soulful version of ourselves.
More than ever, the world needs such human beings in all our unique and diverse expressions.
Thanks for being here. Thanks for tipping the scales toward more love and goodness. Thanks for caring about our work in the world.
Thanks for staying connected. And thanks, always, for making the world a kinder and more soulful place. It matters.
In kindness & kinship & a fierce dedication toward a more beautiful world,
Erin
p.s. We have some great podcast episodes coming soon. Make sure to follow our podcast “Embodiment Matters” wherever you listen to your podcasts to receive the episodes as soon as they drop. Can’t wait to share with you!
Ah, the knowledge of impermanence
that haunts our days
is their very fragrance.
– Rilke
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