A North Star, Dark Honey, Flowing Like a River, and more

Hello, beautiful human,

This newsletter includes a personal update, a few gorgeous poems, quotes, and songs to bolster your heart, and invitations to two of our upcoming offerings. Thanks for reading!

A few nights ago, we had the privilege of attending a 2+hour memorial for Joanna Macy with a global community of people whose lives have been profoundly touched by hers. I wept, I laughed, and my heart was lifted and bolstered beyond words. Camus wrote, “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” Joanna was so free, so in love with life, so dedicated to helping others and this beautiful world. Her presence itself was a beam of love and a potent teaching that granted permission to fully show up as your unique self, inviting your courage in loving the world as only you can. She is one of the north stars in my lineage, even now, reminding me how I aim to live.

As Carl and I sat on the red couch holding hands, with the laptop in front of us, we kept whispering to each other some version of “YES! THIS!”again and again as people shared about Joanna.

In our own ways, we aspire for our work, like Joanna’s, to touch hearts, to encourage and empower people to love the world in their own unique ways. Like Joanna, we don’t wish to train people to be like us or to do what it is that we do. We aim to use our decades of training in somatics, soul work, meditation and mindfulness, grief tending, and the Work that Reconnects, to nourish people’s lives at the roots, so they can become their most free and authentic selves, empowered and supported to pour forth their soul medicine and to keep stepping out of the conditioning of the overculture, without burning out. An old friend wrote in an email this week, “The primary quality of true community is that your load significantly lightens by being part of it.” I felt that at the memorial, and I aspire that everyone who participates in our communal offerings feels that as well.

Almost everyone I’ve talked to this week, when checking in with each other via the complex question of How are you? has said, “I’m tired.” Me too, friends. The world is so much. Somehow, though I showed up at the memorial tired, and left feeling so fully alive. All that Joanna energy reminded me of what I am here for, and that brings me to life.

 I learned of the death of someone else in my circle this week. I wrote a piece about a profoundly moving experience I had with him a few years ago. You can read my short essay, The Dark Honey Sacrament, here on my Substack. 

 As Paul Hawken wrote, “Inspiration is not garnered from the recitation of what is flawed, it resides rather in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine and reconsider.” All of this reminds me that while I’m tired and devoted to making time for rest, and while I do read all kinds of recitations of what is not only flawed, but crumbling and being destroyed, there’s no time like the present to do what we came here to do. May we keep showing up tired, imperfectly, and wholeheartedly.

When I interviewed Kathleen Dean Moore for our podcast a few years back, she said that she is often asked, “What can one person do?” and she always answers emphatically, “Quit being one person! Get together!” Such wise counsel. Would you like some inspiring company and to gather support to quit being one person? 

Carl and I are holding nurturing, respectful, inspiring community spaces full of unique and deeply good people from around the world, aimed to help you resource yourself deeply and liberate your unique gifts and ways of loving the world.

Here are two upcoming offerings that Carl and I hope will be of deep support to living a life that matters and doing what you came here to do, and not wasting these precious lives in fear and distraction, but embodied, resourced, and free.

We’re offering two Pockets of Flourishing workshops in August.

 Applications are open for my once-a-year 9-month Women Embodied group starting in late September. This won’t come around again for another year, so don’t miss it!

You can read more on these offerings below. I’ve included a few great poems, quotes, and songs below as well.

Read on! Thanks for being here.

During these trying times, we truly have no idea what might unfold between now and next May. It is such a gift to invest in deepening our roots in a nourishing community circle, in our own embodied presence, and in wise practices that offer reliable refuge and support during unsteady times. Women Embodied is a circle where you’re welcome as your ordinary self in all your wisdom and confusion, and in the mess and beauty of your real life. It is a soft landing place in a hard world. We take time to ground, unwind, rest, and be. It is so rich!

Throughout our months together, we’ll practice intentional movement and intentional stillness.

We’ll courageously practice listening to our inner lives, listening through our bodies, listening to each other, and listening to our world.

We’ll learn from and through our bodies.

We’ll share ourselves.

We’ll read poems and listen to potent myths that offer timeless guidance.

We’ll laugh and we’ll cry.

We’ll expand our circle of compassion, starting right where we are, with our tender, ordinary selves, and from there expand our circle of care to include more and more of our world.

And we’re going to have so much fun along the way!!! Because this work is far too important to be taken seriously.

We have the final two Pockets of Flourishing workshops this month – they are the last of our series of 90-minute mini-retreats.  To those of you who have signed up, we are so excited to be with you!!

On Sunday, August 10th, join us for Like the River Flows: Embodying Soul Medicine & Becoming Visionary. We’ll explore freeing our voices and freeing our visions for bright and life-giving futures, rooting into our unique gifts and soul medicine.

On Thursday, August 21, we’ll practice both nourishing movement and nourishing stillness in Sacred Stillness, Silence, Spaciousness & Reviving the Soft Animal of Your Body.  These enlivening practices help us return to the richness of intimacy with the present moment, the wisdom in our moving bodies, and will revive our access to the natural peace found in silent, spacious awareness. We’d love to have you join us. Recordings are always provided.

Friend, it feels so good knowing you’re out there being you.

May you be blessed and may you bless.

From my heart,

Erin

p.s. This song is such good medicine for my heart. And this one too. Praise the poets and the musicians. How would we get through these times without you? Keep making art and beauty, friends. We all need it!

p.s. Our Labor Day Weekend Community Grief Ritual weekend is full. We’re planning another Council for Grief Tenders later this Fall on Zoom and will share details soon. Bless the sacredness of our grief.

p.s. Join us anytime, live or via recordings, for Embodied Meditation. We’re there every weekday morning, and we’d be honored to have your company, in intimate stillness, silence, and spaciousness. I am infinitely grateful for this practice in my life!

p.s. It would mean the world to us if you share this email and our work with any folks you think might benefit. TBH, we don’t love marketing, we will never press your pain points, we will try not to show up in your inbox so frequently as to be annoying. Smart people tell us we should do otherwise if we want to be successful. Alas, we have to do it in a way that feels aligned with our soul and our integrity. We adore it when good work spreads by word of mouth – the old-fashioned way. Thank you for being a part of our network of connection and for passing it along if you’re so moved!

p.s.  My friend Margo has been in close and regular contact with five families in Gaza, organizing donations to go directly to these starving, suffering people. If you’re so moved, consider donating to her campaign on their behalf. While many large aid organizations currently cannot enter the strip, these folks are on the ground in Gaza.

While the horrors continue, we continue donating to these 4/4 starred charities listed below. May the horrific violence end in Gaza and everywhere around the world where it is happening. Thank you to all who are organizing to help others suffering in unimaginable circumstances. I bow to and celebrate the multitudes of dedicated folks quietly working toward love and liberation.

You-Shaped Hole

Sometimes the world feels inhospitable.
You feel all the ways that you and it don’t fit.
You see what’s missing, how it all could be different.

You feel as if you weren’t meant for the world, or the world wasn’t meant for you,
as if the world is “the way it is” and your discomfort with it a problem.

So you get timid. You get quiet about what you see.

But what if this?

What if you are meant
to feel the world is inhospitable, unfriendly, off-track
in just the particular ways that you do?

The world has a you-shaped hole in it.
It is missing what you see.
It lacks what you know
and so you were called into being.
To see the gap, to feel the pain of it, and to fill it.

Filling it is speaking what is missing.
Filling it is stepping into the center of the crowd, into a clearing,
and saying, here, my friends, is the future.

You don’t have to do it all, but you do have to speak it.
You have to tell your slice of the truth.
You do have to walk toward it with your choices, with your own being.

Then allies and energies will come to you like fireflies swirling around a light.

The roughness of the world, the off-track-ness, the folly that you see,
these are the most precious gifts you will receive in this lifetime.

They are not here to distance you from the world,
but to guide you to your contribution to it.

The world was made with a you-shaped hole in it.
In that way you are important.
In that way you are here to make the world.
In that way you are called.