A Note from Erin:
Hello, beautiful human,
I’m sending warm greetings to you from my living room on this sunny and cold winter’s day. We’ve got goldfinches, house finches, and fluffy sparrows taking turns at the feeder, and there’s a cute little squirrel who likes to hide in the flower pot below the feeder to catch dropped seeds, then pops his little head up, and repeats. It’s endlessly entertaining and good for my achy heart to see that fluffy, golden tail and those shining black eyes popping up and disappearing. January 2026 already feels like it’s been an eon long and is as heavy as lead. Oof. I’ve had many good cries this week. I’ll leave it to others to speak about politics and the state of the suffering world. Today, I want to send warmth and care to your likely-also-achy heart, and to share an offering from my heart which you’ll find below. Even during such times of intense cultural inflammation, the Earth continues to be beautiful and generous. May we do so too.
In this post, I’d like to share a few things with you.
A story that moves me deeply and helped clarify my calling. Read more below.
An invitation to join us for Refugia, our 13-month Depth Training. We’re starting very soon and we couldn’t be more excited about it!!! Carl and I had a planning meeting yesterday and WOW, y’all, it is going to be so rich and so good! And truly unique. Did I mention that we’re excited?? We’re blessed with a wonderful group of people joining us for this journey. And – we still have room for you. With whatever may continue to unravel during this year, I’m so grateful to be rooting into these practices and this beautiful community as an island of sanity and a refuge offering steadying support and encouragement. Would you like to join us? We’d love to have you! (BTW, We have replied to all applicants. If you think you applied and haven’t heard from us, you may have neglected to hit “Submit.” Please do!)
Here are links to a few pieces I’ve written recently. One is heartfelt and one rather hilarious.
I’d like to offer a gift to you. 5 years ago I recorded a class called The Art of Attention: a month of poetry with me and Mary Oliver. You can take it for free, or pay if you like. Seriously, WE NEED BEAUTY as ballast so we don’t fall into despair. Mary’s invitations and reminders are a balm for times like this. Please feel free to avail yourself of this offering and invest a little time each day for the next 30 days in poetry and the art of attention. Poetry helps me so much! From my heart to yours, it’s a gift. You’re welcome to share this newsletter and this invitation with others too. I promise, it will help your heart. Not to ignore the state of the world, but to give us beauty as ballast during these difficult times.
And I want to remind you that our weekday embodied meditation is always available for you to join either live or via recording. We offer this by donation. For as little as $3/month (or more if you value the offering and are able to contribute) you can sit with us 5 days a week. We host two sitting periods each morning. We sit in silence for 9 of the 10 weekly sits. On Fridays, instead of a second sit, we have a chance to check in with each other. It’s a wonderfully kind and supportive community. You’re welcome to join us live anytime, or to access our vast library of recordings. This practice of meditation is not intended as an escape from the times, but rather to help us to cultivate our capacity for grounded, compassionate, clear-eyed, and openhearted presence in the midst of it all. It truly matters.
There’s more inspiring stuff below. Nothing in this newsletter requires you to hurry. You might enjoy reading it with a favorite beverage when you can take your time to savor. It’s full of good stuff!
Thanks for being here and thanks for reading.
Thanks for being the kind of good-hearted human the world so needs. I’m wishing you rest and hope and softness and beauty and kindness and courage and spaciousness and abundant support and space for grief and fury and also abundant good humor and even during these turbulent times, joy. Let’s celebrate every tiny thing that is tipping the scales toward love and goodness, that is creating the kind of world we’d like to live in. It all matters.
I’d like to share a story that deeply moves me. Here’s a version of it I posted many years ago. For people who are “distraught, unable to think of what they might be able to do to stop the terrible losses caused by an industrial growth economy run amok.” It’s about Refugia. Refugia are protected places that support life to continue, to heal, and to thrive, even when destructive forces are growing.
This story has helped me to understand the core of my calling. If you’ve been around a while, perhaps you know we’ve hosted countless opportunities for somatic movement practices, meditation, grief work, creative expression, embodied gratitude and reciprocity practices. We’ve held poetry parties and encouraging community gatherings. We’ve held song circles and deep ecology practice circles. Over the past few years, I’ve been distilling a curriculum that weaves all of these things together into a beautiful whole so that: “We can make ourselves into overhanging rock ledges to protect life so that the full measure of possibility can spread and reseed the world.” Honestly, y’all, I weep when I reread that for the thousandth time. I feel it vibrating in my body. I truly want to live like that.
I’m called try. To protect and shelter possibility during these times. I’d rather lean in that direction than engage in either avoidance or doomscrolling! Carl and I aim to use all the skills we’ve grown to invite, support, and encourage others to live like that too.
Over the past 30+ years, at the center of my life have been committed studies of meditation, especially in the lineages of Lojong and Dzogchen, the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education, Focusing/Embodied Inquiry, Embodied Life work, Community Grief Tending, Embodied Gratitude and Praise Practice, Soul Work, experiential deep ecology and The Work that Reconnects, deep dives into Mary Oliver’s body of work, as well as that of many other poets. I’ve studied and taught yoga therapy, tai chi and chi gong. I’ve been blessed to dive into I Ching studies, the 19 Ways with Deena Metzger, ancestor work, coherence work, systems thinking, bee-centric beekeeping, permaculture gardening, mythopoetics, writing, somatic and soulful anti-oppression and anti-racism work, herbal medicine, seed keeping, learning with Martín Prechtel for years, and so much more. I’m a passionate learner and I’m a synthesizer.
The way my mind works best is when I, like a bee, visit many different flowers, gather nectar, and do my best to essentialize my understandings and then offer them distilled as honey. I understand things better in relation to other things. I’m a systems thinker. And I love to offer the essence, the harvest, the deep roots, and the honey of what I’ve gathered to nourish the people I’m honored to work with in order to help their unique way of ripening into themselves so they too can experience, become, and create refugia in their own unique ways. Whatever I’m doing, whatever method I’m using, this intention is underneath it all.
Ultimately, Carl and I are in all of this work not just for ourselves, not just to have a good time or to make money or to feel better, and not just to encourage our students to become themselves and to feel better and to be more resourced themselves, but to keep re-centering LIFE as what we’re serving with our learning and unlearning practices and journeys. Life of course includes us!! But this frame offers a much wider and more satisfying, more generous circle of care and connection than the self-centered self-improvement practices and perspectives typically offered by modern culture.
My deep heart wish: May we create a holy refuge of our lives so others may find comfort and encouragement there. All of this so life may thrive – even if those others we’re supporting may be in future generations or may be members of the more-than-human world. If many of us orient toward living like this, how beautifully we could support each other’s thriving. Community flourishing is core to how we might survive and even thrive during these weird times on planet Earth. As Robin Wall Kimmerer says, “All flourishing is mutual.” May we remember and root into this truth.
As I’ve been distilling my learning and teaching over the decades, my core intentions have seemed to distill down to two. (I reserve the right to change this as I keep learning!)
1. To use all I’ve learned to help to ripen mature adults and wise elders the world so needs.
2. To create refugia so we can together support the healing and reseeding of both nature and culture.
I love to convene communities as refugia – as protected places where life-giving ideas and ways of being can flourish in ourselves, in our way of being together, in our communities, and in our larger lives. In addition to doing the big work of bringing forth books this next year, I’m offering just a few refugia/community learning opportunities. The core one is Refugia. And the opportunity to participate won’t come around again for another year.
You’re warmly invited to join us. Refugia is a nourishing and life-giving container with no pressure to conform to a particular way of being. It’s a context that offers soulful hydration for the roots of your life – supporting you with how you move, how you pay attention, how you interact with your inner life and the others in your world, how you express yourself, how you dream a unique vision of a beautiful world into being. We can’t wait to witness the blossoming that happens when people’s unique roots are nourished in this way. I don’t know what the blossoming in others will be, but I do know it will happen, and I’m so excited to participate in this journey and to feed this blossoming with my whole heart!
Thank you for reading. Whether you join us for Refugia or not, we are grateful to be connected with you.
I’ll close with some orienting words that help my heart.
I love this quote from the late great Ram Dass, who I got to interview in the 90s not long after his stroke. “I’ve been asked many times whether this is the Aquarian age and it’s all just beginning, or if this is armageddon and the end, and I have to admit I don’t know. Either way my work is the same – to quiet my mind and open my heart and relieve suffering wherever I find it.”
And I also treasure these words from Dahr Jamail:
“I remember my obligations, taught to me by a Native American elder of Cherokee descent, Stan Rushworth: that we are born onto this planet with the obligations of caring for it, and of making decisions based on what will be best for the future generations of all species. So each morning, I awake and engage in my morning practice, part of which is pondering what I shall do each day to serve Earth and all her species. When I approach my life from this perspective, no matter how bleak the future appears, I always have work to do and services to perform.”
With love,
Erin
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