How do we navigate through life when we find ourselves tossed into the uncharted seas of climate crisis, political turmoil, biodiversity collapse, and cultural divisiveness, all amidst the demands and challenges of our personal lives?
For ancient travelers, having reliable navigation tools was essential to their voyages.
While they used tools like a compass, an astrolabe, and a map, we need different tools for different times and different journeys. When we aim to be a part of the Great Turning toward a more life-giving way of being human, we benefit from wise guidance.
We take heart in the reliable orientation distilled in the Five Vows of the Great Turning. We offer our deep thanks to our elder and teacher, Joanna Macy for articulating them.
We invite you to gather with us and other like-hearted people committed to active hope during these times when the foundations of nature and culture are being rattled to their core.
This immersion is for those who care a lot and may feel vulnerable to distraction, numbness, or overwhelm. It is for those of us who want to become more resilient to despair and more permeable to beauty as we participate in the Great Turning in a way that is right-sized for our current energy and capacity and suited to our real lives. This is a gathering place for those of us who want to do something much more life-giving than shame and blame others or endlessly criticize ourselves.
We gather to support one another in finding our unique, life-giving path through these times.
We intend for this course to be a steady and supportive refuge, a kind-hearted community, and a soft place to land in an increasingly hard world.
We hope the warmth in our circle blows on the embers of your courage and bolsters your heart. The world desperately needs such people. We get good at what we practice, so let's practice with intention.
Please join us for this one-of-a-kind, 10-week communal immersion in which we'll explore these commitments together, with kindness, curiosity, and deep devotion to our beautiful world.
We'll meet on Zoom over 10 Sundays
from 10am-1pm PT
January 19th through March 23, 2025.
This course has been lovingly crafted and will be facilitated by Erin Geesaman Rabke and Leilani Wong Navar, dear friends who have been living into these vows individually and together for many years.
All classes will be recorded for those who can't attend live.
We are thrilled to have some truly incredible guest teachers joining us.
Soul activist, psychotherapist, and author Francis Weller will join us 2/9/25 to explore our belonging to a wider network of kinship.
Teacher, author, devoted Earth steward and founder of the Gaia Mandala, Cynthia Jurs will join us on 2/16/25 to explore living a life dedicated to healing our world.
Beloved poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer will join us on 3/9/25 to share about her daily practice of writing poetry as inspiration for our engagement with nourishing daily practices and to share heart-nourishing poems for these times.
Founder of School for the Great Turning, Lydia Violet Harutoonian will be joining us on 3/16/25 to explore deepening our participation in the Great Turning during times like these.
Read more about each teacher below.
Dark times call for bright new visions of the world we want to inhabit.
Our 10 weeks together will be mapped by a journey through the "Five Vows of the Great Turning," also known as the "Five Commitments of Active Hope," which were first articulated by Joanna Macy.
For us, these five vows are an enduring holdfast. As we ride the rough waters of these times, we turn to them again and again for orientation, for navigation, for ballast.
How might these vows help guide the ways we live our lives?
What's challenging about living in alignment with these vows?
How can they help us when things feel overwhelming?
Can they help us deepen our connections with each other and build community?
How can we relate to them in a life-giving, kind way, and not at all in a restrictive, shaming, or perfectionistic way?
Vows can be related to as heavy and constricting or vows can be related to as orienting and liberatory. We approach The Five Vows of the Great Turning as navigation tools to help us find our way during challenging times. We honor that all participants in this course are adults and we bow to your inner authority as you find your own unique path with the vows.
This course is 100% guaranteed not to improve you, but rather to connect you with the intelligence that is inherent in your own body and heart-mind, including your bullshit detectors and truth-and-beauty resonators. This course has nothing to do with "fixing" yourself or being a better person according to others' standards. It has everything to do with powerful life-changing learning saturated in courageous friendliness and woven throughout with potent invitations to a loving, non-objectified relationship with yourself, others, and with all life.
When asked what one person can do during these times, the wonderful writer Kathleen Dean Moore replied, "Quit being one person! Get together with others!"
This is your invitation to join us.
You don't need to show up as anything other than your real self, willing to meet others with kindness, curiosity, and respect.
We are offering tuition on a sliding scale.
- The standard tuition rate is $595 or 3 payments of $205.
- The supporter rate is $795 or 3 payments of $270. (This rate is for you if you are financially well-resourced and can contribute more to help us keep this program accessible to those with less financial means.)
- The supported rate is $395 or 3 payments of $135. (This rate is for you if the standard rate is not financially possible.)
“Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.”
— Robin Wall Kimmerer
“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.”
– Vaclav Havel
"Our leaders got confused. So we are all leaders now. They told us there was nothing we could do. They were wrong. When we tell ourselves there is nothing we can do, we are wrong. We’re all making the soup we’re all eating. We’re all weaving the cloth we’re all wearing."
– Anne Herbert and Paloma Pavel
We'd be honored to have your presence in the circle.
Click here to fill out an application.
Recordings will be provided if you cannot attend live.
Each live class will include:
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potent teachings
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experiential practices
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inspiring poetry
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sharing in community
Practices are drawn from Erin and Leilani's years of study within lineages of qigong, Feldenkrais, the Work that Reconnects, self-acupressure, Embodied Life, grief tending and soul work, systems thinking, meditation and more.
We'll share group and individual practices for:
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experiencing embodied gratitude and appreciation for the natural world, our own bodies, and the tiny miraculous details of our ordinary lives
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clarifying your passions and commitments
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becoming unafraid to welcome our grief, fear, and anger in response to what's happening in our world
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navigating blame and judgment, whether directed inward or outward, with compassion and adult presence
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letting grief embolden your love to flow through you and out into the world
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cultivating a sense of groundedness, renewed capacity, and love of this precious life
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clearing stagnation related to our emotions
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finding ways to reduce tension and increase pleasure as we show up for life
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relating to vows in an empowering, liberating, fresh way
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and more!
About Leilani Wong Navar
Leilani Wong Navar is a mother, an acupuncturist, and a dreamworker. With groups, she facilitates the Work that Reconnects and teaches practical wisdom from Chinese Medicine.
In clinical practice, she supports people dealing with pain, disease, infertility, and stress, using acupuncture, traditional herbal medicine, modern functional medicine, and dreamwork. She hosts Turning Season Podcast, a series of deep conversations with people around the world who are rising to their own roles in the adventure of our time.
Born into Chinese and Jewish families, Leilani carries on her ancestors' holistic, poetic medical science, and their dedication to asking big questions. She is in collaboration with her husband, whose work is dedicated to personal and collective transformational processes, her two children whose emergence into their teen years is endlessly enlivening, her beloved friends and family, and countless seen and unseen beings of the more-than-human world.
Leilani attended Evergreen State College where she studied Political Economy and Holistic Health, and earned her Masters of Science in Oriental Medicine from the National University of Natural Medicine. She is in ongoing, heartening study within multiple lineages of wisdom for the well-being of the landscape of the body and the body of the Earth.
About Erin Geesaman Rabke
Erin Geesaman Rabke is a Somatic Naturalist & Embodiment Mentor; a mother, a writer, a teacher, and a possibilitarian.
Professionally trained as a Feldenkrais® Practitioner, an Embodied Life Teacher, a Work That Reconnects Facilitator, and a Community Grief Ritualist, as well as being trained in yoga therapy and tai chi, over the past 30 years she’s been trained in many somatics lineages, in the Tibetan Buddhist traditions of Dzogchen and Lojong, as well as being engaged in ongoing deep mentorship in soul work, the mythopoetic, the 19 Ways to the 5th World, anti-oppression and collective liberation, and the art of teaching and facilitation. She designed her own degree at the U of U's Bachelor of University Studies in Integrated Somatics. She is currently at work on her first 3 books.
She is a meditator, an animist, a lover of poetry, a convener of soulful community, and is devoted to the wild Earth and to creating life-giving culture. She is a home herbalist and a beekeeper, dedicated to ripening mature human beings and to stewarding Refugia. Descended from ancestors of Bohemian Czech, Scottish, German and English lineages, she makes her home, along with her husband, Carl, and their 14-year old son, many wily animals, and a wild permaculture garden in Salt Lake City, Utah, the gorgeous, unceded, stolen ancestral homelands of the Shoshone, Ute, Goshute and Paiute nations.
Together Carl and Erin host the Embodiment Matters Podcast, an ongoing, rich conversation about what it means to be embodied, and why and how embodiment matters in our daily lives and in our world. Guests include wise and insightful teachers from the realms of somatics, meditation, social justice, indigenous traditions, psychotherapy, soulful living, mythology, movement arts, bodywork, martial arts, neuroscience, ecology, poetry, and more.
About Francis Weller
Francis Weller, MFT, is a psychotherapist, writer, and soul activist. He is a master of synthesizing diverse streams of thought from psychology, anthropology, mythology, alchemy, indigenous cultures and poetic traditions. Author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief; The Threshold Between Loss and Revelation, (with Rashani Réa), and In the Absence of the Ordinary: Essays in a Time of Uncertainty, he has introduced the healing work of ritual to thousands of people. He founded and directs WisdomBridge, an organization that offers educational programs that seek to integrate the wisdom from indigenous cultures with the insights and knowledge gathered from western poetic, psychological, and spiritual traditions. Learn more about him here.
About Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer lives with her husband and daughter in Placerville, Colorado, on the banks of the wild and undammed San Miguel River. She served as San Miguel County’s first poet laureate and as Western Slope Poet Laureate.
Devoted to helping others explore creative practice, Rosemerry is co-host of Emerging Form, a podcast on creative process, co-founder of Secret Agents of Change (a surreptitious kindness cabal), and co-leader of Soul Writers Circle. She directed the Telluride Writers Guild for ten years and co-hosted Telluride’s Talking Gourds Poetry Club for another ten years.
She teaches and performs poetry for mindfulness retreats, women’s retreats, teachers, addiction recovery programs, scientists, hospice, literary burlesque and more. She has been writing a poem a day since 2006, posting them since 2011 on her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils. Favorite themes include parenting, gardening, ecology, love, science, thriving/failure, grief and daily life.
Rosemerry has 13 collections of poetry, and her work has appeared in O Magazine, A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, American Life in Poetry, on fences, in back alleys, on Carnegie Hall Stage and on hundreds of river rocks she leaves around town. Learn more about her here.
About Cynthia Jurs
Cynthia Jurs is the author of Summoned by the Earth: Becoming a Holy Vessel for the Healing of our World, in which she shares the extraordinary story of her decades of devotion to the Earth Treasure Vase practice, and her pilgrimages around the world. She is a Buddhist teacher in the Order of Interbeing who received Dharmacharya transmission to teach from Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in 1994. Also a practitioner of Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism, for 30 years she has studied and practiced with many great masters and spent much time in retreat. In 2018 she was made a Lama by Ngawang Tsultrim Zangpo Rinpoche at his seat, Tolu Tharling Monastery in Nepal, in recognition for her many years of dharma practice and dedication to the work of global healing through the Earth Treasure Vases. She is the guiding teacher at the Open Way Sangha in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she leads meditation groups, retreats and pilgrimages offering a unique blend of engaged buddhism and sacred activism. Learn more about her here.
About Lydia Violet Harutoonian
Lydia Violet has studied dedicatedly with deep ecology elder and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy for the past 15 years, learning how we can metabolize climate despair, eco-anxiety, and community traumas into energy for resilience, action, and community healing. She founded and runs School for The Great Turning, in dedication to the work of Joanna Macy, and to create access to an education that supports the societal shift from an Industrial Growth Society to a Life-Sustaining Society.
For 4 years Lydia has also run the Music As Medicine Project, combining traditions of community singing with Macy’s “Work That Reconnects.” Lydia is also an accomplished Iranian-Armenian-American multi-instrumentalist weaving together American roots and Iranian folk music traditions. Learn more about her here.
"What do you practice? Whatever you practice, you'll get very good at. Some people become more fearful or cynical; some more arrogant or vain; some greedy, some needy; some combative or closed-minded. That's what they practice. And then there are a few who grow as solid as a mountain and as wide-open as the sky." –Karen Maezen Miller
Would you like to join this circle and practice together?
We're thrilled.
Click below to fill out an application.
