A note from Erin
Dear beautiful human,
Thanks for being a part of our global community of courageous, kindhearted humans. It feels good to know you’re out there being you in the midst of everything else.
Over the weekend, Carl and I hosted a lovely online gathering about Refugia, our upcoming 13-month training. It was beautiful. We had some lovely questions and comments, including one person who said, “I’m just not sure about the money.” As there was someone lined up to speak after her, I didn’t comment on it in the moment. But I’ve been thinking about it since.
For those of us not in the millionaire/billionaire class (and to be clear, we’re nowhere close to that), these times can be financially stressful, to say the least. To be sure, even being middle class and struggling still grants us privileges unavailable to many. I want to share a little secret, often whispered behind closed doors with many dear friends and colleagues. We know so many brilliant and gifted therapists, acupuncturists, teachers, healers, creatives, writers, etc., who are financially struggling – at least those who aren’t partnered with someone who has a high paying job or don’t have an inheritance to draw on. We commiserate and strategize and sometimes cry behind closed doors, trying to figure out how to make it work more easily. There’s a background fear that if we say, “It’s really hard and we’re not financially thriving,” that our clients/students/others will think, “Hey, if they’re not rolling in the dough, they must not be successful, so maybe they’re not that good at what they do and maybe I should look elsewhere.” So they/we don’t say it. But I can’t tell you the number of these conversations I have with so many brilliant people, who are doing such good and important work – and struggling to make it work. For so many of us, these are stressful, expensive times. We totally get it and feel it ourselves. And deciding to invest in education like Refugia might seem nuts. Unless you’re like us. :)
As long as we’ve known each other, we’ve been investing whatever extra we had into nourishing education, starting when I was 18 and saved my meager tips from the Palestinian restaurant where I worked to go to a weekend workshop with Ram Dass in the early 90s. Together, Carl and I have chosen to invest more in our deep education than in the stock market. We’ve finagled payment plans and done slightly nutty things like living out of our VW van during the first two years of our four-year Feldenkrais training so we could make it work financially. We’ve supported one another and sacrificed so we could take time off work and do months of solitary silent retreat, as well as countless retreats with our teachers. We’ve invested in many life-changing intensives and extended trainings with elder Deena Metzger, and in years of training in community music making, and a yearlong facilitator training in The Work That Reconnects. We’ve been blessed to spend years being mentored in grief tending, soul work and community ritual practices with Francis Weller. We’ve prioritized paying for mentoring with brilliant guides over paying for things that might make more conventional sense. During the three years of our Embodied Life training, we traveled back and forth to Northern California with our toddler and a babysitter in tow, so we could delve into that important learning. When my inner compass zings for a learning opportunity, I go for it. None of this was even close to easy, and many may say it was financially unwise. Yet we don’t regret any of it!
While others have invested in stocks or bonds or savings or real estate, we chose to invest in this deep education that matters profoundly to us. And though we’re not sitting on a pile of money, this investment we’ve made gives us such a deeply rooted and steady foundation to stand on. It feels especially valuable during times like these.
Our investment choices did not offer the ROI the overculture values and teaches us to value. But we have received returns on our investments that have made us rich in the ways that deeply matter to us. We have skills that help us care for, move, and inhabit these aging bodies well. We have countless practices that deepen our adult presence and fierce compassion. We’re blessed with so many ways to sanify, sanctify, and beautify these minds we live in and through. We’ve got abundant tools and years of practice participating in life in ways that are soulful, satisfying, sacred, communitarian, and beauty-making, even during times like these. And these skills have helped us to support countless others over many years as well. We’ve also met some of the most wonderful kindred humans in each of these trainings who are still our dear friends and colleagues to this day. (Hi, friends!) Of course we’re deeply human and far from perfect. And we are also so damn grateful, especially during times like these, to have invested in this rich foundation we get to stand on, root into, be nourished by, and share with others. As Mary Oliver might say, it’s more beautiful than money. For sure.
How do you name these times? Horrifying? Unsettled? The Long Dark? Collapse? Polycrisis? In The Work That Reconnects, we talk about 3 stories happening simultaneously. There’s Business as Usual. We can see the capitalists continuing to enact this even when it makes little sense. (“Drill baby drill!”) There’s the Great Unraveling. Unless our head is in the sand, we can see the unraveling of ecosystems, democracies, social norms, weather patterns, etc. It’s helpful to remember there’s a third story that Joanna Macy called “The Great Turning,” and that Jaiya John calls “The Great Remembering.” Right now, in countless places around the planet, there are so many good people, investing heart and time and energy in so many diverse ways and forms in the Great Remembering and the Great Turning toward more beautiful and life-giving ways to do this thing called life. We can choose be a committed part of that however the results may turn out. That’s where I’m investing my life!
If you’re drawn to join us and make this alternative kind of investment, one that offers potent riches that the overculture will never understand, we’d absolutely love to have you along with us on this journey over the next 13 months. You can read more and fill out an application here. We truly believe the world needs more people investing their time and energy in this kind of education and in this kind of participation with life. Our loved ones, the children, the future ones, the struggling ones… for goodness sakes, we don’t need more rich people! We need people who can be the imperfect, wise elders committed to pouring out medicine and beauty and soulful hospitality during these times, rather than collapsing in contagious fear and despair.
As we all know, we get good at what we practice. Let’s practice beautifully together!
Refugia is for you if:
You care deeply about the state of the world and want to live your life as an act of love.
You’re ready to defect from the many ways domination causes harm in your body, mind, relationships, and the collective, and instead step into a more life-giving way of being.
You long to feel a sense of dignity and belonging – at home in your body, your community, your relationships, your work, the natural world, and the deep time story.
You want to deepen your presence and potency as you reclaim your attention and your soul from an overculture that would have you disembodied, stressed, dissatisfied, and distracted.
You’re seeking like-hearted community with people who share your commitment to loving the world in their own unique ways. You don’t want to be told there is “one right way” to show up and respond. You long for a respectful container of diverse, authentic, caring adults.
You want to nurture an authentic practice of embodying your unique soul medicine and your ever-evolving answer to what Mary Oliver called the only question: How to love this world?
If you’d like to watch the video of the Refugia gathering I referred to, click here.
I’m wishing you abundant beauty and the slowness of pace and quality of presence to really take it in. As I often say, may we stay permeable to beauty and resilient to despair. I’m so grateful we’re in it together.
Sending extra warmth to all the tender, griefy, worried hearts. I’m with you.
From my heart,
Erin
p.s. I posted a piece on Substack recently and several kind folks have told me it was helpful. Click here to read Let’s Make it Beautiful.
p.p.s. I included below a beautiful poem from Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer that’s been helping my heart this week. We’re so lucky to have this amazing woman/poet/teacher as a guest teacher in Refugia!! As well as guest teachers Alexandre Jodun, Alyona Kobevka, and Francis Weller. Y’all, I’m so excited and grateful!!
p.p.p.s. As our beloved elder Deena Metzger writes, “We are, once again, in a conflagration, once again at war. Once again, we must find the heart of peace, even now put out the fires, even those in our hearts.” May this young poet rest in peace.
can’t save even myself,
can’t wrap my arms around
every frightened child, can’t
foster peace among nations,
can’t bring love to all who
feel unlovable.
So I practice opening my heart
right here in this room and being gentle
with my insufficiency. I practice
walking down the street heart first.
And if it is insufficient to share love,
I will practice loving anyway.
I want to converse about truth,
about trust. I want to invite compassion
into every interaction.
One willing heart can’t stop a war.
One willing heart can’t feed all the hungry.
And sometimes, daunted by a task too big,
I tell myself what’s the use of trying?
But today, the invitation is clear:
to be ridiculously courageous in love.
To open the heart like a lilac in May,
knowing freeze is possible
and opening anyway.
To take love seriously.
To give love wildly.
To race up to the world
as if I were a puppy,
adoring and unjaded,
stumbling on my own exuberance.
To feel the shock of indifference,
of anger, of cruelty, of fear,
and stay open. To love as if it matters,
as if the world depends on it.
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