Cultivating Culture
a 9-week online course on ancestral repair, reclamation & renewal through ceremonial inquiry, collective sense-making & creative expression
the course will launch again in january 2024
please feel encouraged to enroll at any time to save a space in the next cohort or to reach out with questions or reflections.
Join in kinship and life-affirming experience to transform our ancestral inheritances into liberatory futures.
What does it mean to be human?
To spring forth from ancient and enduring lineages, known and unknown?
What does it mean to know that this breath, yes, this one (pause… notice your inhale… let it deepen into a long, slow exhale…) is an outcome of countless beings that conspired for your survival and arrival to this precise moment where these words meet your eyes and digest through the miraculous mechanisms of your mind, settling into your tissues and bones.
To be alive is to be a vessel for infinite wisdom and intelligence encoded into your DNA through the many lifetimes lived before you.
You.
Singular, sacred, and integral thread in the fabric of human existence.
What does it mean to forget ourselves? To become lost to – or severed from – the magic and medicine of our ancestry as something both past and still living? To be separated from the grand story humanity is writing?
The cacophonous and all-consuming forces of systemic and structural oppression drown out the whispers of our unique cultural inheritances that knew how to live in solidarity and cherish diversity. These forces break the sacred, inherent bonds woven between all beings and deny the truth that our wellbeing, our freedom, and our thrival is bound up with each others’.
The art of finding and remembering ourselves, is a vital component of reclaiming ourselves as active participants in the shaping of more possible collective futures. As we position ourselves in the truth of our stories we come closer to our common humanity — a critical step toward dismantling all that aims to divide and oppress. Through this work, we responsibly release white supremacy and rebuild broken solidarity to nourish the seeds of collective liberation.
Through our inquiry and our effort, we heed the call of Black, brown, Indigenous teachers, mentors, elders, wisdom-keepers who have asked white-bodied/inherited people for centuries to discontinue the terror project of whiteness and find ourselves beyond it so we can all thrive in our diversity.
Equally and essentially, we heed the call from within ourselves to become free from the grips of whiteness, these shackles we inherited, knowing that this violence must be undone from within to cultivate the freedom we all deserve.
This experience is for all people who carry lineages of whiteness or who feel drawn to composting internalized white supremacy, whatever your background. This space wants to hold you at the intersection of your identities. A baseline understanding of one’s relationship to whiteness is necessary to join us on this journey.
"It has been so incredible to be part of a community that's all asking the same questions with a shared understanding of the challenges we're facing, shared grief, shared sensitivities, and shared dreams. I think I felt alone in these questions for so long. And that's so frustrating, because they're questions that permeate every moment of my existence. "Who am I? Where do I belong? What is my gift? What is asking to be healed? Where am I going? Where did I come from?" There's no way to dream in a new world without asking these questions.Otherwise, I keep recreating the old world and I just can't do that anymore."
–Aviva
We meet at the crossroads of our initial knowings.
Whiteness is erasure – it destroys what is sacred through genocide, theft, assimilation, exile, hoarding, dispossession, appropriation, and/or commodification to fuel itself.
Whiteness is the violence of forced forgetting.
Whiteness manufactures scarcity, threat, crisis ,and trauma.
Whiteness is a choice – it is a constant opting in to an identity that chooses comfort, safety, opportunity, and privilege over life itself.
Whiteness is accepting a distorted reality as truth and manipulating ourselves and everything around us to fit into the notion of superiority and dominance.
Whiteness is the antithesis of species survival.
“One of the things that most afflicts this country is that white people don't know who they are or where they come from.”
– James Baldwin
A crucial part of collective liberation is actively participating in eliminating whiteness by the act of un-choosing and de-selecting, while also acknowledging we can't erase the imprint of this legacy without taking devoted, persistent action. To truly transform, we remain accountable to its impact. We hold the recognition that our ancestors may have chosen whiteness to ensure their survival, that whiteness may have been forced upon them, and it was the only way for the spark of us to be here, now. But there is no future by maintaining this stance. We begin by acknowledging that whiteness left us with sparse and frayed threads of our heritages, dispossessed us of our ancestral wisdoms, extracted from us to assimilate us into whiteness, and forced us to neglect, hide, or abandon all that kept us from being white. No matter your heritage, if whiteness is part of your identity, this is our work to do.
“All of us have ancestral memory of what it’s like to live connected, interdependent lives. We may be cut off or too far away from those traditions to claim them, but we can listen to our needs, our longings, and through ritual, rite, and practice build a way of being in the world that honors and makes tangible our connections to one another, to nature, and to spirit.”
– Mia Birdsong
We venture forward by plunging deeper.
This is an invitation to turn inward and look backward, so that we can move forward. We will:
dig into our roots, lineages, origin stories, and ancestral journeys of biological and chosen elders and ancestors that enabled us to be here today
gather the treasures, secrets, wisdom, medicine, and magic suppressed, stored, and saved for us—recipes, songs, tales, dialects, lifeways—as guidance, lessons, and ways of being that can open portals of liberation
retrieve these artifacts and ourselves simultaneously
be hospice workers for white supremacy
rediscover technologies of resilience, belonging, and thriving in diverse communities
As we journey into our past, we tether each other to present time, helping us come back to ourselves, make sense of what we learn, and reorient continuously to toward healing, integration, liberation, and possibility.
In community, we will cultivate culture through ceremonial inquiry, collective sense-making, and creative expression as a way to find our own paths and roots outside of whiteness.
We may not know where to begin, we may not have many connections to our past, we may feel overwhelmed. We will do it together. We will nourish and tend to culture through creative expression as a form of understanding, processing, healing, connecting, and creating.
"I was entirely transformed by our time together. My heart has possessed me. When we first began these sessions just twelve short weeks ago, I didn't know how to connect with myself, with others, or with the potential futures I was envisioning. You set me on a path that led me beyond the abuse and erasure that shaped my ancestors for generations. Then you showed me how to make my own way. Our ceremonies and love for one another liberated me from patterns of behavior, much self-doubt, and memories of loneliness that made me a stranger to my own heart for a very long time. Furthermore, these practices helped me envision new, heart-centered ways of being that immediately became my reality."
– Clara
“I want to acknowledge that some of the first Indigenous People’s that were forced into hiding were the medicine women of Old Europe. Let us reclaim our Earth Selves no matter what ‘race’ you are and do it soon! The earth may depend on it.”
— Lyla June
"I was here for the journey and it blew my mind. Three practices stood out the most: the family anthology allowed me to map out and see a big picture of all the elements I wanted to bring into this practice, digest, understand, rewrite and reclaim; the relative interview helped me root into the connections and ways things are passed through generations in a really tangible form as well as more deeply connect with my grandma; the ceremony brought so much together and solidified much of my thinking throughout the journey and allowed me a place to let go and reclaim in community; all such a powerful combination. The ways it was such a somatic, bodily experience at the core rather than an intellectual exercise are what I’m most grateful for. The impact was profound. It felt like I moved so much through the body and reconnected to my intuitive knowing and being. Overall I feel so much more expansive in my heart and in my entire body."
– Julie
Program Arc
GATHERING
Greeting present selves
Setting our container, greeting our community
2. Connecting to place
Meeting our more-than-human kin, cultivating reciprocity
3. Welcoming perspectives
Listening to ancestors, opening to guidance
ALCHEMIZING
4. Healing through inquiry
Embodying truths, holding contradictions
5. As within, so without
Situating the personal and the collective
6 Burning and blooming
Releasing ∞ seeding ∞ transforming
INTEGRATING
7. Dreaming possible futures
Envisioning personal and collective liberation
8. Navigating new paths
Harvesting resources, harnessing tools
9. Closing our experience
Integrating lessons, affirming connections
Program design:
Intimate community: There will be no more than 20 participants in the program. This helps to build trust, a sense of safety, and enables deeper relationships.
Weekly gatherings: Twelve two-hour facilitative learning full-group live sessions.
Practices, tools, and prompts: Guided meditations, somatic/embodiment practices, creative expression prompts, critical inquiry, storytelling, divination tools, rituals, ceremony and more.
Weekly materials: A companion document updated weekly to revisit at your own pace with invitations to deepen your practice between sessions and supplemental articles, podcasts, and other resources for additional learning.
One 1:1 support session: for deeper support and integration during your experience.
Online gathering space: A platform to gather, share, and communicate with fellow community members throughout the journey together.
Time & Place
Start + End: The next cohort will launch in Jan 2024
Frequency & Length of Sessions: 2 hours weekly, 4-6 pm MST
Place: Virtually on Zoom
What to expect:
A thoughtfully nourished community of support and companionship that moves at the speed of trust with whom you can sit in experimental exploration and provocative discussion
Tools and resources to support you in building and strengthening your relationship with your ancestors
Questions and prompts for inquiry and creative expression (writing, movement, film, music, collage, watercolor, whatever calls to you…) with opportunities to exchange/share at your discretion
Somatic/embodiment practice: trust in the inherent wisdom and healing within each of our bodies, and in the collective body
Guided meditation, visualization, prayer, ritual, and ceremony
Agency and autonomy in your path to participate as you feel comfortable
Opportunities to incorporate your unique gifts, practices, traditions, rituals, ceremonies and other offerings to make the experience yours
Emergence: we can’t quite know what this will be or what it wants to be; we will dive into the mystery together, let it be changed and allow it to change us, to generate the experience that we each need at this particular time and place
"I feel that, as Joy Harjo puts it, the "post-colonial jitters" have simmered down a bit within myself. I felt so many things come up to be released, healed, and held throughout this experience. I feel a deeper connection to my ancestors, grace and accountability held hand in hand for my family, and a richer groundedness of self. I feel more connected to the life and World that I wish to exist in and create communally, and that I am a loved and important part of that World. I am looking more to chosen ancestors as well, people who I see living radiantly and shamelessly, who remind me that creating the World I wish to be a part of starts with showing up authentically and loving the places that I have held shame within myself."
- Robin
Payment details
While actively working to discontinue the horrors of capitalism, I acknowledge that we remain entangled within this system. This experience is committed to contributing to a systemic shift toward an economic formation that composts the toxicity of white-supremacist, patriarchal, colonial, and extractive capitalism as a continuous practice. Your financial contribution amplifies this in critical ways:
Quality over quantity: Capitalism pressures us to scale quickly, but this work insists on moving in contrast to that pace. This pricing is reflective of a devotion to the beauty of small and slow.
A deep personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal investment: This in-depth experience is designed to support you throughout your lifetime. Think of it like investing in an heirloom treasure that will benefit generations.
Redistribution Commitment: 10% of your contribution will be donated to support Black- and Indigenous- led community organizing and land re-matriation projects.
Sliding Scale: This program is offered at a sliding scale of $460 - $660. This range was chosen with significant consideration. I hope to provide access to this program in a way that is manageable and enables agency. Please choose the price point that feels right for you with some guidance to consider:
your personal circumstances, resources, and access to income and financial wealth, both current and anticipated
the people counting on your financial livelihood including dependents and community members
the socio-economic conditions of your locale (relative to other places in your country and in the world)
the ways you have or have not been granted unearned advantage by the systems we live within
the ripple effect of this investment on yourself, your family, your community, and beyond
that your offering can be a prayer — a small enactment of your commitment to restoring balance and right relationship
what would feel joyful to give!
*note: you are enthusiastically invited to exceed the high end of the scale. Paying on the higher end of the sliding scale, or beyond it, makes this program more accessible for participants who would not be able to join otherwise and increases our redistribution contribution.
Payment Plans/Alternatives: Whether or not you can pay, no one is turned away. Please reach out if none of the above options work for you and we can discuss alternatives such as a payment plan. Limited scholarship options are available for those who need it.
*note: you are enthusiastically invited to exceed the high end of the scale! Paying on the higher end of the sliding scale, or beyond it, makes this program more accessible for participants who would not be able to join otherwise and increases our redistribution contribution.
How do I know if this is for me?
Can I show up? A weekly commitment can ask a lot of us. The intention behind this arrangement is to facilitate a particular kind of container that feels more like a practice group or sangha. This may mean taking inventory of your other commitments, and understanding whether you have logistical time and space for this in your life right now. With the exception of situations out of our control, the ask is that you commit to being at every gathering, even if that means you’re there at 5% capacity or less.
Am I called to sit with others, both new and familiar, in possible indeterminancy? Am I willing to be pushed out beyond what I can imagine? To host the uncomfortable? To unravel? To be open to the experimental nature of this un/learning re/learning journey?
Have I invested in antiracist practice? This inquiry does require that we have already put in work of antiracist practice. It requires a baseline familiarity with ourselves and our relationship to whiteness. We will work through some nuances and histories together, but we expect that all of us are already familiar with core concepts.
Are you mixed race or bi-racial? This space wants to hold you, too, at the intersection of your identities. Past participants included mixed-race individuals. Please don’t hesitate to reach out with questions or concerns.
Click below to express interest and/or to get in touch with questions:
"This course allowed me to think beyond individuals to understand collective patterns in my family's history related to migration, land, and how we got here, and contextualize that against the backdrop of American history. It helped me hold truths that people had different understandings of surviving and thriving. It allowed me to tell a new narrative about who my family is that does not just cast out the bad actors, but examines their influences, how they operated within the system & structures of white supremacy, and what their sense of awareness and consideration was. It helped me understand that the body's response to how we process and ground is a direct reflection of family line and where we come from."
– Meggie