Circles have always been sacred and there’s evidence from nomadic tents to the earliest houses - humans almost always built round.

“The way you build a house is a way to shape a town. And how you shape a town is how you form your world.” - Scott Richardson-Read

Birds build nests. Beavers build lodges. The celestial bodies dance circle dances across the sky. 5,000 years ago and even further back than that, our ancestors were observing the world around them and developing sophisticated understandings of the relationship between the different components of their ecosystems and them. For them wisdom and knowledge most likely weren’t understood to be intellectual exercises. To steal from Rilke: “the point [was] to live everything.”

Most likely for them, to live, gather, and practice ceremony in round houses, with the fire in the center, was to live their cosmology. Daily, they would have mirrored back to the world their understanding of it. And in doing so, they would not only have affirmed and passed on their sense of their place in things; but they would have also mirrored the world back to itself - helping it remember its own roles and cycles.

Most of us don’t live in round houses anymore. And we rarely sit in circles. We’re increasingly disconnected from fire and hearth. Our cars keep us isolated and moving too quickly to notice much of what’s happening in the natural world. We don’t tell time by the moon’s phases or the sun’s position in the sky. Electric lights overpower all but the brightest stars.

How we design our world probably does still say a lot about our collective priorities, but it no longer seems to reflect values like: connection, relationship, deep listening, giving back, honoring endings and beginnings, leaving room for mystery; making things with our hands; skillfully tending the sacred fires of hearth and heart, etc.

No wonder we feel so deeply lost, disconnected, and burned out.

I still remember the picture of the indigenous women of the Amazon, dressed in their colors and feathers, wailing and crying and beating their breasts in protest of another round of deforestation of their jungle. I remember being struck in that moment by how deep their expression of grief ran. As if each of those individual plants and trees, plus all the displaced animals and denuded land and contaminated waters, were unique and intimate family members, being murdered in front of them.

I had already begun the phase of my own deep healing and spiritual reconnection work which unfolded in a shamanic and more indigenous praxis. I’d already begun reconnecting to animism and the idea that all of life is conscious, with its own wisdom to share. That we are one species in a wide web of kin. And yet it was all still more a concept than an embodied experience for me.

Looking at those indigenous women, it struck me deeply that while I felt existential grief and dread about the state of the world, I wasn’t mourning as if it were my kin. Would I ever be capable of their depth?

In spite of years of feeling overwhelmed by my own sensitivity and huge emotions, years of trying to numb them out and tame them down; I found myself with the vague sense that I was missing out on something by not experiencing that level of love and connection. Even when it hurt.

Around a similar time, the wellness and spirituality world was exploding anew with conversations around cultural appropriation and ethical connection to ancient wisdom traditions in the face of settler colonialism, diaspora, and the resulting economic and power disparities. As much as I was open to those conversations, as a yoga teacher and energy healer/ shamanic practitioner living in the currently called “United States” and descended from European settlers, there was a part of me that experienced a visceral response which felt a lot like resistance and entitlement.

Sitting with those sensations/ emotions, I followed them down and in and saw an image of ruptured roots. A gap between one part of the timeline and another. And in that gap, there was an immense surge of grief. I knew somehow that it wasn’t just mine. It was my ancestors’, it was the land’s. I heard the words clearly: “Before we were “American,” before we were “white,” before the shame and the trauma and wounds, we were something else. We belonged to a place.”

What followed was a deep knowing that there was a time in my own lineages where the world was kin. And there were probably rituals, songs, stories, clothing, ways of making things and moving through the world - belief systems - which had connected my longer-ago ancestors to their beyond-human kin.

In that moment I knew the next part of my journey would be to tend those ruptured roots, in part by seeing what memories I could find.

I make no promises that these gatherings (collectively or individually) will heal your burnout or bring you fully alive. In my experience sustainable, longer-term burnout recovery requires a lot of rest, a reclaiming of a more human and humane way of being and relating, and efforts to build a world we won’t burnout from (within our spheres of influence).

This offering will meet you at whatever capacity you find yourself in right now and lands somewhere between the reclaiming and the building.

Circles have always been sacred and there’s evidence from nomadic tents to the earliest houses - humans almost always built round.

“The way you build a house is a way to shape a town. And how you shape a town is how you form your world.” - Scott Richardson-Read

Birds build nests. Beavers build lodges. The celestial bodies dance circle dances across the sky. 5,000 years ago and even further back than that, our ancestors were observing the world around them and developing sophisticated understandings of the relationship between the different components of their ecosystems and them. For them wisdom and knowledge most likely weren’t understood to be intellectual exercises. To steal from Rilke: “the point [was] to live everything.”

Most likely for them, to live, gather, and practice ceremony in round houses, with the fire in the center, was to live their cosmology. Daily, they would have mirrored back to the world their understanding of it. And in doing so, they would not only have affirmed and passed on their sense of their place in things; but they would have also mirrored the world back to itself - helping it remember its own roles and cycles.

Most of us don’t live in round houses anymore. And we rarely sit in circles. We’re increasingly disconnected from fire and hearth. Our cars keep us isolated and moving too quickly to notice much of what’s happening in the natural world. We don’t tell time by the moon’s phases or the sun’s position in the sky. Electric lights overpower all but the brightest stars.

How we design our world probably does still say a lot about our collective priorities, but it no longer seems to reflect values like: connection, relationship, deep listening, giving back, honoring endings and beginnings, leaving room for mystery; making things with our hands; skillfully tending the sacred fires of hearth and heart, etc.

No wonder we feel so deeply lost, disconnected, and burned out.

My work does not require or compete with any particular religious beliefs. It is more spiritual than aligned with a specific doctrine. It is, however, animist. Meaning: you have to be OK with the idea that all things, including animals, rocks, trees, etc have a consciousness and a soul. If that seems too “witchy” (and not in a good way), you’ll probably feel very uncomfortable with my work.

The live gatherings are 2 hours each and while I anticipate them being recorded and still impactful through the recording, it is highly recommended you attend them live. Outside of the gatherings, you can engage with the offered prompts as much or as little as you’d like. I would recommend planning 2-3 hours outside of the gatherings, though it doesn’t have to all be in one chunk.

There are multiple ways of knowing - none right or wrong, all with their benefits and pitfalls. This offering is not an academic one, though opportunities for self-study and research will be provided. But written records and academic studies have their own limitations and our dreams and bodies store wisdom, too. When we gather, we won’t engage with the material from an intellectual perspective. We’ll participate and experience. What I’m offering is part imagining, part reconstruction, part new creation. And remember - each gathering is only two hours. In general, these gatherings will paint with broad strokes, rather than get into fine details.