THE ELEMENTAL SELF IMMERSION
A 9-Month Journey of Life-Changing Initiation, Reclamation, and Becoming
Wilderness. Eros. Sexuality. Mythology. Archetype. Qigong. Writing.
An October 2019- July 2020 Offering
This journey is a resurrection of the Mythic Life, living proof that the sacred walks among us and in us, and needs us as much as we need it. We make the world, as the world makes us, and we have a responsibility to this depth of exchange and wakefulness. What would your life and work in the world be if Soul was at the center? What would it take for you to show up each day with “Soul on deck”, as an Agent of Change in this world, anchored in the bone-knowing of your birthrights and gifts? How would you live if you knew that life and this planet needed you?
This is not a New-Age self-help program. This is depth work: potent practice technologies, processes, and pathways, carefully crafted so that your deep inner life can meet the outer world with reliability, resiliency, and creative response. Our work is not about transcendence. It is about getting more “here” than ever before, recovering right sight and right cycle. This program admits and embodies, in both practice and philosophy, that there is no separation between the vast wilderness of nature, our sexual energy and expression, our creativity, voice, spirituality, social activism, and calling. At root, these are essential conversations of Soul. Our work is the excavation, retrieval, and cultivation of these vital territories, the ones we’ve been forbidden to touch- by culture, bloodline and inheritance-because they are wellsprings of true power. When we know these truths, we cannot be bought and we cannot be sold. We are no longer capable of living life in a hazy trance or within the margins of our inherited scripts and conditioning. We can no longer give up hope or believe that what we do and who we are “doesn’t matter”. When we are integrated in sex, spirit, voice, and gift, we are sourced from a truly vital place. We can rise up from the inside, and take our generous place in the call and response of life.
If you are called to a deeper life and a deeper reason, called to this level of initiation, you will know it in your bones. When you know something in your bones, you can trust and believe that what you are seeking is truly seeking you… You only have to let yourself say YES, and watch all of life conspire to meet you and make this possible. There is no scheduling feat, internal dialogue or financial barrier that is bigger than the decision to claim your life and stand as a torch for all things Wild and True on this planet.
Your Doorways into Soul during these 9 Months
This is a courtship with soul as a destination through the carefully crafted synergy and power of these 6 specific doorways.
Wilderness Immersion
The unequivocal backbone of this entire program is our time in the wilderness, spread across the wheel of the seasons. We will walk into the canyon because we need her. But also because the canyon needs us. To the river at dusk, to the sunrise and blackest night. We will taste the unfurling of seasons and pregnant air because we are aching to see ourselves splayed out across the sky and the earth and to remember where we came from and what we are made of.
Myth and Story, from Women Who Run with the Wolves
The book “Women Who Run With the Wolves” is nothing short of an Oracle. There are two ways to engage this book- As a mere book or as a ceremony. We will do the latter. A carefully crafted collection of timeless tales, they give us the ley lines of psyche and soul, showing us where we have gotten lost, and how to find our way home.
The Great Remembering: Sacred Sexual Inhabitance
I call the sacred sexuality work that I teach “The Great Remembering”. At root, this is exactly what it is – a profound reclamation and remembering. A homecoming. Sexual embodiment and integrity does not ask us to become something we are not. It asks us to become ourselves, fully. To return to this ancient knowing of the most primordial energy that runs through us.
Archetypal Qigong and Energetic Technologies:
These practices lead us into the process of “making soul with physical ritual”. They are of the most potent, sophisticated, and transformational energetic technologies that I have ever encountered in my lifelong study of the body and energy. Through Archetypal Qigong Forms, we not only cultivate energy, right cycles, sensitivity and reverent embodiment, but we commune with the unseen, archetypal and mythic worlds that fund our mundane lives into meaning and alignment.
Gateless Writing:
This is the work of finding and claiming original voice. Gateless writing is a writing methodology based on the neuroscience of creativity and inner-freedom. It is an unequivocally safe space that will literally unlock your creative brilliance and calm and relieve your inner-child- the place from which we innately create.
Courage Work
The work of pioneering educator Parker Palmer, “Courage Work” has everything to do with the fierce protection and creation of relationships that honor the soul. “Courage Work” holds an unshakable trust in the “teacher within” and our relational necessity to engage in a “Community of Solitudes, a way of “being alone together,” in which a group of people can live more fully into Rilke’s definition of love: “that two [or more] solitudes border, protect and salute one another.”
Wilderness Immersion
The unequivocal backbone of this entire program is our time in the wilderness, spread across the wheel of the seasons. We will walk into the canyon because we need her. But also because the canyon needs us. To the river at dusk, to the sunrise and blackest night. We will taste the unfurling of seasons and pregnant air because we are aching to see ourselves splayed out across the sky and the earth and to remember where we came from and what we are made of.
Myth and Story, from Women Who Run with the Wolves
The book “Women Who Run With the Wolves” is nothing short of an Oracle. There are two ways to engage this book- As a mere book or as a ceremony. We will do the latter. A carefully crafted collection of timeless tales, they give us the ley lines of psyche and soul, showing us where we have gotten lost, and how to find our way home.
The Great Remembering: Sacred Sexual Inhabitance
I call the sacred sexuality work that I teach “The Great Remembering”. At root, this is exactly what it is – a profound reclamation and remembering. A homecoming. Sexual embodiment and integrity does not ask us to become something we are not. It asks us to become ourselves, fully. To return to this ancient knowing of the most primordial energy that runs through us.
Archetypal Qigong and Energetic Technologies:
These practices of lead us into the process of “making soul with physical ritual”. They are of the most potent, sophisticated, and transformational energetic technologies that I have ever encountered in my lifelong study of the body and energy. I learned these forms with Zhen Dao and the MogaDao Institue in Santa Fe NM, and though I am no longer affiliated with the institute, I still find these forms to be potent and gorgeous. Through Archetypal Qigong Forms, we not only cultivate energy, right cycles, sensitivity and reverent embodiment, but we commune with the unseen, archetypal and mythic worlds that fund our mundane lives into meaning and alignment.
Gateless Writing:
This is the work of finding and claiming original voice. Gateless writing is a writing methodology based on the neuroscience of creativity and inner-freedom. It is an unequivocally safe space that will literally unlock your creative brilliance and calm and relieve your inner-child- the place from which we innately create.
Courage Work
The work of pioneering educator Parker Palmer, “Courage Work” has everything to do with the fierce protection and creation of relationships that honor the soul. “Courage Work” holds an unshakable trust in the “teacher within” and our relational necessity to engage in a “Community of Solitudes, a way of “being alone together,” in which a group of people can live more fully into Rilke’s definition of love: “that two [or more] solitudes border, protect and salute one another.”
The Components for this Program
Imagine… 9 months. 4 Seasons. 10 soul-companions. The chance and path of a life that can and will not wait.
3 Seasonal Backpacking Trips
*first trip Oct 28th.
A Personal Winter Retreat
Bi-weekly Audio Teachings/Transmissions
21 weeks of live, online Gateless Writing Salons
Weekly QiGong Classes
2-hour Monthly Integration Calls
3 Private Sessions with Sarah
Peer-to-Peer Support
This program is for you if…
- You are ready to ignite the inner-fire that will allow you to respond and participate as a trustworthy Change Agent through your unique gifts and capacities.
- You know that in order to really show up and offer your gifts in reliable ways, you need to do your own work first, so that you do not pass on unconscious cycles of fracture and pain.
- You know that in order to self-actualize and do your work in the world, you need to be sourced, supported and guided in a longer-term container
- You feel a painful gap between your current reality and the Destiny and purpose that is calling you.
- You understand that in order to truly live a meaningful life, you must be funded by the depths and directives of Soul… you are longing to unite “soul and role”.
- You know that it is your birthright to thrive, not just to survive and you are ready for that reclamation.
- You are already on a path of self-actualization and desire to go so much deeper, and need the nuance, sophistication, skillful facilitation to bring you to that depth.
- You know you have a deeper calling but you can’t quite hear it, or you feel far away from it.
- You wish to secure your relationship with your Wildish Nature, instincts and your ability to effectively “walk between two worlds as a way of life”, in the words of Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes.
- You are tired of dabbling and are ready to commit to a coherent path that will ask more of you, and therefore allow more of you to emerge.
- You feel a lonely distance between your day to day life, sexuality, spirituality, and work in the world.
- You long to traverse the territories of your wild and untamed soul and have grown tired of the thinness and one-dimensionality of popular psychological, New Age and Self-Help philosophies.
In these 9 months, you will…
Recover and trust the cycles of your life
We suffer because we have refused and misunderstood the natural cycles of our internal and external lives. When we do, we lose energy, skip ahead, get stuck, resist, deny, bypass, overstay, leave too early, and orphan ourselves at critical moments of transformation, maturation and initiation. In these 9-months, you will journey through all four natural seasons, and in that, come to understand and fill in the blanks of your lost cycles. You will, with support and understanding, claim the width of yourself. Your life, health, and harmony depend on the reckoning and understanding of cycles.
Cultivate and integrate your sexual energy and expression
Our work in this realm will transform the way you relate to the profound wilderness of your sexual energy and allow it to become the soil from which your life-force flourishes, evolves, and embodies for the rest of your life. Reliable. Integrated. Embodied. Reverent. Whole. You will understand, in a visceral way, just how inextricable your sexual energy is from your voice, your creativity, your generosity and your becoming. You will refine and therefore trust your desire as a map of your life. We will do the work of “de-compartmentalizing” and “de-colonizing” sex.
Reclaim your Voice, honesty, and expression as a creation force
You will find your original voice, what it has to say, and how it wants to say it- The one that got buried, edited, manipulated and scared. The one that stopped telling the full truth. The voice that is a Poet, Revolutionary, Lover and Sage. The one that is entirely your own and original to the hilt. You will come to know this voice as a literal creation force, to feel and trust its profound impact and gift to others. You will come to understand your voice and original expression as inseparable from your sexual energy and joy.
Source your life from a place of actual, real energy
You will cultivate an actual “reservoir” from which your life will flow. A life that is not moving from a reservoir is a life on the verge of collapse, burn out, and giving up. There is no way to truly give our gifts and be reliable “value bearers” in our relationships, lives and the world without a reservoir. A reservoir, in the words of Zhen Dao, is a “field of potential which does not need to immediately demonstrate itself. In order to risk and [live the essence of our hearts], we need a reservoir. The depth of a reservoir is what makes someone capable of being trusted.” Many of us live our lives running on fumes and borrowed (sometimes stolen) energy. When we look out into the panic and trauma of the world, what we are seeing is the collective influence of people acting and moving with no real ground under their feet. We have no reservoir and therefore no true place to draw from in our relationships, vocation, and dreams. To source from a real place is a revolution, and a birthright. Every aspect we will engage in this program is a source of real energy – Time in the wilderness, free-flowing creative energy and expression, sexual energy and Qi in our bodies (which we will cultivate and harmonize through practice), myth and story (which keeps a flame for us, always), and a community in which we will protect, border and salute each other’s soul voices.
Align your life with your destiny and calling
And therefore take your place in your life and this planet that both needs you, and has so much to give to you. These months will be a sacred crucible in which you will clearly see where your life is and is not aligned with your deeper calling and convictions, where have you given over to conditioning, ancestral stories, society’s narrow script. Simultaneously, It is the container in which you will cultivate the courage, support, inspiration and energy to claim your life as your own and live from soul, funded from a deep reservoir that feeds the greater harmony of things. When we align with soul, we become agents of change, celebration and creation.
