alchemy of prana

... the beauty and power of aligning aspects of our psyche to the four seasons of Earth, four times of day, and associated four directions, innately moves our psychology past duality constructs and into a relational and ongoing field of existence.

The light is almost gone. I can still see well enough to keep the flashlight in my pocket. There's an internal switch/compass/calculus---no words really name it---a something which I am being mentored by as I try to reignite the fire of creativity in words. This is almost like code switching or task switching or hat shifting.

How do you explain the nuance of an ethos? And what happens when overlapping paradigms do not account for gaps, the intersectionality of the waves made, and the quieting of softer voices manifests?

How can we see this as a process, an invitation, a collective request for reconsidering our way of being not just as humans but as LIFE living amidst the interwoven, interconnected, and deeply participatory intercorporeality that is this planetary LIFEWORLD?

a blog discussing the impact of roads as direct iterations of empire and the associated struggles buried between the thoroughfares of modernity

What I carry with me now, into this changing of the light and emergence of the seasons, is this: I am a student of the ceremony and all who walk themselves into and through such potent endeavors. What I found in the basement, in the fertile unraveling, was just that: being a wilderness rite of passage guide is not about teaching; it is about apprenticing oneself to the ceremony and all who enter.

song from the heart: becausde

a poem for the lost ones

Even more critically, the difference between everyday creativity and the culture allegiance to creativity as product has to do with the infiltration of meaning into such objects and not the objects themselves. This is where we, as citizens and aspects of this larger culture, have both lost the plot and where we can re-find it.

A soft cloud covered the sun today, I saw it from inside the canvas tent. Within that cloud, a full rainbow circling the star–-radiance created in collaboration with the frozen canvas of white above. Nearby, the questers were doing their work, easing their way into their third day on the land in ceremony.

Somewhere upward of 24,000 acres are burning in Colorado today, with thousands more just across the border in neighboring states. The Roaring Fork Watershed is currently at about 15–66% of normal, with most of the watershed in stage 4 (of 5) drought. Two days ago, the sky was so hazy with smoke that we could almost not see either of the two mountain escarpments that hold the north and south boundaries of this valley, each 10 miles away. This morning, a few raindrops have fall

There is a movement of emotion moving through me, a disorganized psycho-sensorial process that is having a conversation that I cannot ignore. Tears are close and frequent, and while there are moments where I remember the social awkwardness of being a highly sensitive human within a culture largely ambivalent and oppressing to deep feelings, there is a profundity to this experience.

Wilderness immersive experiences such as these have a way of re-foregrounding the body and embodiment. In so doing, the sensuality of existence is reawakened, and that expanded sense of awareness begins to innately include the more-than-humyn lifeworld all around. This blog explores the nuances of wilderness immersive experiences and draws an example from a recent teen quest hosted by Alchemy of Prana.

Reflections from Waking the Soul Fire, a week-long wilderness rite of passage quest which transpired in the high mountains of Coloradoo

Found poetry from the School of Lost Borders Ceremonial Immersion. Emergent themes from a week getting deep and wild in the mountains of southern colorado.

Ecotherapy is a burgeoning field of therapy which, as applied ecopsychology, offers a variety of techniques for bringing nature into the human-human dyad as a way of broadening the holding environment and situating our always-enmeshed, interconnected, and reciprocal relationship to/with/in the natural world (Delaney, 2021, p. 35). Pragmatically, nature is considered the third body, shifting therapy from a human-human dyad to a human-nature-human triad (Buzzell, 2009)...

Magnificent awe. That is what I see in the weather, feel in its changes, know deep in my embodiedness as I walk this fine earth and get to know myself through the interactive aliveness of existence.

There is a false dichotomy between nature and the human world, a persistent story for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years that asserts that we humans are somehow outside of, beyond, or greater than and different from the wilder-than-human world.

A blog exploring the ecopsychological concept of ecological identity. What are your earliest memories of feeling deep connection to/with/in the wild earth? What are your recent memories of this? Where do you wander back to in your psyche, dreaming of some vista or moment of deep meaning?

Time in a wilderness environment can often return us to our embodied way of being alive (Williams, 2019). The weather, the landscape, the wild ones, the way the water moves, all become aspects of aliveness which call to and echo outward the depth of our vibrant animal bodies and transpersonal potentials.