Growing Capacity for Living with Change ~ Awakening Self Healing through Connection ~ In Service to Community and the Greater Earth Body
RITE OF PASSAGE : adulting at the threshold of uncertainty & change
May - November, 2024
THE JOURNEY
As the planet spins while orbiting the sun, seasons continue to cycle and waves of loss, change and hope surge across the landscape. A sense of quickening and urgency can be contagious. Yet, what does it take in these wild times to slow down enough and mark significant thresholds through life’s spiraling stages and changes? To become still enough to receive the gifts of resiliency and lifeways that shaped the lives and lands of your ancestors? Rite of Passage: adulting at the threshold of uncertainty & change hosts an intimate container for these inquiries.
Fasting in wild places is a deep practice of marking various thresholds throughout cultures worldwide. In the weeklong trip to the Mojave/Paiute land embedding in this journey, you will have an opportunity to mark the initiatory moment you are in with the land, Spirit and guides as your witness. The first 4 moons of the journey will be preparing for this fasting time. The last 2 moons will be strengthening and nourishing that which will anchor you as you step forward in co-creativity with the living myth of your life.
The sacred technologies of this and other earth based practices we will explore together help clear the way for a life lived upright, sovereign, attuned and expressed.
We, Kari, Lauren & Ray, have been called upon to offer our support to a group of humans aged 32 and older who are ready to go on a journey together. A journey to uplift and enliven the wild caverns of the psyche & soul, the fortitude of the body, and union with Spirit in and of service to the earth and human community.
May this journey be a deep holding of you so that you can step forward in your service as a healer, activist, visionary, creative, educator, trades person, builder, farmer, land steward, community/movement builder, parent, friend, or ally, etc with more courage and resiliency.
WHEN & WHERE
three 3 day + 7 day desert overnight immersions:
May 31-June 2nd - Pomo/Coast Miwok lands: Sebastopol, California (10am arrival Friday, closing by 4pm Sunday)
July 19-21st - Pomo/Coast Miwok lands: Sebastopol, California (10am arrival Friday, closing by 4pm Sunday)
September 21-28th - Paiute/Mojave lands: Mojave National Preserve, includes 3-day solo fast
November 15-17th - Location TBD on Pomo/Coast Miwok lands: Sonoma County, California (10am arrival Friday, closing by 4pm Sunday)
*2 hour zoom gatherings monthly June-November - to be scheduled with group once formed
*1 one-on-one mentor check in with Kari or Lauren between each in person immersion
IS THIS JOURNEY FOR YOU?
~ As a team of primarily cis-gendered guides, we have limitations on how we hold rites of passage for our non-binary and trans community. As such this immersion centers the experience of cis gendered women, who have lived and been acculturated as women. We welcome the spectrum and range of sexuality and gender identity and fluidity and if you identify as femme, or female, trans female or nonbinary and feel strongly to participate in a space that centers the experience of women, you are welcome.
Furthermore, as primarily white guides who are invested in and actively engaging decolonial work, dismantling white bodied supremacy and divesting from systems of domination and oppression, this may be most fulfilling for white, white-assimilated, and white-passing women. However, if you identify as BIPOC, a body of culture, a person from the global majority/global south, you are welcome. Know that our perspectives are inherently limited.
~You are of the age of 32 or older
~You are ready to mark a significant threshold in your life. Thresholds can be informed by significant changes such as life stage change, losses, celebrations and internal transformations.
~You are walking with deep questions of what it means to face uncertainty and change from an upright and wild place, allowing your gifts to flourish.
~You are open, interested/curious and willing to grow relationships with blood ancestors, the ancestors of the land you are currently living upon and spiritual ancestral ways through ritual and ceremony.
~You are able to take responsibility for your own experience and receive the mirrors (pleasant and unpleasant) that may be offered to you from the guides throughout this process.
~You will seek out and get additional support if you find yourself in need of support beyond the capacity of what the container/guides can offer.
THE COMPASS
Your guides will co-weave the journey using these sacred technologies:
Myths of initiation
Self-generated ceremony
Orienting with 7 directions & elementals
Ancestral remembering & connection
Land tending and medicine making
Sacred & profane through play
Stoking the fires of intuition
Emotional embodiment & eros
Somatic awareness & resiliency
Sidereal/Vedic astrology & star gazing
Authentic movement
Mindfulness
Council sharing
Sleeping & being on the land
Handcrafting
Music, song & dance
TUITION RECIPROCITY
Tuition reciprocity for 6 moon journey (includes three 3 day immersions (food not provided), a weeklong in the desert (most meals provided) zoom meetings each moon cycle and one-on-one mentor calls throughout the journey:
~Partial scholarships are available. Please complete application and we will be in touch with you to confirm if we can accommodate your needs.
~Actual Rate - $3000-3900 (you have access to basic needs such as food, housing, childcare, though sometimes it may feel difficult. You are able to save money each week/month to pay for the journey.)
~Sustaining Rate - $4000-5000 (you may be paying off debt or working to build savings, but you also have access to steady income. You do NOT struggle to meet basic needs such as food, shelter, medical care, child care, etc.)
~Pay it Forward - $5000-6000 (you have access to financial security, own property, and/or have personal savings. You are able to pay for “wants” and spend little time worrying about securing necessities in your life. If you have economic privilege and power in your community, this reciprocity range is for you.)
THE GUIDES
Lauren Ashley (Lo) Brown, LMFT (she/they) - 6 moon journey guide
Queer, cis gendered, middle-class, educated Ashkenazi Jewitch living on stolen Miwok/Pomo lands.
As a storyteller, music weaver, fire tender, and apprentice at the wellspring of the starry night, Lo fans the embers of cultural regeneration through earth-based body-oriented practices. She carries a laser compass to help us find our way in these mythic times and supports folks deepening in connection with the more-than-human realms. Star Bard by night and somatic therapist by day, she has a private MFT Somatic Therapy practice in Sonoma County.
Lo is dedicated to the dismantling of anthropocentricity (human-centered as most valuable perspective) and the healing of the white bodied supremacy virus in service to the waters and the liberation of all beings. She carries a toy box filled with games and song to accompany the journey of life. Lo lives in intentional community with her mischievous water dog, Teyo.
Lo has been leading rite of passage journeys and fasting ceremonies in wild places since 2016.
Find her @ www.laurenashleybrown.com.
Kari Stettler, CMT, SEP (she/her) - 6 moon journey guide
Kari is a guide, somatic practitioner, bodyworker, astrologer, ceremonialist and land steward living on stolen lands of the Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok people since 2006. Her roots follow the trails of the corded ware culture into what is now Poland to the north and Sicily to the south, across the northern Germanic lands and into Scandinavia. Her most recent ancestors landed in Baltimore and Minnesota and eventually migrated to coastal California, where she was born in 1976 on the stolen lands of the Tongva people. She has been in practice and service at the crossroads of cultural regeneration and repair, physical/emotional/spiritual healing, embodiment, rites of passage and land stewardship over the past 25 years. She hosts spaces within which individuals and groups can: cultivate presence through embodiment, explore their ancestral roots through inquiry, research & ceremony, resolve traumatic imprints that are held in the body, grow capacity for experiencing the full spectrum range of sensations and feelings that life has to offer, foster reciprocal relations with the natural world and dismantle internal conditioned patterns of systemic colonization and white bodied supremacy. Kari’s work contributes to the movement of peace work and centers around the prayer of co-liberation…may individual liberation be in service to and experienced as inextricably linked to collective liberation of all people in the human community and the systems that shape us. She has been leading groups in fasting/vigil ceremonies in the wild over the past 11 years and is Wilderness First Responder certified. Kari’s passions include dancing, planting trees, medicine making, cooking, tending forests and immersing in wild waters...alone and in community. For more info on Kari’s meandering learning journey and practices that inform her work, read her CV here.
Rachel (Ray) Kaplan, MFT (she/they) - will be guiding some before & after and be fully present for Mojave Desert Trip
Rachel Kaplan joyfully offers up her skills as a somatic mystic, permaculture activist & teacher, wild mycelial tracker, plant tender & ritualist in ceremonies of initiation, re-membering, honoring and vision. An old-time queer from a privileged, totalizing Ashkenazi lineage, she currently lives on unceded pomo/coastal miwok land. Rachel is a stand for a world of belonging for all beings, working the lines of ancestral healing, hospicing modernity & dismantling embodied human & white-bodied supremacy. Grounded in the wisdom of the great open heart, Ray is gifted in holding space for trauma and joy, and our collective participation in this perilous & passionate moment of The Great Unraveling. As a newly minted young elder, Rachel is committed to offering up a lifetime of good learning to folx looking for path & purpose in this time. She holds her own feet to the fire of transformation and offers that opportunity to others. Alongside decades of practice in somatics, deep ecology, ceremony, conscious movement & expressive arts, she brings life-time commitments to social change & advocacy for the rights of nature. Her toolbelt is filled with the medicines of laughter, rigor, courage, tenderness, devotion & play. She is a new initiate on the kundalini energy path which brings surprises, uprisings, breakdowns and resonant reconnections of all kinds. Her deep joy comes from dancing & engaging deeply with others in the wildness of the multi-species parade. Find her @ www.ecosomaticaction.com