Evergarden Session

Ceremony and ritual, are medicine rooted to our earliest collective conditioning. The human psyche craves these. Ceremony and ritual support us to make sense of the dark, as we align our somatic experience in these living expressions, we touch the elemental aspects that tie us together.

Across the world we are in the time where celebrations will stretch from October through April. From days for honoring the ancestors, to festivals of light, onward to several new years. We will enter into various forms of culturally imbued celebrations with the common thread of ceremony and ritual.

We are lonely and lost in our hungry transparency. We desperately need a new and gentle light

where the soul can shelter and reveal its ancient belonging. We need light that has retained its

kinship with the darkness.

- John O’Donohue from Anam Cara

Many are drawn into this hungry transparency by social structures that no longer offer nourishing care. You may think the problem is you, after all, you do everything you’re supposed to do. The reality is for many, ritual and ceremony have become dissociated from the fabric of our life. They are now added material burdens that exist separate and alongside our day to day life. What was meant to be deeply enriching, rest providing, has now become an automated, demanding, burdensome weight.

An old teaching says, just as we thirst for water, water thirst for us. This is the heart of nourishing ceremony and ritual, easily embedded in our somatic daily experiences, aligned with a relational element that liberates from the subject/object trance. Ritual invokes communion with the very life you are living.

The candle longs to offer you light.

The cup of tea longs to warm your heart.

The path longs for your foot prints.

The moon longs for your gaze.

I recently read a beautiful creation story from Korea, in this story after the incident that severed humanity from creator, the ogeum, part of the human ear that can hear the song of the heaven, turned to dust and crumbled. The people lost the ability to hear the heavenly sounds. In myth and story, if something severed, then it is likely not the end. What is lost wants to be found. Working with this story in this way, we can ask, what is missing, what is needed to feel, sense, hear, see, the nourishing song from the life all around.

It’s not necessary to start with complex elaborate plans. Ceremony and ritual are free and embedded in the natural rythm of your day. The only cost is a moment and a shift of awareness. Your starting point is to invite these energies into the mundane. Let ceremony enter that first moment your feet touch the ground. The floor, cold and too early, longs to offer you welcome to your day. What would happen if you, ritually lit the candle of welcome in your heart each morning when your feet touch the ground? This is the embodiment of the kinship of light and dark, and how ceremonial awareness is the bridge.

Often this work is easier done in collaboration with external community regular rhythms and spaces we can join. This community exists to create opportunities to do this. In each of our December sessions we will explore the engagement with ritual and ceremony in simple and accessible ways. Each of our sessions is in itself a way to invite these practices into your life.

In morning medicine we will use the age old power of story, come to the Monday session and join me at the fire, where I will share a teaching story. I will select a story from the north, south, east and west that holds psychological truths and guidance as we continue to explore working with your nervous system. If you have yet to join the global meditation, maybe this is a simple twice monthly way to invite a new supportive ritual. Our sunrise session is an accessible brief practice to start your day. And in our creative session is a chance to make art together, the act of art making is good medicine, and channeling an expression of togetherness around what is hurting is innately healing.

Morning medicine session - Monday at 8:30am EST to 9am EST each week.

In-person at Evergarden and on zoom, $25 drop via Venmo or with Evergarden community subscription

This session is a weekly practice group that happens on zoom and in-person at Evergarden. We meet at Monday 8:30am EST to 9am EST each week. In the session you will be guided through a practice from various psychotherapeutic and healing traditions including; mindfulness, somatic, depth, systems, expressive and creative arts and more. This group will help you to; navigate stress, build mind-body connection, develop insight into yourself, deepen your capacity for grounding, cultivate positive emotional states. The group is come as you are, no prior knowledge necessary, the focus is on practice, you will not be asked to share, most participants keep camera off and settle into their own process. If you cannot make the live time a recording will be uploaded to morning medicine archive on our community portal. Our practice community is global, we have people joining from around the world, allowing for a rich collective experience

Global Meditation - Tuesday the 2nd and 16th of December 3pm to 3:45 EST

In-person at Evergarden, free community event

Evergarden Community aligns with Thomas Hübl’s global community for a global download meditation on the 1st and 3rd Tuesdays of each month. In December that will be the 2nd and 16th. This is an international collective meditation with participants world wide. You can learn more about it here. This global mediation is done separately by individuals aware that they are joined at the same time by other meditators world wide. We are inviting any community member interested and able to practice together in-person at Evergarden.

Sunrise session Wednesday 6am - 6:30am EST each week

Virtual by zoom only, with Evergarden community subscription

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell

Don't go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

Don't go back to sleep.

-Rumi

In our sunrise session we welcome the new day with first words. After a practice of of welcome and gratitude cultivation we listen to our first words of the day. From these words we weave together poetry from the session. Come and give it a try. Bring a pen, some paper and an openness to gratitude for a new day.

I open the zoom session at 6am, with weather permitting the camera facing the rising sun, join at 6am and settle in, breath and settle into the intention for the sessions, the guided reflection will begin at 6:15 am for 15min. We then each take the words collected and make our own poem. Our growing collection of poems can be found here.

The Creative Session - Collaborative Collage. Monday December 8th & 15th 2pm to 5pm

In-person at Evergarden, free community event

The creative sessions happen each month at Evergarden, our in-person art studio office. This month we will continue to create space to experience and express via collaborative art-making.

In our session this month we will continue our collaborative collage on a large section of our office space. This collaborative art instillation will be made continuously over the next several months with all our communities invited to participate. If you have never made a collaborative art piece, please come and discover this beautiful communal experience. If you are connected to a community that might like to join, please invite. The theme of the collage is together within what is broken and beautiful. Join us at each creative session.