It's not the land that is broken but our relationship to it.
The cosmos is not a random assemblage of dead matter and empty space, but is gloriously, rapturously alive. In the quantum froth of this mystery, not only is everything alive but it is alive in us.
LEARN MOREWe feel an urgency to do more, but how?
How do we actually become a part of the change that is so needed on this planet right now?
Lean in closer now. The secret (not so secret) is relatedness.
Reconnection can be awkward. It is hard to know where to begin.
It’s okay to feel lost. It’s okay to feel worried about getting it wrong. We are all learning to show up better. Our ancestors are not asking for us to get it perfect, they are just asking us to try.
EarthHeart, EarthPsyche
is an intimate journey of remembering our place within the living world, based on Five-Element philosophy, rewilding principles, and contemporary animist insights. Filled with practical earth-honoring skills, somatic practices, and rituals, this co-creative course is a deep dive into our intrapsychic drive to know the wilderness of our souls.
Our teachers are not the old men of dead history but the wind and the coyote, the steam rising off the black lake, the cold bones of the earth beneath our feet.
We listen. We remember. We reembody.
THIS IS FOR YOU IF...
✧ you are feeling like a refugee, severed from the land. Very few of us live where our ancestor’s bones are buried. Very few of us were taught the knowledge, stories, recipes, or even practical skills of our dead elders. Very few of us were raised beyond the empty images and hollow interests of our modern culture.
✧ you long to feel more connected and woven within the sacred continuum with humility and reciprocity. You ache to participate in the great cosmic movement, to stop trivializing and shrinking your existence. You are feeling ready to grow up.
✧ you are wanting to remember that God is not an old white man that floats on clouds, presiding over a dead Earth but that you too are spirit-made-flesh. You too have an essential place, a specific niche, a very particular expression of divinity within the mesh of the living world.
MEET KENDRA
Kendra Ward, LAc., MAOM, is a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner and herbalist. After twenty years in practice she has developed a style that fuses a sense of deep ecology and earth-honoring philosophies combined with Five Element and traditional Chinese medicine. She takes the best of these ancient systems and uses it as soul medicine to reclaim what it means to be a human on this planet right now.
Kendra’s primary teachers are the land where she lives, her life-long meditation and spiritual practices, and the complex, honest, radiant human beings she has been fortunate to hold sacred space for in her healing practice.
This course arose out of Kendra’s yearning to contribute something more to the spiritual maturation process we are needing at this time. Transforming our hearts and psyches from a human-centric view to an earth-centric view rests at the root of not only our health, but also a bigger, more radical cultural change. In this way, our grief, joy, and longing are gateways into a transformational shift in our understanding of what it means to be a beneficial human.
Featured In...
These learnings are for any one who would like to...
✧ become a new human helping to redefine a new culture of humans.
✧ get softened up by life, allowing our hearts to be broken open, falling in love with the world and its many beings.
✧ learn the basic groundwork for an earth-reverence value system. Earth-honoring ethics are the wisdom teachings of Indigenous cultures around the world. But all of us are on the hook. It is the birthright and responsibility of all humans to come back into relationship with the Earth.
✧ replace the outdated human-centric structures within our psyches that keep us from other beneficial ways of knowing and engaging with all of life.
✧ enter the model of inherent wholeness of the living world. Returning ourselves to the Earth, her paradigm, her storyline, is also returning to and knowing ourselves as essentially complete.
✧ have a diversified sense of relational intimacy, richness, and belonging. Within this widened sense of kinship we come to see how all beings have their own communities, languages, intelligences, and culture. An Earth-centric viewpoint sees everything as alive and worthy of respect.
✧ take part in a new kind of environmentalism, one that does not perpetuate white privilege, one that does not unconsciously encourage a separation between humans and nature, one that is based on joy instead of an unshiftable despair.
✧ explore the inner alchemy and deep ecology of our bodies. Embodiment practices for reclamation help us heal the human/nature split within our psyches. Real change occurs in our lives when we make it experiential, moving past our tendency towards over intellectualization and instead learning to listen to the wisdom of our animal bodies.
✧ Learn from anywhere. Ten instructional video lessons, each with a downloadable pdf transcript.
✧ Guided practices. Experiential learning included in each lesson.
✧ Catch up later. Review or watch on your own timeframe.
✧ In-depth learning. A wealth of additional multimedia resources (articles, websites, interviews, additional videos) with each lesson. These resources will keep you learning well beyond each module.
✧ Lifetime access. Ongoing access to all course material – you will never lose access to the course.
WHAT'S INCLUDED IN THE PROGRAM
MODULE 1
Setting the Spell, Weaving the Dream: The etiquette of an Earth-honoring value system
- Laying the groundwork of Earth-reverence
- Modeling the etiquette of politeness, respect, gratitude, and friendship
- Activating the heart when speaking or interacting
MODULE 2
Earthpsyche: Remembering Ourselves Home
- Beginning to examine our cultural indoctrinations
- Shifting from a human-centric world view to an earth-centric perspective
- Exploring contemporary animism
MODULE 3
Human/Nature Split: Exposing our dominator’s training
- Deconstructing the conditioning of our colonialist mindset
- More clearly seeing how we talk and think as if nature is outside of us
- Examining how traditional environmentalism is based in ideas of separation
MODULE 4
Hello Friends: Diversifying our relational intimacy
- The essentials of friendship and widening our sense of kinship
- Explorations into belonging and finding comfort in the others
- Appreciation of the intelligences, cultures, language, talents, and communities of the more-than-human world
- Exploring the legal rights and cosmic mattering of all non-humans
MODULE 5
Embedding Ourselves: Belonging to the land
- Learning the history of the place where you live
- Dralas and other kinds of land spirits
- Connecting with your Earth-honoring ancestors
- Ways of interacting with the land beneath your feet, rooting in place
- Entering the land’s dreaming
MODULE 6
Lie Down in the Dark: Decay and transformation
- Appreciating the breakdown, the falling apart, the rich decay
- The importance of germination and resting in the dark
- Periods of uncertainty and transformation in our lives seen through the principles of alchemy
- The health of the soil and how it mirrors our own dirt bodies
MODULE 7
Invest in the Millenium: Explorations of Deep Time
- Examination of our culturally constructed ideas of time
- Elongating into Deep Time
- Learning about Stone medicine
- Approaching and feeding the Earth as an elder deity
- Confronting some of the false myths we perpetuate about the Earth
MODULE 8
Medicine is Everywhere: Plant allies and sensory awakening
- Entering the Plantroposcene, instead of the Anthropocene
- Meeting plants as kin instead of “what can you do for me?”
- Awakening and extending our sensorium
- Working with a local plant ally
- Learning about the Honorable harvest
MODULE 9
Born From the Womb of Life’s Grief
- Using the Elemental Powers to put ourselves in place
- Grief, water, and healing
- A new kind of activism based on acknowledging our grief, as well as our joy
MODULE 10
Merging with all of life
- Deepening our reclamation
- The myth of our individuality
- The thrumming relationality of everything
- Animism as a lifestyle and culture
ACCESS TO THE COURSE
IS PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE NECESSARY?
SCHOLARSHIPS
SETTING THE SPELL OF BELONGING
May this learning be of benefit to all, may it be inclusive, loving, and nutritive.
May we not bypass harms done by supremacy of all kinds. May this work be done in the name of awakening, feeling, and grieving, allowing ourselves to be undone in the process. May we keep unraveling the stories of separation that we have inherited, feeling into our loss as refugees, disconnected from knowing a symbiotic relationship with all of life.
May we be willing to walk our edges as we live in a world that is on the edge, finding the place where fear and courage meet.
May we feed our relationships, in our community, with the land where we live, with our more-than-human kin, with our ancestors, with the Earth as an old primordial power, with the elemental forces all around us.
May we remember to honor our earth bodies in the process, to use the resilience of our embodiment as a gateway of healing.
May we be available to the ethic of a radical not-knowingness, releasing the story that we can and should know everything, and instead emerge ourselves into the black womb of the holy unknown.
May we take up the messy task of finding home within ourselves, home in the place where we live and home in our very root essence, pushing back against the capitalistic, extractivist machine and committing ourselves to feeling a sense of inner richness and belonging.
May this be for the social, material, and spiritual wellbeing of all.
May it be so!
