The disenchantment from our bodies starts early.

We hear it in the offhand comments our parents make about their own bodies or when we hear them speak about others.

It creeps in when we hear advertisements for “feminine odor” and jokes about women’s genitals smelling like fish.

We see which bodies are preferenced over others and assess whether or not ours live up to them.

We are given euphemisms for our most intimate, innervated anatomy that leave us in the dark as to what actually is “down there.” And then we’re told to keep our hands off.

The foundation of our healing and thriving as humans is rooted in our experience of belonging, which directly impacts the resilience of our nervous system. But unless we have at least a basic understanding of the system that informs all of our (re)actions, it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to tend to our belonging from our wholeness. This knowledge is essential to our wellness and yet, embodied, digestible information about it can be hard to find. So we decided to create a self-paced audio course, available now, ‘Wandering into Wellness, an Embodied Tour of your Autonomic Nervous System’.

A friend gave me an Amaryllis bulb as a birthday present, and I’ve been having a full-on love affair with it. I’ve taken pictures every day, I’ve been studying it, bearing witness to its unfolding, grieving the already wilting petals, and even asking it questions.

Does it hurt?

I asked my Amaryllis one day.

Our skin is the largest organ in our bodies. It covers us from head to toe with different textures, thickness, and innervation. Our skin protects us and contains us, and it heals itself.

Pause for a moment here to appreciate the wonder that is your skin. Stroke the back of your hand or the sides of your face, offering some gratitude to this miracle of nature.

Devotion comes in all sorts of forms, from our work in the world, to important causes, to those we love, to God. Regardless of the inspiration, devotion makes its home in our hearts and loyalty and a commitment to stay are the common threads woven through everything we’ve deemed worthy of our devotion. It can make the mundane and sometimes painful parts of life more bearable and perhaps even joyful as it helps us remember our place in the larger story of the World.

As you sit with a crying friend, do you reach out to rub their back because you are uncomfortable and you’re trying to comfort them so you can feel okay? Or are you reaching out and rubbing their back for them? Who is the touch for?

We speak often about the importance of a connection with the other-than-human world, and this is it. Seeing, studying, witnessing another being. Recognizing that it, too, has intelligence and soul. Different than mine, but equally essential and worthy of awe and respect. This means, of course, that my existence (and yours) is also essential, and worthy of awe and respect.

When we come together in community, one that supports us in our wellness and in our wounding, we begin to question the narratives that have us feel less-than or in competition with each other. We become dangerous to the stories that have been handed to us by a culture that thrives on our disenchantment and cynicism. We begin to see that the world does, in fact, have a place for us – that we belong.

Magickal ritual or ceremony is Earth-and Spirit-centric activism. It requires that we acknowledge, court, nourish and weave multiple layers of intelligence for a deep-structure change. It acknowledges that true, systemic and lasting wellness that attends to the thriving of all life does not come from bills and policy (alone). It comes from human cultures that are deeply well.

In an anthropology class in college, I read about the Yanomami people of the Amazon Rainforest. When a member of their tribe dies, they cremate the body and then put the ashes in a kind of banana pudding that they pass around and eat. As I read this, something in me quietly opened. I got it.

The last 365 days were a spinning compass needle of disorientation for many of us. An unwelcome yet necessary awakening, a horror film, an unraveling of certainties, a loss of innocence, a barbaric feeding-frenzy, a mystical, slow-moving choreography of chaos. And they were the days of listening to sounds never-before-heard in my suburban backyard and imagining that THIS – the sounds without the noise – is what the world sounded like to my ancestors. Birdsong. The slightest breeze. The whispers of my neighbors talking over coffee in their backyard, being carried over to me, as the field grasses, waking up to the warming sun, rustled against each other’s crisp winter stalks.

Last week on my birthday, I spent the afternoon in ceremony painting 100’s of Japanese Sumi circles. With a simple supply list of black ink, white paper, and one brush, I embarked on an exploration of mark making in an embodied process of spontaneous creation. I wasn’t trying to make art or anything special, my purpose was to actively dance with Eros in the present moment.

It is a striking truth that Capitalist Culture is nearly devoid of soulfully nourishing, culturally recognized ceremonies. Ceremonies that are meaningful and relevant mark the essential transitions from one stage of our lives to another, and they remind us of our immutable relationship between, and reliance upon, the rest of the natural world. They provide both an opportunity to celebrate a transition and a necessary ‘calling in’.

Gift giving, attending holy services, lighting the menorah each night, caroling, decorating, gathering together with family to eat, drink, and be merry… At their roots, these traditions grew out of a deep reverence for and celebration of meaning and gratitude, practices to help us honor the mysterious benevolence of life and to nurture our experience of belonging and embedment. For many of us, they’ve devolved into obligatory, rote activities that reinforce our disembodiment and our enslavement to the monotheistic and consumerist traditions that have shaped Western Industrial Culture.

It's tempting to imagine the solution is to throw it all out. In actuality, the solution is to take a sacred pause, step back, and look at what you are participating in and why so that you can decide with intention which rituals you will keep, and which you will let go.

What we witness as we grow up, and the stories we inherit around food, emotional nourishment, what it means to nourish ourselves, and what is and isn’t acceptable nourishment shape our development and likely our current relationship with nourishment, including how we feel about nourishment and our ability to take it in.

At the IEI, we believe one of the most powerful ways to align with our soul’s gifts is through self-designed ceremony. When we connect with something larger than ourselves, we bring in the holy and renew our connection with the more than human world. Through deep listening, we hear whispers from our guides and feel the heartbeat of our ancestors living in us. With the sacred offering of our attention, we receive messages from the Earth about what we can do to strengthen planetary diversity and remember our interconnectedness and belonging.

Weaving the mysterious and unquantified power of our mind with our human longing has the power to create change.

So much of our lives happen “underground.” The people in our lives often cannot see the shifts and changes we undergo or the thresholds we cross because so many of them are not immediately visible as we go about our days. Sometimes they even occur without our conscious knowing! These changes sometimes occur gradually and slowly until one day, you realize things are not what they once were. You are not who you once were. Other times, they happen all at once.…

I knew I wasn’t going to scratch the itch, but something had to give. So rather than continuing to try to push it away, I let it have me. I yielded all of my attention to the itch and it grew. The sensation took over my entire body. It came in great undulating waves, crashing into the boundaries of my skin before splashing back into the core of my body. The sensations were intense, crossing back and forth between pleasurable and painful. In some moments, I thought I was going to have an orgasm. The next, I thought I might throw up.

Preparing to write about pleasure tonight began with a small ritual…

I light a few candles and lift my sage bundle. It smells sweet, pungent, ashy. Touching the flame to its leaves, I drop into a deep breath and blow into glowing orange embers, entranced by their dancing light. Smoke swirls up and around my body, bathing me as I move from a feeling arising within. I’m present to the heat, the light, and the smoke transporting the dayworld into the mystical…