These talks were performed in 2020. They are all available now on crowdcast (each one linked below), please venmo any amount to @ existingtogether if you watch one and benefit from it!
Part dharma talk, part performance, part astrology lesson, each of these talks is a way to spend time with yourself, to reflect on core human struggles, and cultivate a new vision with others. Each talk addresses a spiritual problem in intuitive association with the zodiac sign of the time we are in. Each offers reflections and new approaches to the problem. Talks for Collective Healing is a space for your mind and your heart to expand, just by attending, by being present to receive. These talks are a way to exist in the life-giving space of possibility, with other people who want to touch life directly, while breathing together, healing together, living together.
Each talk includes:
a guided meditation including tools you can use anytime to ground and settle yourself
a talk exploring the topic at hand using beginner’s mind
specifics on the astrological sign of the season we are in, and how it relates to the spiritual problem discussed
cultivating friendship and community through asking questions together
reflection and creating new practices for yourself for the upcoming month
q&a
Click on any image to read about and sign up for them!
I don't associate listening with the sign Leo really. But I just turned 40, and my Sun is in Leo, and what I want to do right now is listen. So I have asked a few lights of the world in human form to come to this talk, and talk.
I'll guide us in a mediation to practice listening to our bodies, ourselves. Then I'll ask these magic humans some questions, and we can all listen to their answers.
There will be poetry.
There will be art.
There will be endangered turtles.
Once upon a time I published books with my sister and hosted events that were about listening as a spiritual practice, even though we didn't call it that at the time. They were about looking at existence itself, in all its beautiful various forms, and that is what we are going to look at on a Sunday morning. Together.
The money for this event will be split three ways, evenly between me and each participant. Imogen Daly - a marine biologist who has spent years with desert tortoises. And Junior Clemons - a poet who specializes in listening. I promise they are people you want to spend a Sunday morning listening to.
In earlier drafts for this talk, these were the titles:
ON DOULAING THE DEATH OF YOUR WHITENESS
ON EXORCISING THE DEMON OF WHITENESS
To me, these phrases describe some of ongoing, loving work for us white people. But I didn't feel I'd landed on it until the phrase directed attention to what we are aiming FOR.
What role do us white people have in Black liberation?
An answer for me right now is becoming safer for others. Becoming one less person, one less place where Black people encounter violence.
In part we can do this through transforming our fragility - all of the ways we can't handle seeing, or repairing, or staying with, or changing - into resilience. An ability to handle, and even welcome our racism being exposed, knowing that it must be inevitable if it remains unconscious. An ability to connect to the purpose and vision and joy of that transformation so we can stay with it for the duration of our lifetimes.
This talk is a way to offer some tools I can share toward this end, and structured space for you to reconnect to your own tools on your path toward cultivating resilience in service of BIPOC.
(Anti-racism work is energy work. Energy work is internal and external actions.)
Do you also want to be safe for others?
If you do, this talk is for you. This talk is time and space to cultivate a vibrant meadow of practice that can hold all of our abjectness, all of our blindness, asleepness, innocence, ignorance, confusion, all of our fear, along with all of our love, and the transformation we are guided to by our love.
It is open to everyone, but specifically designed for white people who are interested in becoming safer for BIPOC. What does it mean to be safe for others? This is what we will explore together.
This is two hours of space to connect to your own wisdom, love, bravery and creativity in answering the question, “What can I do?” to contribute toward the thriving of Black people.
To contribute toward the thriving of Black people is to contribute toward your own thriving. Interconnectivity is not a metaphor. Part of the work we will do here is frame our personal internal work in the political context it truly exists within. And to frame our political work as the self-care work that it truly is. To spend some time discerning for ourselves, what is being self-obsessed and what is focusing on the self in order to transform it.
I'll also talk about the astrological shifts happening for what we call the USA, during this time of Cancer, which is the sun sign of this country.
For those of you who have been here before, you'll notice the sliding scale of this talk is different from the last three. This update is another iteration of what it looks like for me to simultaneously exist within and blast beyond capitalism at the same time.
Also, 100% of the money you pay for this talk will go to Black womxn's midwifery, doula, and lactation consultant education. Because when we heal the mothers we heal the world.
Click on the image below to read about and purchase a video recording of any past talk!
I've thought and written and facilitated about this over the years, offering some thinking here in this form of a talk for the time of Gemini, an energy of connection!
This feels even more important in the time of Corona, to attend to our internet lives.
What I mean by this is connecting to our bodies and our own intuition to discern when and how much time we spend on the internet. To bring conscious decision-making to this realm, where so often we go unconsciously, and go unconscious.
How do we engage with the reality of the internet in our lives without fantasy or denial about what is happening but instead with love, appreciation, and care for ourselves and each other?
We will meditate. We will do a ritual with our phones where we reset the energy, and you can take this with you to use anytime.
We will make a loving plan about how to be present with and on our phones, so that the time we are spending on the internet feels more embodied, more full of love and true connection. I will share some proposals about how to do this. Let's bring creativity and compassion to every part of our lives, especially this part that takes up so much space!
We'll cover online banking / money, internet dating, social media, emails / texting, and more.
I want your (and my) internet life to feel as alive and in balance as possible! This is what I can offer to contribute to that.
Past talks
What are your thoughts about your body and how do they affect your health, your sense of well-being, your inner peace?
That's what this talk will explore.
Where do these thoughts come from? Where and how do we learn what our body should be like, should do and be able to do, should look like, etc?
This talk will explore the unquestioned thoughts we have about our bodies and how they should be and look.
The goal of this talk is to help you move your attention from thoughts about the appearance of your body as the determining factor of your health toward your internal mental and emotional relationship to your body as the determining factor of your health.
Moving from "How does it look?" to "How does it feel?"
This is an area that is so unconscious, so inherited for so many of us. Bringing our own light of reflection to our bodies and their needs and desires can completely change our lives.
It feels especially relevant during the time of Taurus, the most embodied of all signs, the most earthly! We will connect to the ground of our bodies in the time of Taurus.
We'll experiment here with developing body-positivity THROUGH body-listening.
We will meditate (obviously!). I'll talk about the things I have been learning in this realm, the life-changing lens of loving reality that, when applied to thoughts about our bodies, can help us feel so much freer and more full of love and appreciation for our bodies.
I'll remind you of all the epic things your body is doing RIGHT NOW.
I'll guide an energy practice where you get some time to listen deeply and with deep love for your body. We'll connect to the truth that our bodies are nature, here to support our life on earth, not be an enemy with their desires.
We'll make a loving plan for how to take this listening practice into the next month. There will be time for Q&A. And all the adaptations that are necessary to address whatever arises in this realm.
Blessings on your body. I'm offering this talk on a sliding scale, from $1 to $122. Pay whatever is possible for you in this strange time.
I've been walking around with this title in my head for so long. And it seemed to fit with the spirit of Aries, such an initiator of action, and how so many of us in modern life feel there isn't enough time. And then corona is happening, and suddenly many people are feeling a different time experience because of it. The urgency of work / to do list shifted. And some people are still feeling the time famine, maybe even more.
So this will be different than I expected, imagined, because everything is different now. It seems more important than ever to explore our relationship to time, which is really our relationship to mortality!
In this talk we will:
-meditate to ground and clear our fields
-I'll share some physics about time (hint: it's not real, even according to science) and the implications of this
-proposals for a different relationship to time that help us feel like life is rushing by LESS and a sense that we are delighting in the joy available right now MORE
-explore time in our own lives through a guided energy practice
-make a loving plan to expand our sense of what time can be in the next month
-there will be time for Q&A and spontaneous adaptations, as this time indeed calls us to a new agility!
Talk 3
March 2020
Things that happen in life that will be addressed in a tender, honest way at this talk:
- loneliness in and out of partnership
- feeling that it is impossible to find love
- being rejected
- rejecting others
Some proposals I will offer in this talk
- a new definition of commitment
- ways to access joy and wholeness while desiring and pursuing romantic love
- ways to remember your true self cannot be rejected and that all “rejection” is nature guiding you back home to yourself
Purchase of this talk comes with unlimited replays.
Talk 2 · February 2020
On Social Justice and The Nervous System
To be safe for others we must be safe for ourselves.
I’ve always been annoyed at people saying you have to take care of yourself before you take care of someone else, and things like that. Even though they are true, kind of. They’re also not how we usually live, or want to live. We often motivate to care for ourselves because we care for others. (My new role as a mom shows me this so well.) And a lot of the time caring for others who are in way worse circumstances than ours feels way more urgent, and that’s a good thing! Sometimes what is good for us is to ‘neglect’ ourselves a bit and focus on helping someone else. We are relational beings and we evolve and heal together.
In this talk about social justice and the nervous system, we’ll explore how to get more conscious about what we long for when we say social justice. And how to listen to and love and practice with our nervous systems to build resilience so we can bask in the glory of alignment between our intentions and our actions. So we can commit to only what care really matches up with our deepest longings. So we don’t wait to arrive in an imaginary perfect state that may never come before we help others and we don’t wait for others to be healed or nurtured completely before we attend to ourselves.
I spent over 6 years as an activist for prison justice, and I’ve often felt a disconnect between my spiritual and activist selves, my spiritual and activist communities. This talk explores bridging that gap, and dissolving the perceived conflict between these two areas. It’s an election year. We can encounter that information with dread or we can encounter it with love and steady commitment to our aspirations. Our aspirations connect us to the pleasure and possibility of the present. Our problems, even collective ones, are a gift because they are the material circumstances through which we express love.
This talk will help you:
discern what you really long for and what you are capable of offering others and yourself
practice listening and deeply responding to your nervous system as a method to bring your intentions and actions into alignment, to access more hope, possibility, and clarity
engage the unique astrological opportunity of Aquarius and Uranus in 2020
connect to joy in the collective work you do or want to do
release guilt and shame, acting from obligation, and move into acting from love
enact prefigurative politics from the micro to the macro of your life
When you purchase a recording of this event, you can replay as many times as you like.
Talk 1 · January 2020
On Feelings and Capitalism
This talk will address capitalism as a spiritual problem. It will also address the sign Capricorn, what is happening with it currently, and how that relates to capitalism.
If you have ever felt heartache, despair, or anxiety at the thought of capitalism this talk is for you. If you have ever felt money stress this talk is for you. If you have ever felt guilt or shame for having stuff / money / privilege this talk is for you. If you feel like you can’t do what you love and make money this talk is for you. If you feel like you don’t want to make money because you hate it this talk is for you. If all you want is money, this talk is for you. If you have ever lamented the inequity in the world this talk is for you. If the lows of your emotional life are tied to money, capitalism, inequity, this talk is for you.
If you are a Capricorn this talk is for you. If you are any other sign this talk is for you. If you don’t know what sign you are this talk is for you. If you want to learn about astrology this talk is for you. If you want to find new ways of living through/beyond/in spite of/outside of capitalism this talk is for you.
If you are no longer available for the current conditions, this talk is for you. If you are ready to transform capitalism and transform yourself, this talk is for you.
When you purchase a video recording of this talk, you can replay as many times as you like.