Beings Cited
An excerpt from Make Your Body the Prayer
Here I will cite both the humans who I’ve learned from and also the nature beings and ancestors. Although some of my learning took place through book-learning, the majority of my studies for this degree were experiential, so in this “vita-ography” I will describe the practitioners who I studied with and the many different textures of relationship that wove into my learning for this project.
BATESON, NORA.
Nora Bateson is a systems-poet, the creator of Warm Data Labs and the International Bateson Institute. Over the last year I have devoured everything I could of Nora speaking and writing about her practice: including her book Small Arcs of Larger Circles, her documentary An Ecology of Mind, her essays on Aphanipoeisis, What is Submerging, Tearing and Mending, Ready-ing, etc and also just about every YouTube and Spotify interview that she has ever done (including this conversation with Stephen Gilligan that I cite in my essay “The Absence is Part of the Teaching.”) Then this November I got to attend her Warm Data Labs host training over zoom, which was timed for people in Oceania, so for three weeks I stayed up from 1am-4am to participate in the classes and become a certified Warm Data host. Nora’s stories and theory opening out into so many nuanced possibles have been formative for my studies into transcontextual mutual learning, how epistemologies shape our perception, and the creative potential that waits in the liminal below the level of conscious awareness. The word “tissuing" which I use in the subtitle for my thesis originated as a poetic innovation of Nora’s which she shared in her essay on Aphanipoeisis.
CARRASQUILLO, DARE (SOHEI).
One half of the organization Animist Arts, Dare Carrasquillo’s practice illuminates the relational contortions of existing as a human within colonial culture, inviting the unpeeling of internalized layers of social threat and ablism, shifting nervous system patterns away from ruminating in ghostly trauma loops, making more space for ordinary presence, creative play, and the felt sense of belonging to the wider body of earth/ancestors/original mother/death. In their writings, podcast episodes, and teaching around Death Practice and animist clowning, they offer patterns that give dimensionality to a space of unknowing that is deeply familiar but rarely touchable with words. As I prepared to write this thesis project, I did a 1-1 session with Dare that was formative for my approach to creative process around complexity. Excerpts from the video recording of that session were shared in my first full length Long Body Prayers podcast episode “Everything is a Being.” Dare also responded to a social media post I made asking for advice about tracing the lineage of the term “Long Body,” which was also influential for my approach.
DANA, DEB.
Author of the books Anchored and the Polyvagal Flip Chart, therapist Deb Dana is able to translate the writing of Stephen Porges, the creator of Polyvagal Theory, into a much more accessible language for people like me who do not speak “science.” Dana’s background in Internal Family Systems also allows her a much more creative and (dare I say) animist approach to clinical discourses about the nervous system. Dana’s formulation of the three qualities of Choice, Connection, and Context needed for the nervous system to arrive into a sense of rooted “safety” were formative for my own approach to tissuing relationship between nervous system and ecosystem, providing the more mammalian half of the six textures of ecological belonging that I currently use as a framework in my practice. I participated in a two day online training in Polyvagal Theory and Nervous System mapping practices with Dana as part of the research for my degree.
DEEP TIME ANCESTORS.
After attending two short courses in the Ancestral Medicine tradition of ancestral healing, I developed relationships with four lineage guides who have been supporting me throughout the creative process of this project. Medicine Carrier, the guide for my father’s father’s lineage, supports my relationship to choice, discerning center, deep resting and replenishment, and the tending of wounded places. Life Praiser, the guide for my mother’s father’s lineage, supports my relationship to heart perception, gratitude, beauty, play, poetics, and artistic process. Mycelial Weaver, the guide for my father’s mother’s lineage, supports my relationship to systems thinking, the perceiving of pattern, underground neural networks, and metabolic process. Threshold Guardian, the guide for my mother’s mother’s lineage, supports my relationship to field intelligence, sacred boundaries, voice, vibration, and initiatory process. The voices of each of these guides are threaded through the oracle cards and the other channeled writings within this thesis.
GRANDMOTHER BIRCH TREE.
Grandmother Birch Tree is rooted in the forest on the Goddard Campus on Abenaki land in Plainfield, Vermont. She spoke to me when I went into the woods in a ritual to express the rage and grief I was carrying about the shape of absence within my culture. She is a Mother Tree, perhaps the parent of the younger birch sapling who I originally spoke to years before in another ritual in the same forest, perhaps also a relative to the adult birch tree who grows at the Shrine of the Divine Mother, also on Abenaki land, in Massachusetts. At a time in my culture where we are lacking a human equivalent of mother trees, lacking the cultural webbing that will support our maturation, Grandmother Birch Tree became a guide as I undertook my own initiatory journey into deeper intimacy with my body and relationship to the ecosystem that enfolds me.
GRANDMOTHER RIVER.
Many of my own deep moments of communion have happened at different places along the banks and the backwaters of the Mississippi River. I have now lived at three places where I was a short distance from her waters, and she has been one of my most consistent teachers about the relationship between solidity and flow, apprenticing to processes of thaw, and the subtle micro moments of choice through which fluid can reshape the landscape that is holding it. I say “grandmother river” here because I am not speaking only of the Mississippi but also of the Minnesota and St. Croix rivers that intermingle with her, with whom I have also had deep ritual encounters as the water flows between. The Mississippi meander maps by Harold Fisk have also been influential in my relationship to this body of water, witnessing her deep time existence in so many shapes across the landscape before colonization. Where I live now, the river flows just steps away from my apartment and there is a dam just upstream of me. Part of this latest iteration of relationship seems to be coming into more of a sensing about how the artificial constraints and boundaries of colonization shape possibility, while at the same time the river still continues her flow.
GREENBERG BENJAMIN, BREE.
The creator of The Possibility Program, Bree Greenberg Benjamin works with the energetic fields of living systems to illuminate constrictions and birth possibilities. Bree’s practice offers frameworks for the dissolving of dependency-based double binds and deepened attunement to liminality, liberation, and the movement of erotic life force. The trainings and classes I have participated in with Bree have helped me to shift some deep patterns in my system and have given me invaluable scaffolding for my own work as a practitioner. It is so rare to actually meet people who have really done the work of maturation and are holding that space open for others. Bree is one of the few practitioners I know who simultaneously embodies immense field coherence and also the chillness and realness of it kind of being no big deal at the same time. Her presence cuts through so much bullshit.
KAUL, LARISSA.
The other half of the organization Animist Arts, Larissa Kaul is a somatic practitioner who guides nourishing explorations into subtle sound and movement, deep experiences of coherence, and attunement to Absolute Nature as the primordial foundation of reality. Larissa’s guidance has been formative for me within my own somatic, ecological, and creative practice, sharing such concepts as “just right amount,” “relaxing effort,” and “feeling the earth feeling you.” I have participated in many classes with their organization Animist Arts, including being part of a year-long Practitioner Cohort that was a deep dive into embodied practice for decentering the "social anxiety static" and "fear of exile" which pops up just about everywhere within this culture, while simultaneously contacting the older-than-bone ritual medicine of elemental expression and embodied ceremony. The practices in the cohort were often deceptively simple, but the intricate weaving of sound, movement, belly honesty, secure attachment to death and eros, highly serious clowning, and unshakable orientation to the wisdom of the wider body wove a sense of deep relational ground that could hold the community in a space of deep ritual.
KOCH, LIZ.
Liz Koch is a conceptual artist and somatic practitioner whose practice Core Awareness weaves together teachings around fluid movement, biointelligence, and ecosystemic perception. I first encountered Liz’s practice through the delicious eco-poetics of her book Stalking Wild Psoas, which resonated with me so deeply that I began to study with Liz in her online workshops and her year-long Professional Application Course. Both the conceptual approach of Liz’s work "changing the language of the body from object to process” and the wide field of allowing that she brings to her guidance of somatic practices have been deeply formative for my own learning as a somatic practitioner and an animal organism.
THE LONG BODY.
The phrase “Long Body,” which I first learned from Bayo Akomolafe in the essay “I, Coronavirus. Mother. Monster. Activist,” is said to come from the Haudenosaunee/Iroquois. I tried to trace it back to more documentation about its original cultural context and who was it within Haudenonsaunee culture who first shared about it with a white person, but that context appears to have been invisibilized by the processes of colonization. The furthest I could trace it back is an essay from 1986, “Psi and the Phenomenology of the Long Body,” which cites an earlier university lecture from a Dr. Joseph Lyons. That’s where the trail runs dry. I tried writing to the Haudenosaunee confederacy website and several other indigenous scholars to inquire about the origins of the phrase but I did not hear back from them. I’m still open to learning more if anyone reading this has any other threads of relationship to follow. In terms of my own relationship to the phrase, eventually I turned to my community of animist practitioners to seek their advice for this conundrum. Dare Carrasquillo recommended relating to the spirit beings in the phrase directly and so I spent some time channeling about its origins with my own webbing of deep time ancestors. What emerged out of that experience of channeling is that the absence the phrase Long Body carries with it is also a part of its teaching.
MAITAKE MUSHROOM.
A very shy mushroom, according to my friend Fauna Gold, the Maitake Mushroom I cite in this thesis is a specific being who I met in the autumn of 2021 in a forest in the Wisconsin Driftless region, under the roots of an ancient oak tree. This mushroom started speaking with me in the forest, and when I asked if it was ok to harvest her body and eat her, she said no, but that I could harvest a small segment of her body to sit on my altar and listen to. I began sitting with the spirit of this mushroom being every day at my altar, and I ordered a maitake flower essence so that I could work with her energetically also. A colleague invited me to a council of all beings and I felt drawn to go as Maitake. Afterwards, it felt like Maitake had more to say and so I ended up interviewing her for my podcast Long Body Prayers. In that first conversation, “A Messenger From What is Still Connected” which edited down to about 90 minutes, Maitake and I talked about six textures of animist perception that I had been working with in my thesis research. Maitake had access to ways of perceiving and describing these things that it felt like there was a taboo in my own system around talking about. Four months later I had a second conversation with Maitake, “Make Your Body the Prayer,” in which she interviewed me, this time using footage of a Maitake channeling from three months earlier. This second conversation was more focused on my creative process around my thesis. You may well ask how Maitake and I, ostensibly sharing the same body, managed to enact two zoom conversations. One answer to that question involves time travel, the other involves some intensive video editing with the software PowerDirector.
MNI SOTA MAKOCE.
Land that is nurturing me. Home of turtles and rivers. Ancestral homelands of the Dakota people. Kelsey Marie Carlson’s thesis project, "We’d Always Return to This Center:” Understanding Urban Space as a Dakota Place in Mni Sota Makoce, was a helpful way of coming into deeper relationship with the network of sacred sites near where I live here. Anam Cara, a local center for cultural study and community practice, also names the other tribes who have lived with and tended Minnesota in a land acknowledgement that is often read before classes and gatherings: “We acknowledge that this land, which is named for the Dakota Tribe, is the traditional and ancestral homeland of the Dakota, Ojibwe, Ho-Chunk, Cheyenne, Oto, Iowa, and Sauk and Meskwaki people.” Other resources that have helped me learn about this land that holds me are the website www.sacredland.org/bdote and the Sacred Sites tour led by Jim Bear Jacobs, organized by Healing Minnesota Stories.
MY ANIMAL BODY.
Yes I am doing this, I am citing my own body as a resource here. This animal organism continues to be an immense teacher to me. I feel how my fascia and bones are sensing towards gravity differently now. I enjoy massaging my face and arms and legs, letting my own hands be a supportive presence through touch on the back of my neck, my solar plexus, my kidneys. My body plays with audible breath, exhaling like a wind sound, gently toning. My body is also a teacher through my experiences of chronic illness and environmental sensitivity that require me to slow down to a different rhythm of reality underneath the pushing through of the dominant culture.
NOURSE, KRIS.
Kris Nourse practices Rosen Method bodywork, Somatic Experiencing, spiritual direction and many other modalities through her organization Body Being. I’ve been receiving sessions and mentorship from Kris for the last three years. Her support has helped my body to attune to relationship with gravity, to be able to discern my system’s edges and boundaries, and to begin to learn about healthy ways to navigate trust and attachment healing with another human. Kris has also been a deeply skillful teacher for navigating shifting relational shapes as our dynamic evolved from practitioner-client into ongoing mentoring.
RAFFO, SUSAN.
Susan Raffo is a somatic practitioner and writer I have met in several different contexts, firstly at a community group in Minneapolis that I attended for a few years, then by steeping in her essays, of which “Gravity: The First Reflex” and “Embodying Impact,” were both deeply resonant. Susan was also my first (human) interview guest on the Long Body Prayers podcast, we had a conversation together that was released under the title “Being in the Awkward, Longing for the Slowness” where we talked about “moving at the speed of the slowest among us,” how we “create the conditions for ceremony,” and that “our kin have confused care and control as though they were the same thing.” The podcast interview was a rich and multi-layered conversation that I am looking forward to revisiting and reflecting on more in the future.
TURTLES.
Turtles have been primary teachers for me, present at both of the sit spots that have gestated my channeled writings, heads peeking above the surface of the water to listen while I sing. The turtles have taught me how to listen to the field of vibratory sensation and flowing life. They teach me to keep checking in with the above water while keeping most of my focus attuned to the below, reading the field in its ripples and tremulous cadences of becoming. They teach me to have a hard shell so I can be confident in my vulnerability, but also to know the moments in which to withdraw from the flow of energy and hold my own softness close. Teachers of submergence, turtles have consistently appeared in my life as a reminder of my belonging, from the stone turtle carving placed in the hollow of the Grandmother Birch Tree at the beginning of this journey, to the turtle nesting ground in the RV park I lived in while detoxing from mold toxicity and the anonymous crocheted turtle figure I received in a plastic bag on my trailer door, to the giant turtle sculpture that is walking distance from my current apartment.
WHITE, GORDON.
Gordon White is a magician and naturalist who wrote the book Ani.Mystic: Encounters with a Living Cosmos, which inspired this more relational way of playing with footnotes and annotations.
The above “vita-ography” describes some of the primary beings who have been guiding me throughout this project, but this is only scratching the surface of the wider web of research threads that have contributed to my learning. Below you will find several bulleted lists of additional resources gathered by field (made slightly more complicated by the fact that several of these people are practicing across multiple fields).
In the future I would like to play with making my citations into a mind-map that allows readers to view not only the sources, but the connections between the sources. For now, though, this gives a little flavor of some of the other resources that have contributed to my learning in the past three years:
EUROPEAN ANCESTRAL HEALING AND RITUAL PRACTICE
Ancestral Medicine practices for ancestral healing created by Daniel Foor
Carolyn Hillyer: short course at Schumacher College and participation in the Braided River online workshop journey
Joshua Schrei: The Emerald podcast
Martin Shaw: Scatterlings, short course at Schumacher college
Kari Tauring: The Runes: A Deeper Journey, webpage about volva stav practice
Azul Valerie Thome: workshop in Grief Composting Circle Facilitation, the convener of the council for all beings that led to the conversation with Maitake
Weller, Francis: The Wild Edge of Sorrow, workshops in The Healing Ground of Grief, A Dream of Burning: Reclaiming Ritual, and The Alchemy of Initiation.
ECOLOGICAL PERCEPTION
Francesca Mason Boring: Connecting to Our Ancestral Past, Nature Constellations online course, Family, Nature, and Systemic Constellation as Ceremony in-person workshop in Minnesota
Stephen Harrod Buhner: Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm, video recordings for his short course “The Living Touch of Wild Earth” at Schumacher College
Caffyn Jesse: Love and Death in a Queer Universe, Ecstatic Belonging online course
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Braiding Sweetgrass, essay on “The Grammar of Animacy”
Open Hearth Permaculture Program through Land By Hand with Megan and Cody Mastel
Suzanne Simard: Finding the Mother Tree
Sophie Strand: Facebook posts
Andreas Weber: Biology of Wonder, Enlivenment short course at Schumacher College, email correspondence
Peter Wohlleben: The Hidden Life of Trees
The Work that Reconnects: Earth Leadership Cohort with the Interhelp Network
INDIGENOUS WAYS OF KNOWING.
Bayo Akomolafe: The Wilds Beyond Our Fences, short course at Schumacher College, We Will Dance with Mountains online course, the essay “I, Coronavirus. Mother. Monster. Activist”
Francesca Mason Boring: see above
Eduardo Duran: Healing the Soul Wound, Buddha in Redface, Quantum Coyote Dreams the Black World, the essay “Medicine Wheel, Mandala, and Jung”
Robin Wall Kimmerer: see above
Pat McCabe: Earth Talks: Indigenous Ways of Knowing video, day-long workshop in Minnesota
Tyson Yunkaporta: Sand Talk, the Other Others podcast
INTERPERSONAL NEUROBIOLOGY AND POLYVAGAL THEORY.
Bonnie Badenoch: The Heart of Trauma
Jane Clapp: Movement for Trauma online training
Amber Elizabeth Gray: Spiraling into the Wild workshop with Liz Koch
Staci Haines: The Politics of Trauma
Iain McGilchrist: The Master and his Emissary
Darcia Narvaez: Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality
Resmaa Menakem: My Grandmother’s Hands
Sarah Peyton: Your Resonant Self, online workshops including Juicy Relational Skills for Intimacy, Power and Its Shadow constellations masterclass, Working with Transgression constellation masterclass
Raja Selvam: Pre- and Perinatal Trauma online training
SYSTEMIC CONSTELLATIONS.
Francesca Mason Boring: See above
Katherine Curran: Foundation Year of Minnesota Center for Constellations growth group, many evening and day-long constellation workshops
Jean Chagnon: The Impact of Complex Trauma and Moral Injury online workshop
Jan Jacob Stam: Organizational and Social Constellations workshop
Daan Van Kampenhout: The Tears of the Ancestors
Elena Veselago: online workshop with the Minnesota Center for Constellations
OTHER POETS AND PRACTITIONERS
Academy for Soul-Based Coaching
Mycelial mentoring and friendship with Fauna Gold
Ada Limón’s “Poetry at the End of the World”
Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”
Rooted and Rising movement workshops with Teresa Reid
Keening Coven retreat with Portia Richardson
Tada Hozumi’s Ritual as Justice School and writings about Cultural Somatics
Facebook posts from Daniella Matutes