I still have a few spots open for the current Ecosystem Spoons journey between equinox and solstice. You can learn more here if you’re interested in applying:
Ecosystem Spoons is a somatic support group that I offer for people who are living with energetic sensitivity, chronic illness, and/or neurodiversity that requires them to slow down to a different rhythm of reality underneath the pushing through of the dominant culture.
This video is a great way to learn more about somatic, systemic, and eco-poetic practice as it describes the main themes in my current work and offers short demos of different processes.
What are "Ecosystem Spoons"?
"I don't have the spoons for that," is a phrase that people living with invisible illnesses or neurodiversity will often use to describe the limits of their energetic capacity.
Those of us steeped within modernity are living in a society where there is a near-universal deficit of "spoons," as people are navigating exhaustion within a dominant culture shaped by overriding the discernment of the body, dissociating from the wider contexts of our relatedness, and feeling immense isolation because of a lack of authentic nutrients. So many of us carry an ingrained sense that the expression of our embodied aliveness will be "too much" for the capacity of the humans around us or even to ourselves when we're alone.
"Ecosystem Spoons" are the relational pathways of support that are often numbed or hidden within the perceptual narrowings of colonization. These pathways include the primal intelligence of our animal bodies, the support of nature beings and deep time ancestors, our access to rest and play, and enough spaciousness in our nervous system for curiosity and creative responsiveness when we encounter experiences of stuckness or overwhelm.
Through sensing into pathways of support beyond the rational human mind, Ecosystem Spoons offers an embodied experience of the way that perception can begin to shift when a wider sense of holding is possible.
In the container of Ecosystem Spoons, when a participant shares a deep thread of their experience, I will often invite the whole group to pause, to feel into the web of beings that holds us—this wide nest of support from the land and radiant ancestors, presences of wider capacity and a deeper context of time than the humans in the space—and I will invite the person who shared to energetically stay with the experience-texture that’s moving for them, and just feel the fullness of the web that is there with them in that process of existing.
Those moments of shared presence can be deeply whole-ing, as even just five minutes of that being-with without needing to change anything subtly allows the experience to breathe and feel itself witnessed in a way that gives it permission to transform.
So much of our experience has just not had enough air time to be held within a space of aliveness without needing to contort itself to belong.
This is how creative change can emerge. Slowly, subtly, as unfolding process over time. Through the being-with, through the meeting what is without needing it to be different. Through feeling of being accompanied, even just for a moment, in the fullness of your expression of aliveness.