Setting Down What is Not Mine to Carry Alone
I first met my mentor Bree Greenberg in an online practitioner cohort through Animist Arts when she joined the zoom breakout room open space I had convened around “Channeled Cosmological Maturational Mappings.”
This was one of the first times that I had shared the primordial pattern knowings that were coming through me, which over the next year were to mature into my thesis project for my Embodiment Studies masters research:
“For most of human ancestry, original cultures have perceived the self as a fruiting body emerging out of an ancestral-ecological field of relationship. This field is the foundation of reality. Its unshakeable nature is an acceptance of what is, nothing is exiled from it, everything belongs. This unified field presence is accessed within each person by an attunement with their “center,” an internal convergence of relational fields that allows for creative responsiveness with the wider ecosystem. Learning to perceive this felt sense of discerning center is a trans-generational maturational process. A child coalesces a sense of center through mediated experiences of this primordial field that flow through the nervous systems of their adult caregivers as if from a portal. We learn our belonging by being held by beings who are also held.”
Bree spent most of that breakout room listening to me sharing this. At the time I knew nothing about her and she seemed very unassuming to me. I remember being surprised that I felt like she actually understood what I was talking about when it seemed like what I was attuning to was completely imperceivable to most people.
That next year, Bree started making Facebook posts about her insights into maturation as an initiatory process and I started participating in the first zoom groups that she offered sharing about her own model around the field of existence. I soon learned that as well as being a therapist who ran the first holistic health clinic for eating disorders in Vermont, she also was a spiritual practitioner who understood the journey of energetic emergence that I had not been able to find context for through any other guide, and that she had a view of the roots of addiction and exploitation within collective social systems as a distortion of relationship to embodied power through the flow of the erotic from the unified field of existence.
Discovering Bree's immense body of work and specific knowledge she has from thousands of sessions with clients has been such a relief to the part of me that felt like I had to carry what I was receiving alone, with no one who had already walked the path.
I had experienced so many relational ruptures with previous mentors and teachers, so many moments in which the lack of capacity in our relational field would become overwhelmed by unmetabolized trauma dynamics that were keeping in place distorted systems of domination.
Learning from Bree was a deep breath of clear spaciousness where intimacy, integrity, and embodied power create space for direct honesty to emerge.
Over the last year I’ve had the immense honor of getting to midwife the gestation of Bree’s potent body of work around The Movement of Existence. I’ve experienced this work as a participant, as a student practitioner, and also as a creative consultant witnessing Bree’s visionary process around it.
One of my roles supporting Bree’s work has been tending the video archive of all her past teachings and editing them into metabolizable portions for her upcoming Foundations course. Recently in the process of that, I happened on the recording of the very first group I ever participated in with her, Resolving the Irresolvable, and re-listened to an exchange between us that was such a formative moment of my own growing.
At that time when I had just started studying with Bree, my disillusionment with all forms of spiritual practice and relational intimacy was at its most intense, and this isolation was creating such a blockage in my practice because I was feeling paralyzed by the immensity of what was wanting to be shared through me. I realized that for so long I’ve felt like I have to be the precocious young one showing the older ones how to heal so that they would have capacity to hold me.
The first glimmer of a different possibility emerged at the end of that very first class with her when I felt her capacity of articulating and bringing presence to the patterns that I had been sensing in the collective field, and I realized that I’d been trying so hard to carry all the immensity of these collective patterns and their resolutions and that I was feeling so alone in it because the specific pattern knows around maturation that I was perceiving were something that nobody else I knew was speaking about.
In that moment of hearing Bree speak of them, I was finally able to turn towards myself and ask: “What can I put down? Out of all of this, what is mine to carry?”
When I shared this in the group, Bree talked about how she had also had that experience in moving through this process for herself as a way to try and find a way through something that it feels like nobody was speaking about or could resonate with.
“I encourage you to put it down,” Bree said. “There will always be more space for more of yourself to come through when you put it down.”
Cut to three years later, when my whole life has rearranged as part of that hinge moment of releasing what is not only mine to carry.
Deep collective visions are still mine to tend, but the heaviness and aloneness I once felt around them has almost completely dissipated. I know that I am not alone here. And it is so moving to me to now be supporting the wider emergence of this collective body of work that is The Movement of Existence. And that the above exchange between me and Bree will actually be included as one of the practitioner training modules for the upcoming Foundations course that I am a teaching assistant for.
This work changed has my life. In very subtle, ordinary, but utterly reorganizing ways that have given me so much more access to my own existence, my expression, and my trusting in the essence that I am here to embody.
Foundations starts on Tuesday.
