Ground of Being
Coming Home to Ourselves, Each Other, and Life
We spend an extraordinary amount of our lives trying to become who we think we need to be.
More confident. Less sensitive. More successful. Less afraid. Better at relationships. Better at handling life.
There are certainly things we can learn and ways we can grow.
But I’ve become interested in a different question:
What if growth doesn’t require us to begin with the assumption that something is wrong with us?
Most of us have learned ways of being that helped us belong, succeed, stay safe, be loved, keep the peace, or simply make our way through the world.
Those adaptations aren’t false or wrong. Many were remarkably intelligent ways of taking care of ourselves.
But sometimes we continue living from them long after we need to.
We override what we know. Distrust what we feel. Say yes when we want to say no. Look outside ourselves for reassurance. Judge parts of ourselves we don’t understand. Become someone slightly different depending upon who is in the room.
And eventually we may barely notice we’re doing it.
Ground of Being creates room to notice.
Not so we can find one more thing about ourselves to fix.
So we can become curious about what is actually here.
What Happens When We Stop Making Ourselves Wrong?
Something rather interesting.
We don’t become complacent.
We become clearer.
When we aren’t spending so much energy defending ourselves from our own judgment, we have more room to see what we’re feeling, what we’re doing, what matters to us, what no longer serves us, and what we actually want to choose next.
We begin to discover a different kind of self-trust.
Not confidence that we’ll always get things right.
Trust that even when we don’t, we don’t have to abandon ourselves.
That changes more than our relationship with ourselves.
It changes how we meet other people.
And eventually, how we meet life.
ME
Being Fully Me
Some Ground of Being experiences begin with the most intimate relationship we have: the one with ourselves.
The Genius of Non-Judgment™
Meeting Yourself Without Making Yourself Wrong
What becomes possible when judgment loosens enough for curiosity to enter?
Coming Home to Yourself
An Experience of Authenticity
An exploration of the adaptations we’ve accumulated and what happens when we don’t have to tear them away in order to rediscover who we are underneath them.
Embodied Self-Trust
Esteeming the Person You Already Are
Through conversation, reflection, movement, Feldenkrais, creative expression and embodied experience, we explore what happens when we listen to ourselves rather than continually overriding what we feel, know, want or experience.
WE
Meeting Each Other
And then there are other people.
Which makes everything more interesting.
We want to be honest without hurting someone. Listen without disappearing. Disagree without fighting. Be understood without having to persuade.
And the more something matters, the harder that can become.
Ground of Being experiences around relationship include:
Having Difficult Conversations
Staying Connected When Something Matters
Impactful Communication™
Four Steps for Saying, and Hearing, What Matters
Beyond the Divide
Difference, Expression, Listening, and Human Connection
A Place Where Truth Is Safe
Trust, Honesty, and Relationship With Our Children
These aren’t experiences in learning how to say everything perfectly.
We practice something more fundamental: remaining connected to ourselves while becoming genuinely curious about the person in front of us.
We speak.
We listen.
We notice assumptions.
We distinguish what happened from what we’ve made it mean.
And we discover whether two people can remain distinct without requiring difference to become separation.
I remain fully me. You remain fully you. Can relationship remain too?
WOMEN
Giving the Whole Woman Room to Breathe
There is something different that can happen when women have room to bring their whole lives into the same space.
Not the professional self here, the sexual self there, the spiritual or creative self somewhere else.
Simply the whole woman.
Women’s Experiences explore dimensions of being feminine such as creativity, sexuality, work, relationship, spirituality, motherhood, aging, desire, identity and the body.
Ongoing Women’s Circles create space for whatever is actually alive: work, love, anger, aging, children, sex, grief, ambition, spirituality, creativity, exhaustion, delight.
Women’s Fire Circles bring us together around something very old and very human: women, fire, time, conversation, storytelling, witnessing, silence and laughter.
There is no ideal woman we’re trying to become.
We make room for the woman who is already here.
ALL
Being in Relationship With Life
Not everything we experience needs to be solved.
Grief doesn’t need to be hurried into meaning.
Nature doesn’t need to become scenery for our personal development.
Our bodies aren’t simply things to manage.
And gathering with other human beings doesn’t always require an outcome.
Walking Home
Nature, Movement, and Belonging
Walking, Feldenkrais™, embodied awareness, silence, conversation and time in the natural world invite us to remember that nature isn’t something we’re standing outside looking at. We belong here too.
Held
Being With Grief Without Asking It to Leave
Room for grief without asking us to solve it, rush it, explain it neatly, find the lesson, or move on.
Gathering & Belonging
Fire, Seasons, and the Simple Human Act of Coming Together
Fire. Food. Seasons. Stories. Beginnings and endings. Celebration and loss. Sometimes we gather simply because gathering itself matters.
What Might You Discover?
There is no particular place you are expected to arrive through these experiences. What emerges will be your own.
You may find yourself trusting your own knowing more readily. Recognizing old adaptations without making yourself wrong for having needed them. Saying what matters without diminishing yourself or another person. Listening differently. Feeling more at ease with uncertainty and difference. Experiencing your body as something to listen to rather than manage. Making room for grief and joy to exist beside one another.
Or perhaps simply experiencing more of yourself in your own life.
Not becoming someone new. Becoming more fully yourself.
Come As You Are
Ground of Being experiences can take many forms: individual workshops, day retreats, weekend and multi-day retreats, multi-session programs, ongoing circles, fire and seasonal gatherings, and experiences created specifically for a particular community or setting.
Some involve conversation.
Others may include storytelling, silence, movement, Feldenkrais, nature, creative expression, fire, or simply the experience of being listened to without someone trying to fix anything.
The form changes.
The invitation underneath it does not:
To come into a different relationship with ourselves, with one another, and with the life we are already living.
And perhaps, somewhere within it all, to discover that the place we’ve been looking for may not be somewhere we need to get to.
I look forward to working with you!