"Trust the Ground" is my threshold offering as I’m growing community around my practice. It consists of a recording library for 10 minute guided somatic practices, associated with the 24 cards of the Long Body Prayers oracle deck.
FIELD RECORDINGS FOR BITE-SIZED SOMATIC PRACTICE
The guidance of these practices are all invitations, the medicine is not so much the prompts as the container itself, the mammal-to-mammal nervous system permission to pause, to be accompanied in a moment of grounding, to feel the wider webbing of support holding you.
You are especially invited to nibble from these practices when you are noticing yourself feeling activated or dissociated, needing a sense of being held and gently invited back into a sense of presence and listening with what is moving in your body.
I call these guided somatic practices “Field Recordings” because they carry the relational field of my nervous system in ordinary moments of grounding, embodied attunement, and calling in the support of a wider container.
(And also because of the other sense of "field recording" in that these are recorded in the everyday context of my home with sounds of life in the background including occasional dog whines and train sounds.)
Here's a sample of one of the practices:
LONG BODY PRAYERS: AN ANIMIST ORACLE
Created by Shante' Sojourn Zenith from oracular conversations with land, animal body, and deep time ancestors
Throughout this course, you will encounter the 24 cards of the Long Body Prayers Animist Oracle deck, each with an accompanying bite-sized somatic practice for any moment in which you are wanting to land deeper into relationship with body and ecosystem.
This oracle deck emerged through channeled ancestral and ecological encounters as part of my Embodiment Studies graduate thesis, Make Your Body the Prayer.
The process began in relationship to a Sit Spot at a local marsh, where I would spend hours communing with nature beings, deep time ancestors, and my animal body through song, movement, and trance.
The following winter, the writing from these encounters distilled itself into 24 poems, the spirits of which I transmuted into a painting. When the painting was finished, I cut it into 24 squares and wrote one of the poems on the back of each card, creating an oracle in which each card was a fractal of the wider ecosystem.
The title of the deck invokes "The Long Body," a phrase stemming from Haudenosaunee culture, which gestures towards the self as a fractal ecosystem held within ancestral and ecological fields of relationship.
If you have a physical copy of the Long Body Prayers deck in your home, you can use the cards for spontaneous divination of a somatic practice by pulling a card and then finding the associated texture and card name in this online course as an invitation for bite-sized somatic practice.
If you don't have a physical copy of the Long Body Prayers deck, you can still engage in this kind of divinatory somatic practice by printing the attached pdf of "Printable Oracle Poems" or another DIY way of associating the oracle cards with your own method of divination.