"Trust the Ground" is my threshold offering as I’m growing community around my practice. It is a free gift for all who are interested in learning more about my work.

LONG BODY PRAYERS: AN ANIMIST ORACLE

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 was created as a collaboration of channeled writing between nature beings, deep time ancestors, and animal body as part of the embodied practice for my graduate studies into ecological belonging.

The oracle deck is also the frame for a book that I’m currently writing as my graduate thesis—a collection of embodied essays exploring the question “what is the edge between nervous system and ecosystem?”

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 in the following ways—by printing the attached pdf of "Printable Oracle Poems" or writing out the names of the oracle cards and textures longhand, then cutting the paper into strips for each title and putting them into a hat, or by associating the names of the Long Body Prayers cards with another divination form that you use such as norse runes or another deck that has 24 cards.

FIELD RECORDINGS FOR BITE-SIZED SOMATIC PRACTICE

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.)

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.

A slightly longer form of this practice is a major part of the guidance I’ve been offering during Ecosystem Spoons, my somatic support group for people experiencing body sensitivity or chronic illness. The practices are modeled on guidance that has helped me in my own living with bodily discomfort and emotional contractions, in being able to sense the holding of a wider container and find places of nourishment and ground.

This modeling process around attuning to body, land, and radiant ancestors through embodied expression and nourishment is a foundational framework for entering into a sensing of ecological belonging.

The practices are informed by many threads of my somatic studies , and are especially influenced by the frameworks for embodied practice that I have learned from Larissa Kaul of Animist Arts and Liz Koch of Core Awareness . Both Larissa and Liz teach through their own somatic engagement with the practices they are sharing, with the audible sounds of their own process creating a container for deeper landing for all.

I have found that practicing-alongside someone whose system has been steeping in this kind of attunement is the most accessible way to deepen into my own relationship to grounding and ease in my own system. There’s some basic young attachment dynamics around feeling accompanied in the presence of someone who is also dropping into presence through their breath and their sounding.

Some suggestions for how to use the practices:

As mammals, we are deeply sensitive to energetic resonance and the relational modelling of others who are shaped like us, so even just listening to these practices while doing other things like driving or housework can invite an energetic shifting happen where more breath, yawning, and grounding might be possible.

Another great way to practice along with the recordings is while resting in bed or in a bathtub, allowing the energetic container to support your system into dropping into a deeper layer of your own nourishment and rest.

I also imagine people using these field containers at the beginning of conversations with loved ones or even group meetings for community-tending if they are needing to access a nervous system state shift into more ground and support together.