The Sanctuary Circle:
Earth Rhythms of Belonging, Resilience and Collective Liberation
You belong here, on this Earth.
You have a deep center of wisdom that connects you to all of creation. And right now in these turbulent times the world needs you navigating from that deeply rooted place.
But I know from personal experience: it's hard to do that by yourself.
In this rich rhythmic immersive journey of seasonal community practice, you will be nurtured in foundational skills of shifting out of survival mode and consistently anchoring to your innate resilient center.
We will do this together for the mutual thriving of yourself, your kin, your community, your ecosystem and all of creation.
Is this you?
- You feel overwhelmed or powerless in the face of personal, national and/or global crises, including the ecological crisis and white supremacy
- You feel stuck or uncertain about significant life choices, and unsure how to discern your own path
- You want to feel more at home in your body and in sync with healthy body rhythms while being of great service to our world
- You feel disconnected from healthy ancestry and isolated from nourishing community
- You’ve been burned by or estranged from mainstream religious institutions, and are tired of the judgement and rigidity
- You are longing for healthier community and culture for yourself and your family
OR maybe you feel personally very well-balanced and resourced AND...
- You want to deepen your sense of belonging and reciprocity within your own body, community, ecosystem and the land
- You desire more opportunities to integrate and decolonize Christian and non-Christian paradigms and traditions
- You want to expand your resilience tool kit
- You want to enjoy culturally rich seasonal celebrations with like-practicing friends
- You want to be of service and share your gifts rooted in physical place and community
This circle is designed to nurture you to:
- Build foundational skills of deep resilience and well-being
- Move through overwhelm and develop a strong, trustworthy internal compass calibrated for making clear choices in the areas of life that matter to you
- Clear self-doubt and nurture an unshakable trust and sense of being at home in your own being
- Shift paralysis and reactivity into creative responsiveness to the problems facing our beautiful, complex and ever-shifting world that we navigate together
- Practice Grief-and-Celebration-as-Resistance to the great dis-eases of dominant culture and crises of the world
- Build real, sustaining relationships of mutuality and reciprocity within the web of human, more-than-human, visible and invisible relationships of which we are are a part
- Engage simple, rich ancestral wisdom in culturally respectful, decolonizing and liberative ways
Blessings and Acknowledgements
I want to offer here a deep bow of gratitude to the earth that is my home, and from which the wisdom of living in good-enough relationship with all creation emerges. Thank you to the elemental forces, animals, plants, waters, sun and moon, and the more-than-human teachers, guides and allies that have nurtured this work in visible and invisible ways. Blessings and acknowledgements to the Coast Salish peoples, gentle stewards of the land I occupy and that has been a primary teacher and nurturer of this work. Thank you to my spiritual and biological ancestors, to my teachers and the communities of practice from which this work emerges. In particular, this offering draws heavily the work and mentorship of Larissa Kaul, Dare Sohei, Tada Hozumi and the now-dissolved Ritual as Justice School. It is also informed by 15+ years of contemplative embodiment practice, study and facilitation in the realms of trauma-informed yoga, Kashmir Shaivism, interspiritual contemplative practice, Christian spirituality and church history, earth-based spirituality, Chinese medicine, the Celtic calendar, intercultural pastoral care, and psychic energy medicine. Deep thanks to the additional mentorship and loving guidance of Najeea Leslie, Nancy Rebecca of Intuitive Mind, Kathleen Bellefeuille-Rice and Diane Whalen of the Holy Wisdom Inclusive Catholic Community; and also to the scholarship, mentorship and intellectual labors of Dr JP Kang, Dr Kj Swanson, Dr Jennifer Fernandez, and Dr Angela Parker. It is with gratitude to each of them, all my teachers and guides, and all of the stewards of the wisdom traditions worldwide, known and unknown, that I make this attempt to respectfully hold, share from, and evolve my small piece of the puzzle. May it be one small offering of restoring/returning my Christian lineage back to the composting earth.
What You Get Inside the Sanctuary Circle
Light-hearted earth-based seasonal rhythms and celebrations for collective lament and joy
Attentive mentorship and close-knit community, engaged in resource sharing with each other and our wider ecosystems
Local, land-based, liberatory, contextualized, emergent group process
Profound, non-bypassing, yet accessible sense-making framework, language and practices
A cyclical, organic learning model designed for you to integrate and deepen at your own pace, and be creative with your learnings
Skill-building for good-enough relating to each other and our complex world
What makes the Sanctuary Circle so Different?
- This isn't a magic bullet or weekend "transformational" intensive. This is a year-long journey because it takes time to build relationships and experience deep, lasting change
- This is not a solo journey. Environment is stronger than will power, which is why we are creating a cultural container to support and hold the shape of the collective vision.
- The Sanctuary Circle has some 'church-like' attributes, but it's not a church. We explore and play with Christian themes because they are so deeply a part of the white western lineage, but aim to do so non-prescriptively. We value contextual practice towards harmony over confession of belief.
- This is not like other courses that give you tons of pre-recorded content and then leave you to your own devices. The Sanctuary Circle consists of frequent, consistent live group contact points so you won't fall through the cracks.
- This is not a linear, progress-and-expertise-driven information dump. Rather, through rhythmic, cyclical learning, we let the earth, our ecosystems, our bodies, and the web of our relationships be our primary texts and teachers
What Past Participants of the Sanctuary Circle say:
Beth S.
“I’ve just learned an entirely new framework for thinking and understanding. There are so many areas of my life and in the world that have become clear in looking at things through this lens of cultural attachment, somatics, animism…. This has impacted my ability to have more fun with my daughter, engage more fully in the cycles and regenerative nature of the earth, and provided me with specific practices to draw on when I feel undersupported and overburdened...reconnecting with my own relationship as a human animal on this earth.
JL, Psychologist
[The Sanctuary Circle is] a very nourishing space...a set aside place to learn and practice body based practices that connect within the self, to community, and to the larger ecosystem, with a strong eye to justice and our cultural lenses...The animist/somatic practices have been really transformational in building a steadily traveled path to inhabiting my own body and being able to draw on my own wisdom and knowing. It's been a 'slow simmer' sort of process which initially may have undershone its eventual build and significance.
Megan Thornton
I love doing this work as a group. Kate understands that we are stronger and better in community, contributing our varied voices and experiences to the work of the whole, and she is such a skilled facilitator. Attending circle felt a bit like going to my dream church, and maybe something like the early Christian gatherings. This work has over time directly impacted my ability and willingness to slow down, listen to my body, and tune in to my feelings. It shines a light on my path towards healing my own generational trauma, connecting with earth, ancestors, feeling at home in my body, working with challenging relationship dynamics, and more fully stepping into my life's calling.
What's Included in the Sanctuary Circle
This offer arises from the land of the Coast Salish peoples, aka Tacoma, Washington State. The Circle is designed in rhythmic layers, for folks to dance in and out as suits them while we collectively hold the pulse/beat. Some of you, if you live near me, may only ever join things that are live/in-person; others may stick to just the online format because you live on other lands or because that is just more accessible to you (also, pandemic, so...yeah.)
EARTH RHYTHMS: 8 live, in-person, outdoor, land-based celebrations of the seasons’ turning
These Earth Rhythms form the roots/bass line, from which all the other rhythms arise. In my lineage (Irish-Celtic) these were called the Quarter Days (Summer and Winter Solstice, Fall and Spring Equinox) and the Cross-Quarter Days (the midpoints between the solstices and equinoxes). Many animist cultures worldwide have observed these seasonal changes in some fashion.
MOON RHYTHMS: A Full Moon live, outdoor Eucharist + Song Circle
These Moon Rhythms on or near the Full Moon will be a chance to practice listening to and syncing with the Moon/Yin essence, which has been vastly undervalued in dominant Western culture. The practice will be a song circle, followed by a simple Eucharist--a sharing of simple elements in remembrance of our participation in and belonging to each other and creation.
Details for Earth + Moon Rhythms:
- Exact dates, times and locations will be announced at the beginning of each month, and subject to slight variations based on the weather.
- Earth + Moon Rhythms will include live-stream audio for folks to join remotely, while attending to the land and the ecosystem in which they live.
- Earth + Moon Rhythms will also eventually be made available as donation-based public community offerings. This is in alignment with a wider commitment to accessibility, hospitality, and giving back.
CIRCLE RHYTHMS: 5 modules of seasonally oriented circle practice: 3 weekly series and 2 weekend retreats.
These circle rhythms weave together themes and practices from animist somatics, energy medicine, the ecological calendar, and the christian liturgical year. Each module provides more concentrated learning and practice time and highlights a different foundational aspect of the Sanctuary Circle. The modules are cyclical, synced with nature's rhythms and the christian liturgical year. Each module can stand alone and the modules can be done in any order. However, themes, concepts and practices will consistently reappear throughout the year, with some clear through-lines to the other modules. The recordings allow you to come back and complete a module at any point during your year, if you aren’t able to make it to the live sessions.
Details
- All circles will be online, via zoom, and recorded for internal use.
- Exact dates and times TBA
- See module breakdown below for complete descriptions
Circle Rhythm Modules
MODULE 1 Foundations of Personal Practice
Simple Daily Sacred: A Lenten Practice of Everyday Spiritual Nourishment with 5 Ingredients (you already have) (5 week series, March-April)
Having a spiritual life doesn’t have to look like getting struck by the Light of the Lord on the road to Damascus, or sitting in a mountain cave till enlightenment finds you. In this lenten journey, we will explore engaging and nurturing 5 simple ingredients that you already have in order to access that slower, deeper wisdom inside and around you.
Module 2 Foundations of Group Practice
Rebelonging: Basic Skills of Animist-Somatics for Good-Enough Relating to a Complex World (A weekend retreat, May)
In this experimental/ experiential practice, folks will be nurtured in some basic skills of good-enough relating, and what I consider to be the pre-requisites to all other group/culture work, through building one’s own felt sense of belonging. This will include the basics of cultural somatics, drawing on key concepts in neurobiology, attachment theory and animist worldview; as well as simple culturally respectful body-based practices to support your own inner sensing, navigation, self-sovereignty, and resilience in your nervous system-in-relationship to others.
Module 3 Foundations of Animism + Christianity
Agape Sluts: A Queer Bible Study (5 week series, June-July)
Agape Sluts is an experimental experiential space of Christian-inspired eroticism, of which the Agape Sluts Bible study is a very gentle, low-key introductory derivative. We will practice animist-somatic sensing skills applied towards approaching and engaging the Bible as an ancestral record and an animate Being active in our individual and collective eco/nervous system(s). Through whole-body sensory listening and a queer hermeneutic (interpretive lens), we will practice being with the Bible and the biblical tradition and explore the possibility of better attachment relationships to Christian texts, stories and ancestors.
Module 4 Foundations of Liberatory Embodiment
Nourish: A Body-Earth Homecoming (weekend retreat, September)
Do you long to feel at home in your body? This weekend retreat is an autumnal pause from the culture of dis-embodiment and perpetual productivity in order to dance with the cosmic elemental forces--earth, water, fire, air and space. Drawing on principles of Ayurveda, energy medicine, animist somatics, trauma-enformed embodiment practice, and habit formation we will practice deepening our experience of ease, strength, nourishment and self-worth in our own skins. You will have the option to design a seasonal cleanse practice that we will implement together over the following weeks.
Module 5: Foundations of Death-Pleasure Practice
Holy Darkness: An advent-epiphany pilgrimage (6 week series, November/January)
Dominant Christian and New Age spirituality tends to talk about darkness as something to be feared or defeated, the domain of evil and the antithesis of light. However, the natural world, our bodies, and many threads of mysticism and animist practice around the world offer a different nondual relationship to darkness: it is the Dark Mother, the sacred womb, the realm of rest, restoration, dreams, and the transformative portal of death. This communal pilgrimage into the sacred Advent womb is a response to winter’s darkness, beckoning towards letting go, simplicity, quietude, spaciousness, and the worlds of dreams and ancestors.
Bonus Opportunities Include:
- Twice Annual Communal Grief Ritual: 1 online, 1 outdoor in person; exact date/time TBA
- Monthly community office hours + Somatic Playshop with Kate (Dates/Times TBA) This is a more informal space for somatic skills partner practice, general Q&A, special topics mini-lectures, and guest teachers.
- RESILIENT OPTION: Monthly 1-on-1 sessions with Kate, a combination of psychic readings + somatic resilience mentorship.
- Lightly curated online community space through Mighty Networks
Sign up before April 9th and get a bonus 1-on-1 with Kate. Pay in full and bring a friend for free to all Earth and Moon Rhythms.
Why is the Sanctuary Circle so important right now?
If the patterns of past empires are any indicator, we are living at the brink of collapse. It is already happening in many corners of our nation and world. Ecologies and systems across sectors are reaching their breaking point. The extreme polarities of politics, worldviews, and access to resources are staggering and seemingly irreconcilable. These coming years and decades will likely continue to be turbulent, unpredictable and painful.
What is on the other side of this portal? And how will we get through it?
Honestly: these are the questions that keep me up at night. I don’t know if I have any answers, but it is through wrestling with the reality of the world as I see it that The Sanctuary Circle has emerged.
I see this as something of an attempt at what Margaret Wheatley describes as an “island of sanity”, a buoy anchored to that deepest source of love-life within each of us and within creation that might offer us a touchpoint to Reality, a reference point from which to navigate the coming changes with even a tiny bit more skill, honesty, groundedness, courage and companionship.
This is a particularly unique, emergent space of where I am inviting more of the beings from my christian lineage to come play: through the practices of Eucharist, the liturgical year, queer bible study as ancestral listening, and through the erotic energies of Jesus and Mary. Because white christianity has been the dominant colonizing force of this era, it has been my sense that we won’t be able to move forward in a whole way if we don’t integrate that ancestry back into the web of belonging. All this weaves with the animist somatics and trauma-informed embodiment work I’ve been doing for the past decade to form what I think will be a pretty rad, one-of-a-kind experience (if I may say so!).
"[The Sanctuary Circle] offers an understanding of how to connect with traditions that I’ve lost over generations of work, toil, colonialism, and 'progress' and remember that I have access to ancient wisdom and tradition. It feels like it helps me find home."
Beth S.
Here’s a Recap of Everything You Get in the Sanctuary Circle
8 live, in-person, outdoor, land-based celebrations of the seasons’ turning: $1000 VALUE
13 Full Moon live, outdoor Eucharist + Song Circle: $1500 VALUE
5 Week Lenten Series: Simple Daily Sacred: $500 VALUE
Spring Weekend Retreat: Rebelonging: Basic Skills of Animist-Somatics for Good-Enough Relating to a Complex World: $600 VALUE
5 Week Summer Series: Agape Sluts: A Queer Bible Study: $500 VALUE
Fall Weekend Retreat: Nourish: A Body-Earth Homecoming: $600 VALUE
5 Week Advent Series: Holy Darkness: An Advent Pilgrimage: $500 VALUE
2 Journeying with Grief communal rituals: $500 VALUE
Monthly community office hours with Kate: $1400 VALUE
Bi-Weekly check-ins/prompts through online community space on Mighty Networks: $1400 VALUE
Optional Monthly 1-on-1 Psychic Readings + Somatic Resilience Sessions with Kate: $3000
The total value: $8,500-$11,500
But don't worry, you won't pay that.
Enroll now to get all this for less than half of that.
Our Economic Philosophy
We recognize the inherent classist, racist and ableist dynamics that inevitably are at play when being in business in the dominant cultural and modern world. Our hope is to make high quality services available to anyone with a sincere desire to participate. We are happy to invite folks of financial means, particularly if you are white and/or you have access to ancestral wealth, to join our web of reciprocity. Well-priced offers allow us to be sustained while also providing free, low-cost and sliding scale services to resource-poor folks in crisis and/or with severe trauma symptoms; as well as to offer sliding scale and free options for folks from cultures from which many of the modern ‘healing’ practices are derived—black, brown, and indigenous.
Additionally, 5% of all program profits are redistributed to local black and brown persons, healers, and black and brown-led community organizations. It is our commitment and a work in progress to practice ethical economics. If you’d like more details on where our money is going, we’re happy to share that with you.
Restorative Culture Sliding Scale for BIPOC:
Black and indigenous folks, as well as folks of color (BIPOC) are welcome and encouraged to pay on a sliding scale starting at $50/month. You do not need to pay more than that and this is not a scholarship. Additionally, this is not an assumption of your access to financial wealth, and if you’d like to offer a financial gift of any kind it is welcome. If you have a sincere desire to join and the minimum is still a barrier, just talk with me. Please enroll through the restorative culture sliding scale link below. I (Kate) am trying this on as an attempt be in relationship and balanced responsibility for the violent history of my white christian ancestors and their impact on black and brown peoples worldwide, whose cultures were destroyed and stolen from, and in more recent decades have been ‘discovered’, white-washed and repackaged as ‘western’ therapeutic modalities.
Thanks to my many mentors, colleagues and teachers at large who have spoken to this dynamic. I’m particularly appreciative to the work of PΔ±nar Sinopoulos-Lloyd for their articulation of ‘lifeways back’, to Weaving Earth: Center for Relational Education for their economic modeling, and to my friend and colleague Kate Morales for connecting me to their work and helping me wrestle with and flesh out the details of this spell.
On being a white-led/white-dominant space:
Folks of any racial/cultural identity are absolutely welcome. Additionally, I want to be upfront about the reality that I am white, most of my audience are white folks, and it’s likely this space will be predominantly white. My intention is to take responsibility for that, and leverage the opportunity of mostly white/white-conditioned folks doing our own work. I envision this as a place where dominant-culture folks (which includes, but is not limited to whiteness) can unwind dominant cultural behaviors and relational patterns, and learn to relate more skillfully to our diverse complex world. I am committed to addressing these patterns as they (inevitably) arise in our process together, and aim to build towards being a place where multi-racial and cross-cultural exchange and healing can happen. Like everything, this will be a work in progress.
A spell for economic balance and reciprocity:
We invite you to consider your financial investment as a kind of spell-casting and energy practice that brings you into awareness of the reciprocal web of support that we all live in. Take a few minutes to breathe into your belly and ask: where am I in that web right now? Do I feel the magic of this offer, and its potential to draw me into closer participation within that web? Then read through pricing structure and ask your belly again: is this right for me right now? Does my desire align with this exchange?
Pay for the whole year and bring a friend for free to all Earth/Moon Rituals ($2500 value) Email me for that link.
In addition to the restorative culture sliding scale, a few sliding scale seats are available for folks with severe financial need, particularly LGBTQ+ folks and folks with disabilities. Email me to inquire.
My Guarantee:
I want this to feel like home for you, which in total honesty will undoubtedly feel both nourishing AND dissonant/disruptive. Please keep that in mind as you enter in. For some peace of mind, you have 30 days from your first circle to decide if you made the right choice for you IF you attend at least 75% of circle sessions within those 30 days. This is to ensure that you actually give it a solid try. If at that point you decide this is not for you, you can withdraw with a full refund, minus a pro-rated amount for the circles and sessions already passed. There are no refunds after the 30 days, and you are responsible for completing all payments whether or not you participate.
But Kate...how do I know if this will be right for me?
Truthfully: I don't know. Only you can know that. That is a question for you, your gut, your ancestors and spirit team. Take it to them prayerfully, without thinking too hard about it.
There is a lot that I intend and will do my best to nurture for you in the Sanctuary Circle, as listed above; but ultimately what I can promise you is that: this is a container in which you will have an experience. What kind of experience will depend on the interplay of so many things: our bodies, personalities, personal and ancestral traumas, available resources, life circumstances, spiritual energies, seasons of the year and of life. I will do my best to gather us together to not be so lost and alone in our experiencing and in our metabolizing and integration of these experiences.
The Sanctuary Circle doesn't (shouldn't!) have to be "the only right thing" or "the most right thing"...but just ask your inner wisdom: is it even just a part of the next right thing?
FAQ
What is the schedule?
What if I can't make a session?
What if I'm joining mid-year?
None of these themes sound familiar to me. Will it be over my head?
Is this a church?
Iβm so tired of zoom calls. Does community really work online?
What if itβs not my thing/I change my mind?
Why do you keep saying βweβ??
How did the Sanctuary Circle come about?
I spent a lot of years running on the treadmill of urgency and overwork, addicted to stress and overwhelmed with the problems of the world. All the while on the inside I felt completely empty. I struggled to feel I belonged in my spiritual tradition of origin, and longed for spiritual community that was inclusive, affirming, judgement-free, connected to the physical world, and based in love and justice. It took a major plunge of depression about 15 years ago for me to finally stop all the DOING and begin the road back home to my BEING. Along the way, a few things revealed themselves to be invaluable in this journey:
- Tuning into the Feminine face of the divine through the Goddess tradition of yoga, and other mystical Wisdom traditions
- Moving from angry activist to restorative culture builder through a return to animist ancestral practices for more sane, balanced relating to the numerous human, more-than-human, visible and invisible beings of the complex web of creation
- creating a new, spacious and cyclical relationship with time through connecting to the rhythms of my body and the earth
- discovering and cultivating places to practice being my full-spectrum weird self
- And joining with other folks invested in their own reweaving of self-within-creation.
Like everyone, I’m still a work in progress! I’ve created the Sanctuary Circle to help support you with the knowledge I gained from my own experience and collaborate and journey with more folks healing together.
About Kate
Hello! I'm Kate. I have been a wandering spiritual orphan for almost two decades. After coming out as queer and leaving my Catholic faith, I got deep into the Goddess tradition of Kashmir Shaivism, where I had my first real 'hit' of being made in the 'divine image'.
In 2013 I received the unexpected call to be “priestess” and then in 2015, even more unexpectedly Jesus came back into my life--not as triumphant victor, not as dewy-eyed shepherd, but as a tender lover. I could not have been more shocked (or annoyed!).
Through major mental health crisis, job loss, seminary, psychic school, somatic animist apprenticeship, and a slow return to my body and earth-based rhythms, I have been attempting to make sense and live respectfully in the confluence of these strange intersections of lineages and modalities. This is my latest iteration of being as generous and authentic from my learnings as I can.
Here's what I know: how lonely, confusing, uncertain a life on the spiritual fringe can be. I also know that belonging is your birthright--you are a citizen of the earth. You have a direct line of communication and connection to Earth/Source/God/dess/the Cosmos. All it takes is a persistent commitment to removing the things that block your direct sense of original belonging.
As we find ourselves on the brink of global collapse, with crises mounting on every front, I believe now more than ever we need to find our way back home to ourselves and in the diverse and interdependent web of creation.
I am creating spaces like the Sanctuary Circle so we can all help each other do just that. So welcome!
So...are you in? I hope so.
Pay for the whole year upfront and save 10%. Email me for that link.
Limited sliding scale seats are available for folks on a fixed income or in severe financial need. Email me to inquire.
