Ceremony comes from the earth . . .
It is not a performance,
or a set of random protocols.
It is an enactment . . .
a listening
a poem.
So often, unions are more theatrical then ceremonial,
baby and mama blessings are sappy,
and funerals rushed and dissociated.
Ceremony that comes from body and earth
is inspiring and edifying,
creative, generative, and emergent.
You know something is missing from the ceremony "recipe"
but have no idea where to turn without
appropriating another culture's ceremonies
or buying into the inherited vacuous ceremonies of the past.
Maybe you've tried ignoring your conscience
and "borrowed" from Native traditions,
or maybe you've tried to make something up completely from scratch
and it turned out more like a 4th of July party than a ceremony.
Whatever it is, you've tried . . .
and you can't shake the feeling that you need to find a way.
You've tried so many things . . .
But how do you make a ceremony?
If you're like so many people in today's fragmented world,
you’ve probably been to a baby blessing that felt forced,
a wedding that was referred to as "bad theater,"
planned a coming of age ceremony that just didn't work,
or a funeral that left everyone
feeling more empty than before.
You don’t have to just live with it.
You don’t have to do it alone.
There is another way . . .
What if I told you . . .
I remember planning my wedding . . . I had hardly been to any weddings so I didn't have a huge expectation of anything fancy or conventional, but when I looked around I also didn't see many examples of wedding ceremonies that inspired me. I began to dig deeper into my own psyche and delved into the dream-world to create something very different. It was part silent sombre community contemplation and part celebratory feasting. It was serious. It was magical. It was a couple-making ceremony. In the end, as my partner and I unfolded ourselves from the experience, I realized that coming out of the ceremony, I felt married. I felt re-created in a way, more than I was before. This is what I can help you discover and create for yourself...
A similar thing happened when I had my first child. Instead of throwing a baby-shower, or hiring a doula, I dug deep again and accessed my own soft animal self. That birth ended up being an initiation into my apprenticeship with birth and also with death. I have been learning and training in traditional birth and death practices for many years now. What I have learned now supports my family in all our rites of passage from birthdays to menarche, harvest and seasonal celebrations.
It's a horrible feeling to look around and not see anything reflected back. Ceremonies are important. They aren't just markers of events. They are enactments. They are creative and visionary. Right relationship to ceremony is your birthright . . .
I know how it feels . . .
I created the lēmniscāta mystery school for mamas
for you who have lost connection to authentic ceremony.
So that you can begin to re-member ceremony as a regular part of life.
I created it for you . . .
for us . . .
for world . . .
That's why I created lēmniscāta
I am offering this group of women, mothers, m(others), daughters, sisters, friends to join me in a year long re-membering of ceremonial healing culture. We will act quick enough to make a difference in you and in the world, and slow enough to avoid appropriation and spiritual and/or political bypass.
We will re-member and restore with integrity the gestures that enact world. We will leave all the performing behind. We will become nothing - regular-relatives-among and instead participate with trees and wind, animal, cosmos and water.
Our bodies-as-earth in relation and deep in ceremony will begin to offer us the extensions of the fragments we carry: the grandmother's odd way of darning, the rage we carry and don't know where it came from, the position we didn't take while birthing our babies, the gestures we always make when we talk, all the strange untethered memoria we inhabit . . .
All these will be our starting point as we ask and find our permissions to listen further and claim with humble-certainty the motions of repair, of making weather, of melting all the frozen places, of bringing the baby down . . .
I am offering . . .
This is a program for personal growth as well as community engagement - sometimes called "professional" service. I prefer to think of it as skills for the apocalypse... once the dust settles.
If you are wanting an intensive initiation and are committed to stepping into your ceremonial healing call, this is the program for you!
This is a one year intensive
for deep healing
& practitioner certification
4 phases of the journey
In order to have a resilient nervous system you will first need to anchor yourself in a visceral sense of your ideals and intentions. These will naturally lead to a settling of your nervous system and slowly to the awareness of each of your worries. As you gently shift between these two poles with all your senses, intellect and spirit, you begin to allow integration of the two poles through the wisdom of the body and its archetypal healing motions. You find permanent resolution, and it feels good.
As you recover resilience and your own authentic story, you also begin to rest in inquiry rather than seek answers. You begin to recover ancestral & relational kin connections that are important to you. You even have a sense of the universal ingredients of celebration, ritual and ceremony and turn to the Earth herself to remember the Sacred. Its all there for you. As you do this you begin to make sense of all the outside information and advice, and gain confidence in your own intuitions and knowing as a woman and mother.
After addressing a critical mass of your smaller personal traumas, you deepen your re-membering ancestral ways, connecting to the earth and cosmos, and making kin-community, you are in a place to serve. You get support when you need it and offer it when it's needed. You need fewer and fewer "rules" and instead embody philosophies, principles and teachings. Threshold passages are smoother now as you cycle back through the stages and support the return to rhythm of the world.
A side-efffect of recovering a resilient nervous system is the meaning that emerges along the way. First you identify and clarify your survival story, the one in which you struggle, are overwhelmed, confused or defeated and slowly as each rupture in your being resolves, you piece together a new and heroic personal & ancestral mythology. You then pass your story on to your children and are able to help them know their own true and meaningful story. You are a part of recovering and passing down the ancestral wisdom of your people - even if your lineage has been broken.
As you begin to move toward and into cosmic-psycho-somatic rhythm you will begin to notice the myriad thresholds that offer themselves to you, that call to you, that require response from you. This is both an acquired skill, a restored ability, a practice, and an obligation . . .
somatic earth wisdom
You are a mama who is willing to be honest, a m(other) who knows that the female body is an original instruction, but who also knows that her self and mothering is mixed-up from generations of trauma and cultural confusion. This program will support you in an intensive year of healing and learning the basics of earth-based mothering. After this major restoration phase, you will begin to feel more resilience and your whole past present and future will unfold into a new mythology, one where the ruptures are beginning to be mended, where a new story is emerging and your somatic-earth-cosmos relation begins to become palpable. Your work as a mother - whether giving birth, adopting a child, integrating yourself into a blended family, preparing your child for their coming of age, or mentoring your grown children and community as an elder - this program is about re-membering an "ancient future" that is full of humble knowing, among-ness, and personal integrity.
restoring :: resilient :: restorying :: rhythmic
:: schedule ::
RESTORATION
Earth Psalm - Fall :: Earth :: stitching aprons
Soft Animal :: trauma resolution & the resilient nervous system
Myth Mending :: visioning your ceremonial obligations
October - November
December
January - February
April - May
July - August
June
March
integration month
inner winter
RESILIENCE
Earth Psalm - Winter :: Water :: stitching shrouds
Lazy-Lady Living - permaculture with concentration in social/Indigenist
integration month
inner equinox
integration month
inner solstice
RE-STORYING
Earth Psalm - Spring :: Air :: stitching blankets
Temixoch :: blossoming warrior dreamcraft café
RHYTHM
Earth Psalm - Summer :: Fire :: stitching skirts
A Room of Her Own :: ethical business
Constellation Ceremony :: Summer Ceremony Gathering
September
WELCOME :: INTENTION GATHERING
Expansive individual intention sessions with Krista
Orientation gestures
August
OPENING CEREMONY
You will be welcomed by those who have gone before you as well as a larger lemniscata sisterhood
components of the program
As soon as you enroll you will gain access to the school site and an orientation module where you will find everything you need to get started.
foundation courses
This is still being finalized, but at the moment your first year will begin with Soft Animal in the Fall, progress onto Lazy-Lady Living in the Winter, Temixoch in the Spring, and A Room of Her Own in the Summer and & our Ceremony Gathering in August.
Story Stitching Sundays
Over the course of the year we will prepare ourselves with sacred ceremonial attire. We will dream, design, create and activate our attire with stories and laughter and truth telling. This will take place on Sunday early afternoons - in hopes that it is accessible for all our lēmniscāta mentorship mama-sisters. Stitching Sundays pause during integrations months. Gatherings will be recorded if you can't make it.
Seasonal Care Packages
Receive a heart-crafted bundle of seasonal medicine straight from my studio/kitchen/garden/world . . . designed to support your unfolding journey into wholeness and service.
Possible inclusions: poems, healing essences, balms, tinctures, images, symbols, songs, and other faerie-medicine magik.
one on one & group process
In order for you to have extra grounding during the year, the program includes 7 one hour one-on-one Myth Mending sessions (one intake session and then one per month excluding integration months - no rollovers without prior arrangement) as well as seasonal group process gatherings and a LIVE facilitated Constellation Ceremony at the end of the program. Any additional sessions you might want will be discounted for lēmniscāta mystery school participants / initiates.
The lēmniscāta MENTORSHIP also includes one year in the the lēmniscāta MEMBERSHIP program. This includes supportive and inspiring weekly prepared and live content. It is a community of mamas who you can encourage, engage and serve as you grow in your Lazy-Lady wisdom, Soft Animal intuition, and Earth Psalm medicine. This will be a place of give and take and practice of reciprocity.
lēmniscāta MEMBERSHIP
You may choose to complete requirements for a permaculture design certificate with a focus in social/Indigenist permaculture as well as for a Myth Mending / constellation ceremony facilitator certificate. These are certificates of completion rather than guarantees of your abilities or structures to keep you in check. That said, I will be supporting you to step into your responsibility as a community practitioner and you will be required to complete sessions with me and others ir order to be certified.
:: certifications ::
I am now entering my eldership, after a long incubation in silent and sacred unwinding of the teachings of my elders. It is time for me to speak, to share, to stand in my medicine and my place as re-membering knowledge keeper.
This work is what my elders and the earth and cosmos have trained me to facilitate. A from-the-ground-up re-membering of the world ceremonies that can repair this world. The kind of repair that generates new genuinely regenerative paradigms.
I am grateful to be among the uncertain, those who humbly know they are not of/from perfect lineage, but who turn to the teachings they do have with humility, to the earth herself, to fragments, and to exile without abandoning their obligation to serve in these times of polarization and strife.
about krista
Ceremony is so often done badly, it's true. There aren't many good honest resources - that is also true. But, no matter how hopeless you may feel about marking your baby's birth, your daughter's menarche or your father's funeral, I promise you there is a way to create something meaningful, magical, simple, healing, and transformational - a ceremony that reflects the gesture you are making, that enacts it, that makes it so. This is nothing less than restoring matriarchy.
