Growing Capacity for Living with Change ~ Awakening Self Healing through Connection ~ In Service to Community and the Greater Earth Body
Rites of Belonging: Adulting at the threshold of uncertainty & change
"The times are urgent: let's slow down” -Bayo Akomolafe
As the planet spins while orbiting the sun, seasons continue to cycle and waves of loss, change and hope surge across the landscape. A sense of quickening and urgency can be contagious. Yet, what does it take in these wild times to slow down enough and mark significant thresholds through life’s spiraling stages and changes? To become still enough to receive the gifts of resiliency and lifeways that shaped the lives and land of your ancestors? This June-December, Rites of Belonging: Adulting at the threshold of uncertainty & change hosts a 6 month container for this inquiry.
Fasting in wild places is a deep practice of marking various thresholds throughout cultures worldwide. In the week long ceremony in Mojave/Paiute land embedded in this journey, you will have an opportunity to mark the initiatory moment you are in with the land, Spirit, and guides as your witness. The first 4 moons of the journey are preparing for this fasting time. The last 2 moons are strengthening and nourishing that which will anchor you as you step forward in co-creativity with the living myth of your life! The sacred technology of fasting and other earth based practices we will explore, clear the way for a life lived upright, sovereign, attuned and expressed.
We have been called upon to offer our support to a group of humans who are ready to go on a journey together; one that uplifts and enliven the wild caverns of the psyche & soul, the fortitude of the body, and relationship with Spirit in service to the earth and human community.
May this journey be a deep holding of you so that you can step forward in your service as healer, activist, facilitator, visionary, creative, educator, trades person, builder, farmer, land steward, community/movement builder, parent, friend, or ally, etc with more courage and resiliency. In solidarity, Kari & Lo
CHRONOS - 6 MONTH CONTAINER
3 weekend immersions - Week long desert ceremony - Monthly zoom & mentor sessions
June 27-29th - Pomo/Coast Miwok lands: Sebastopol, California (3pm arrival Friday, closing by 4pm Sunday)
August 8-10th - Pomo/Coast Miwok lands: Sebastopol, California (3pm arrival Friday, closing by 4pm Sunday)
October 4-11th Desert Ceremony - Paiute/Mojave lands: Mojave National Preserve, includes 3-day solo fast
December 5-7th - Pomo/Coast Miwok lands: Sonoma County, California (3pm arrival Friday, closing by 4pm Sunday)
2 hour zoom gatherings monthly - to be scheduled with group once formed
1 one-on-one mentor check in with Kari or Lo between each in person immersion
KAIROS - THE COMPASS
Your guides will co-weave the journey with you through these various sacred technologies:
Myths of elemental intimacy
Self generated ceremony
Orienting with 7 directions
Embodiment practices
Ancestral remembering
Play (sacred & the profane)
Stoking the fires of intuition
Emotional intelligence
Somatic awareness & resiliency
Way of Council
Astrological & astronomical wow
Handcrafting
Deep nature connection
Music, song & dance
IS THIS JOURNEY FOR YOU?
This journey is for all humans comfortable with and able to traverse wild uneven terrains, physically and emotionally.
We welcome the spectrum and range of sexuality and gender fluidity. This journey is guided by two cis gendered white women.
You are ready to mark a significant threshold in your life. Thresholds can be informed by significant changes such as life stage change, losses, celebrations and internal transformations.
You are not a minor.
You are walking with the deep questions of what it means to face uncertainty and change from an upright and wild place, allowing your gifts to flourish.
You are open, interested and willing to grow relationships with fire, water, earth, and air; through ritual and ceremony and through emergent and ancestral ways.
You are able to take responsibility for your experience and receive the mirrors (pleasant and unpleasant) that may be shown to you through this process.
You will seek out and get additional support if you find yourself in need of support beyond the capacity of what the container/facilitators can offer.
We, Lo and Kari, are committed to and actively engaged in the work of dismantling white bodied supremacy and breaking through systems of oppression one feral step at a time. While these dialogues and systems will be present and a part of the journey, we want to be clear that this journey is focused on marking the unique rite of belonging and threshold you are on. What is unique to each of you is what will be centered for you. We as a collective can’t include anything without including everything, nothing is more or less important for the healing of the whole.
TUITION RECIPROCITY
Tuition reciprocity below is for the facilitated preparation and incorporation portions of this experience, (includes 3 weekend immersions (food not provided), zoom meetings each month and one-on-one mentor calls throughout the journey)*the week long ceremony in the desert will be a separate opportunity to gift in reciprocity:
Pay it Forward: $3,500 +
Sustaining Rate: $2,500 +
Actual Rate: $1,800 +
~Partial scholarships are available. Please complete application and we will be in touch with you to confirm if we can accommodate your needs.
*The week-long vigil ceremony in the desert will be offered on gift, meaning each person will have an opportunity to make an additional financial (or otherwise) gift to the guides based on the amount that feels appropriate for you at the end of that ceremony time.
We ask you to consider the guidelines below as you sense into what level rate of tuition you can offer for the preparatory and incorporation aspects of this offering:
~Actual Rate - You have access to basic needs such as food, housing, childcare, though sometimes it may feel difficult. You are able to save money each week/month to pay for the journey.
~Sustaining Rate - You may be paying off debt or working to build savings, but you also have access to steady income. You do NOT struggle to meet basic needs such as food, shelter, medical care, child care, etc.
~Pay it Forward - You have access to financial security, own property, and/or have personal savings. You are able to pay for “wants” and spend little time worrying about securing necessities in your life. If you have economic privilege and power in your community, this reciprocity range is for you.
THE GUIDES
Lo Ashley Brown, LMFT (she/they)
Queer, cis gendered, middle-class, educated Ashkenazi Jewitch living on stolen Miwok/Pomo lands.
As a storyteller, music weaver, fire tender, and apprentice at the wellspring of the starry night, Lo fans the embers of cultural regeneration through earth-based body-oriented practices. She carries a laser compass to help us find our way in these mythic times and supports folks deepening in connection with the more-than-human realms. Star Bard by night and somatic therapist by day, she has a private MFT Somatic Therapy practice in Sonoma County.
Lo is dedicated to the dismantling of anthropocentricity (human-centered as most valuable perspective) and the healing of the white bodied supremacy virus in service to the waters and the liberation of all beings. She carries a toy box filled with games and song to accompany the journey of life. Lo lives in intentional community with her mischievous water dog, Teyo.
Lo has been leading rite of passage journeys and fasting ceremonies in wild places since 2016.
Find her @ www.laurenashleybrown.com.
Kari Stettler, CMT, SEP (she/her)
Kari is a Rites of passage guide, Somatic Experiencing practitioner, Work that Reconnects facilitator, Biodynamic gardener, Vedic astrologer, ceremonialist and land steward living on stolen lands of the Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok people since 2006. Her roots follow the trails of the corded ware culture into what is now Poland to the north and Sicily to the south, across the northern Germanic lands and into Scandinavia. Her most recent ancestors landed in Baltimore and Minnesota and eventually migrated to coastal California, where she was born in 1976 on the stolen lands of the Tongva people. She has been in practice and service at the crossroads of cultural regeneration and repair, physical/emotional/spiritual healing, embodiment, rites of passage and land stewardship over the past 25 years. She hosts spaces within which individuals and groups can: cultivate presence through embodiment, explore their ancestral roots through inquiry, research & ceremony, resolve traumatic imprints that are held in the body, grow capacity for experiencing the full spectrum range of sensations and feelings that life has to offer, foster reciprocal relations with the natural world and dismantle internal conditioned patterns of systemic colonization and white bodied supremacy. Kari’s work contributes to the movement of peace work and centers around the prayer of co-liberation…may individual liberation be in service to and experienced as inextricably linked to collective liberation of all people in the human community and the systems that shape us. She was co-director of Tree of Life Adulthood Initiation from 2014-2025 and has been leading groups in fasting/vigil ceremonies in the wild over the past 11 years. Kari is Wilderness First Responder certified. Kari’s passions include dancing, making pottery, medicine making, quality time with soul family, tending forests and immersing in wild waters. For more info on Kari’s meandering learning journey and practices that inform her work, read her CV here.
To learn more, please join our Rites of Belonging Info Session on May 7th, 6:30-8pm via zoom. We look forward to meeting you!
RSVP by completing the form below:
Kari Stettler and Somatic Resiliency offerings reside on the stolen lands from the ancestral and current inhabitants of Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo tribal nations. These communities, currently represented by but not limited to, The Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, who have called this place home for hundreds of generations before European and other mixed race settlers arrived, are the original and current human stewards of these dynamic ecologies. The diverse landscapes of this region which provide an abundance of food, medicine and textiles from which I benefit is an ongoing legacy from generations of their tending. Wherever you are reading this from, I invite you to take a moment, reflect on the Indigenous peoples of the place you call home. How can you learn more about them, their culture, their stories of past and present, and most importantly, what can you do to support your local Indigenous led organizations, projects and movements? If you are living in or around the “Bay Area of California”, there is a list on the Resources page (coming soon) of local Indigenous-led organizations and projects you can consider researching and supporting.