Working with Monsters and Shadows
This class turns us toward our inner monsters and the shadowy parts of our Inner Territories. The sharp, reactive, protective places that learned how to become the weapon so they would never again be prey. Instead of trying to fix or control them, we get closer. We listen. We relate.
Inner Territory Journey: A Vow To Self
This Journey is the best place to start if you’re new to Inner Territory work.
We begin in an inner desert, navigating the chakras as stones we use to build an altar. Clear, steady, and fully alive, we welcome our unique guides and form a vow made to Self.
Writer’s Soul: Merlin Stone
Merlin Stone was the author of When God Was A Woman, first published as The Paradise Papers, and of Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood. She studied art and journalism, eventually becoming interested in archeology through her study of ancient art. Her work had a serious impact on the Goddess Movement of the 1970s and 1980s and has given us doorways of possibilities to rethink the primarily male lens through which we are taught history.
Self Reclamation: Beyond the Wall
This journey follows on from the Cord Cutting: Invasive Roots. Here, we listen to defenses instead of tearing them down. We ask what the wall has been protecting and whether it still needs to stand. Reclamation happens through respect for survival intelligence. As always, we move slowly, with intention, and on behalf of all our parts of Self. There is no rush, no need to force or conjure an outcome.
Cord Cutting: Invasive Roots
Cord cutting is held here as a gardening practice rather than a severing, guided by relationship with land, body, and the wisdom of what is native.
If you can, try to spend some time in Nature before this cord cutting. Watch the way plants, animals, and elements interact with one another. Observe how the interconnectedness of Nature feels in your own body. Take note of what is native to your part of the world and what is not.
Writer’s Soul: Mary Austin’s Wild Voice
This class sits inside Joy Harjo’s way of listening to the world. We move through her poems as landscapes shaped by breath, memory, grief, and belonging, paying attention to how voice carries responsibility to land, ancestors, and spirit. We stay close to the tenderness and ferocity in her writing, the way image and truth travel together without explanation. Writing here feels devotional and grounded, guided by what has been carried forward and what still needs a voice.
Inner Territory Journey: Below The Deep
In this unique Inner Territory journey we travel through bioluminescent waters, diving all the way to the floor of our inner great sea.
We encounter whale graveyards, the libraries of all of our lifetimes, and we connect to the threads that link us to ourselves and to one another - beyond language and time. We move into depth without urgency, and encounter vast, quiet, connective landscapes. We are reminded of the long story of our souls, that we are made of many lifetimes, stories, and shared threads that persist even in the deepest dark.
Self Reclamation: The Living Altar
We begin building an altar of our energy bodies in the wildest part of our being. This journey is about cultivating relationship with the self as something alive and responsive. The altar is not symbolic or fixed. It moves, shifts, and answers back. What emerges here comes from listening to the energy body in its wild state, and following what calls from beyond reason or plan.
Self Reclamation: Largeness
This journey makes space instead of seeking change. It softens the inner landscape to make room for feral, jagged, grieving, fire breathing parts to lie down without being managed or improved. In this meditation, we offer all parts of ourselves haven rather than transformation, trusting that rest holds its own kind of intelligence.
Self Reclamation: Island of Joy
This is a unique meditation that leads us to the island of our joy. What we find there is likely to be complicated. It may feel full, distant, guarded, or unfamiliar, and grief is allowed to move alongside it. We approach joy with curiosity rather than expectation. Nothing is asked to resolve or brighten. Our attention stays with listening, learning how joy actually lives in the inner landscape when it’s given time and room.
Cord Cutting: Uproot
This journey moves directly to what is tangled beneath the surface. We recognize when a bond has grown too entwined to tend, and when release is needed for life to keep moving. The letting go here is clear and steady, meeting deep attachment and trauma bonds without drama, and trusting that honesty can be enough to create freedom.
Cord Cutting: Life Raft
Rather than cutting the cords this time, we untie the rope, toss it into the water, and watch that person/that connection float over the horizon. Instead of severing, we allow distance to form gently and naturally. The release here is quiet and buoyant, offering space to float, recalibrate, and breathe again. It trusts that safety and separation can coexist, and that letting go does not have to be abrupt in order to be real.
Cord Cutting: Eras
This journey moves through time as a living landscape. It allows past eras of the self to be witnessed, honored, and released without collapsing them into a single story. The cord we cut here is temporal, loosening identification with who we were so who we are becoming has room to arrive.
Self Reclamation: The Land Of Giants
This journey opens into the scale of the towering giant redwoods in the Pacific Northwest. It places the self alongside something vast and alive, where awe interrupts self scrutiny and perspective shifts through direct contact with largeness. What we reclaim here comes from remembering that we are shaped by land, movement, and wonder, not only by the stories we carry about ourselves.
Cord Cutting: An End Is Also A Beginning
This journey works with endings that are honest rather than catastrophic. It begins with the wisdom of the Death card, letting cycles complete without clinging or collapse. When something is ready to be released here - a cycle, a pattern, a relationship - it makes room for agency, dignity, and a quieter beginning that does not need to announce itself.
Self Reclamation: Samhain
We're going to be riding the gates of Samhain, thinning the veils of our own decomposing stories and laying out a plate for our nearly dead parts. We're going to be making sacred ground from the dark loam of our lives, at this time of the year when stories soften and identities loosen. The turning here is quiet and preparatory, shaped by what is laid down and what is allowed to rest as the year shifts toward winter.
Cord Cutting: The Green Ribbon
This is a cord cutting journey rooted in reclaiming sovereignty through story. Drawing from The Green Ribbon folklore, the work centers the moment when curiosity, entitlement, or devotion crosses into possession, and asks what it means to belong to oneself again. Cord cutting here is held as an act of self authorship rather than rupture, honoring the truth that some boundaries exist to keep life intact.
Self Reclamation: La Loba
This journey follows the old story of La Loba, the Bone Woman, as a way of remembering what has been scattered or buried in our inner territories. It moves with the quiet devotion of gathering bones, trusting that what has been preserved still knows how to live. Nothing is rushed or forced back into form. This reclamation happens through attention and patience. We are guided by the Bone Woman’s song to restore our instinct, vitality, and soul memories.
Cord Cutting: Place
This journey works with Place as something alive, something that shapes us in real and lasting ways. It recognizes how environments, shelters, and landscapes have fed and held the soul, and it does not ask for erasure in order to release. Letting go here is ecological rather than abrupt, guided by respect for what has been gathered and trust in Nature’s ability to regenerate, carry memory, and continue on in new forms.