write what you know, they say. but i don’t know shit

about love. i want to find love in the unknown. love has

had its way with me since birth, and i don’t know how to

be with her, and why should i? who says that love is

something to be known when more frequently it is

something that we stumble into, stupefied, reeling at the terrible

inconvenience of becoming

soft and riddled with desire? everything i am is

reduced to ash in the wake of love. my memories take on

terrible, seductive shapes and

sing in foreign tongues. i drift left of centre, having

forgotten my own name.

write what you would want to read, they say, but i don’t

want to read about love. i want to find love in the wordless. i want to be

caught off guard when love sneaks up on me. i don’t

want a mind cluttered with ancient words. i

want love to make me a melted mind—to have me

babble like a child seeing sunlight for the first time. love

makes every time the first time all over again. if ever i forget

my smallness, i want love to swallow me into her bottomless pit of a

belly and rob my eyes of sunlight. and when

i emerge, after she has ground me down in that

cavern of stillness, i’ll crawl down

from her tongue on hands and knees, having

forgotten my own name.

write what has yet to be said, they say. but there is

nothing i can

say about love that hasn’t already been said. i want to

sleep through the night and find love in the silence. love

wakes up when i toss my body around in bed. closing the

gap between us, she plants a seed in

my back with a soft mouth. love doesn’t

ask me to settle down; she asks me to settle into my own

bones like soil over time. and when it rains, i swell so much with

her nectar that i become too heavy to move. the seed

bursts and flowers from my ribcage, making me bleed.

and when the flowers wilt and the stems withdraw into the

gash in my middle, i am left full with her absence, having

forgotten my own name.

i treat her like a problem to be solved. then she

bares her teeth at me, protecting her right to be wild. but

when i come to her in that wilderness, naked and willing to be

mauled if i must be, she kneads me with

tender paws, showing her belly. and

i remember

i remember

being born of her. and i remember

how i will return to her when it is time.

she takes my name and

i don’t need it so

i don’t take it back.

art is ritual, and ritual is art.

it delights me that the word “art” and the word “ritual” share an etymological root. it delights me that both emerged at the same point in history. it delights me that the forces that express through ritual are the same that express through art.

imagine the magic that happens when both are held by the same hands.

humans are innately mystical, ritualistic, creative, and weird. unfortunately, we live in a world dominated by extractive, exploitative, and oppressive social structures that are more and more rapidly killing us (as well as the rest of the planet).

i see this not as a death sentence, but as an invitation to create a different world.

ritual art is a practise of continuous relationship with the immanent (god-in-the-world) and transcendent (god-beyond-the-world). both ritual and art are trans-contextual processes integral to life.

and ritual art is the most powerful and potent catalyst for systems change.

for those who are here to bridge the worlds

of sacred and profane,

body and mind,

individual and collective,

seen and unseen—

i present to you…

the diaphanous edge—

formerly known as ‘Alchemical Writing’—is a monthly poetry and ritual theory group that supports artists, healers, scholars and seekers with self-exploration, creative expansion, and relational field tending.

we engage ritual theory, mystical practise, meditation, and mythology as pathways to introspection, contemplation, transformation, and expression.

if you’re ready to make the art that will shift reality, liberate those you love—and most of all, confront you with the real—join us for one evening per month of journalling, play, art sharing, and free expression.

each session is 90 minutes long and begins with a 20-minute lecture, followed by 20 minutes of silent meditation. after a 5-minute break, we journal for 15 minutes. the last 20 minutes are open discussion time.

this group gives creative intuitives a place to percolate, evolve, experiment, and explore both practical and theoretical aspects of ritual art. all live calls will be recorded and stored in a shared google folder.

here is the schedule for the coming year:

the hollow body: death practise as creative liberation

31 july 2026 @ 6:30pm ET

it all starts with death. before we can fill with new information and learn new ways of being, we must leave at the door everything we think we already know. how will we choose to experience this precious and fragile human life? let’s allow death to show us the way.

[sign up]

the magic circle: invocation and the relational field

23 aug 2026 @ 6:30pm ET

what and who is in the room with us right now? the truth is there is nothing that is not in the room with us. in this session we will attempt to articulate a felt sense of relationality, reciprocity, and kinship through the practise of invocation.

[sign up]

what is ritual for? categories and characteristics

25 sept 2026 @ 6:30pm ET

ritual is infamous for defying neat categorisation. but contrary to popular belief, not everything is a ritual. perhaps we can begin to answer the question of what ritual is by asking a different question first: what is ritual for?

[sign up]

close encounters: flow, trace, and meditation as points of contact

30 oct 2026 @ 6:30pm ET

altered states of consciousness have been co-opted by the so-called ‘psychedelic rennaisance,’ fast-food spirituality, and the personal development industry. what is the true purpose of having so many different modes of orienting to reality? what is it we truly seek to contact?

[sign up]

place beyond place: altar tending, sacred symbols, and ritual aesthetics

4 dec 2026 @ 6:30pm ET

what is the difference between performativity and authenticity? how can the invariance of ritual forms pave the way for deeper and more expansive authenticity? let’s take a look at one of the most central ritual aesthetic practises—altar tending—for the answer.

[sign up]

invisible friends: metaphor and embodied imagination

10 jan 2027 @ 6:30pm ET

what is actually real? turns out that there are multiple categories of ‘realness,’ and ritual allows us to touch them all. inspired by bob samples’ categories of metaphor and john vervaeke’s four ways of knowing, we will dive into the nature of ritual practise as embodied imagination.

[sign up]

art salon 1

21 feb 2027 @ 6:30pm ET

come share a story, a myth, a poem, a song, a movement, or some visual art with the group! this can be something you have been working on during our time together or simply something that you find inspiring or beautiful. all are welcome who are ready to share from the heart and listen with the whole body.

[sign up]

being moved: archetypes, masks, and ritual performance

21 mar 2027 @ 6:30pm ET

what moves through you that is greater than you? who or what does your body belong to, and what are bodies for? come explore themes of authenticity, ritual possession, archetypes, and the transformative power of ritual theatre.

[sign up]

where is the edge? dynamics of the extended body

18 apr 2027 @ 6:30pm ET

as we discovered in previous sessions, there is nothing that is not in the room with us. in the words of thich nhat hanh, ‘all things inter-are.’ let’s tease out new definitions of boundary and agency as we contemplate the following question, posed by systems theorist nora bateson: where is the edge of me?

[sign up]

portal-between, mirror-to: the artist as an agent of systems change

16 may 2027 @ 6:30pm ET

all of these contemplations and explorations are well and good, but how do we actually take action in the world? ritual art is the most potent catalyst for systems change. how do we as ritual artists honour our responsibility to the earth and our web of kin?

[sign up]

swing on the spiral: towards a ritual ontology

18 jun 2027 @ 6:30pm ET

ritual allows us to touch the truth that all things inter-are. what else does ritual reveal about the nature of reality? in this final session, we’ll take a look at the work of clare graves, david bohm, and timothy morton and how it compares with various indigenous cosmologies.

[sign up]

art salon 2

20 jul 2027 @ 6:30pm ET

come share a story, a myth, a poem, a song, a movement, or some visual art with the group! this can be something you have been working on during our time together or simply something that you find inspiring or beautiful. all are welcome who are ready to share from the heart and listen with the whole body.

[sign up]

how to register

if you are a paid subscriber of underworlding, access to the group is included in your subscription. after subscribing, you should receive an invitation to the diaphanous edge group via email. message me if you have questions or trouble navigating the registration process.

if you aren’t a paid subscriber, you can easily sign up to get access to the group.

if you’d just like to drop in every once in a while, you can register per session at the drop-in rate of $30. i’ll post an article to this newsletter with the theme, date, and time of each session on the first of each month, along with a registration link—so no need to worry about missing sessions.

DROP IN

i’m looking forward to exploring the diaphanous edge with you.

happy underworlding.

bless it all—

the skin of steel,

the vessel proud, bearing its cracks,

the fluid it gives to the mouths and mouths,

the insatiable mouths and mouths.

benevolent illusion winks

to the moon-song made only for her ears.

she shapes the mountain with a hidden smile.

the mountain doesn’t even realise it

has been shape-changed.

you are also water, aren’t you?

changing shape to show another’s face.

why wouldn’t i wait to meet again, then, in our origins?

to slide my neck through the wound in your side

and behold my own face?

i drink her patience to swallow my medicine,

resting in rainbows for my family to come

and see their faces in my shape.

i will not abandon

what i remember.

why wouldn’t i remind you, then?

your soul is the same colour as mine.

a bone slips out of place

i eat five eggs in the morning and hang upside down

i simper my way through the hellfire i chose because i chose it

because i chose it

your disembodied voice is here

i tap my listening mirror

my heart is the very first star to collapse

i search for your red dot every second i should be sleeping

i should be sleeping

i am sleeping

the witch of my youth dies by a venomous mouth

her body is shrouded in a casket of water

i weep in the mirror because i am free

because i am free

in that glowing way the voices came

not by wind nor by sound but

in your smile a lotus through the mud

in your smile the blade and the blood that stains

and the veins that keep the blood that stains

in that glowing way the creatures came

crawling from the scattered dark

to escape the illumining

the illumining

i should be sleeping but

a bone has slipped out of place

and you are not an escape

you are a reckoning

a reckoning

i bowed not before the teacher, but before the wisdom he carried.

an expectation to bow to a teacher with no explanation of why might have caused me to want to walk straight out of the dharma hall. this has nothing to do with me having an innately rebellious nature. in fact, i hold teachers, elders, and scholars in high regard by default. i love learning. i consider humility a virtue.

but this past weekend, when i went to study with a teacher of a traditional wisdom lineage, i was inspired many times to bow before him. not because he expected this, nor because i was told to (i wasn’t). i simply had to, because it was an authentic expression of my reverence for the wisdom living in his body.

as a recovering theatre kid, bowing comes relatively naturally to me. it is an expression of gratitude, of reverence, and of humility. i am less used to bowing as a greeting, or as a sign of respect to a wisdom keeper. in the past, i would have resisted the latter entirely.

i have changed.

i am not against hierarchies; i think they can be good, and sometimes even necessary. what i find distasteful isn’t ‘hierarchy’ per se, it’s fragmentation. domination. oppression. bowing from a place of self-degradation actually disrespects the teacher. when we abandon our own depth of understanding, our ability to question, and our subjective learning process, we don’t actually receive the wisdom that a teacher is giving us. we merely perform receptivity.

i liken this to the cultural norm of ‘expertism’ and the way in which we are encouraged to seek knowledge and wisdom outside of our own subjective experience. the contemporary western world has historically disavowed subjectivity as a valid means of getting true information about reality; in more recent years, the culture has overcorrected for this, which ironically gives subjectivity an even worse name.

let us presuppose the obvious—that subject and object are fundamentally aspects of one whole, unbroken process. from this vantage point, how can we gain a full picture of reality without the phenomenological? how can i bow to the teacher, knowing full well it is a lie?

we live in a culture that claims the only people who are qualified to speak are people who have proven themselves in a particular way. they must display certain measurable qualities of intelligence, they must perform specific tests, they must devote four or more years to a piece of paper that says they’re worth hiring for an entry-level job.

getting a college degree is a sorry excuse for a rite of passage.

i don’t mean that it doesn’t mean anything at all. learning is learning, and it’s not easy to slog through the hell of academia. i barely made it 6 months through my freshman year, so i’m one to talk. but true rituals of initiation are so much richer, so much fuller spectrum than just surviving years of rote memorization. true rituals of initiation are death processes that involve the land, the body, and the community. they involve the ancestors, the plant and animal kin, and the unseen forces. they show you how much of an expert you are not.

if you have a college degree and you’re proud of yourself, you should be. i only mean to say that the symbolic and somatic richness of ritual initiation is significantly atrophied here in the west. consider the following quote from my essay on contemporary ritual design:

Modern Western culture does not suffer from a lack of rituals, as is often stated; it suffers from a lack of meaningful, devotional, earth-based, collective ritual process. Our rituals exist, but they are insufficient; they lack intergenerationality, transcontextuality, ecosomatic attunement, and post-religious inclusivity. I believe there is an indirect relationship between the insufficiency of these rituals and the converging mental health, ecological, and political issues referred to in some intellectual circles as the ‘metacrisis’ (or ‘polycrisis’).

this ritual insufficiency is a huge reason why i have chosen to leave my home of 2.5 years: asheville, north carolina. the subculture of asheville is what you get when folks attempt to repair contemporary post-colonial fragmentation consciousness through ritual without actually examining that fragmentation consciousness at its root. it’s what happens when you can sense the ‘problem,’ but you forget that the way you solve problems and understand problems is actually part of the problem. it is what happens when you have been taught your entire life that what matters is how things appear, not how things feel.

kokoro wa katachi wo motome, katachi wa kororo wo susumeru.

this is a phrase i learned from a japanese language teacher on youtube. i haven’t been able to forget it since i came across it. it translates to the heart requests form, and form advances the heart. when i first heard it, i immediately thought of the closest english equivalent: ‘fake it ‘til you make it.’ on the surface, these phrases seem to communicate the same thing, but i argue they’re different.

the difference between them is the same as that between performative ritual and ritual performance. performative ritual tries to make true what is false. ritual performance teaches the body how to express and remember what is true.

expertise is not true. expertise is not wisdom. it is a symptom of forgetting how to learn. it is a comfort zone of knowledge that blinds us to the moving, flowing, emergent reality that we dance within.

i bowed to the teacher because my body is wise—wise enough to sense wisdom in another, wise enough to express reverence, wise enough to be with what is true.

Happy underworlding.

By the way!

In 12 days, you will no longer be able to book a tarot reading with me.

After that, I will be focusing full-time on peer support for highly sensitive creative intuitives. If you’ve enjoyed my support as a tarot reader, or if you’ve wanted to experience oracular space with me but haven’t had the chance, I have a special gift for you before I quit reading tarot professionally and fully commit to my path as a ritual art teacher.

All of my tarot related services are 25% off. Purchase a bundle of sessions before 17 May 2026 and you can schedule your readings at any point in the future—even if the deadline has passed.

Book a single session here and use the discount code FAREWELL25A.

Or book a bundle of sessions here and use the discount code FAREWELL25.

i have become untethered

from this place.

all composite phenomena are impermanent, yes

still, it is the water from my dreaming eye that breaks chains

to make way for a cloudless mind-sky.

i have become untethered

from this place.

my body is the bell tone,

crying that the hierophant has died.

open yet not filling yet not just yet,

let it linger, that space

free from the hunger.

the hunger

a home

a lover

a million dollars

a chance to make what never should have happened unhappen

and to make sure for sure it never happens again

i have become untethered

from this place

and i have no one to tell.

it is all already known

the me that knows is neither late nor early

the me that knows is also the you that doesn’t know

that doesn’t care

that turns away and sleeps through daylight hours

so as not to see what glows beneath reality’s innocent offering

we’ve all got dreaming eyes.

you can try to blind them, but they can’t stay blind.

ashes to desert sands

desert sands to an oasis

to water the land with my dreaming eye

to wake in an oasis

an oasis.

an oasis.

we’ve all got dreaming eyes

we’ve all got dreaming eyes.

Asheville, thank you for being my home.

It’s been an incredible 2.5 years.

And quite suddenly, I’ve decided it’s time for me to move on.

A really wonderful string of opportunities has opened up for me to explore the world a bit and deepen my practise as a ritual artist.

It’s all sort of magically falling into place, so far. I always take that as a sign that the path forward is clear.

If all goes well, as I pray it will...

I will be gone for 5 months. It is not likely that I will return to Asheville after those 5 months.

For my birthday (17 May), I am asking for some support to help get the ball rolling on this journey.

My fundraiser goal is less than a third of the estimated cost of my upcoming travels.

Learn more specifics about what you would be investing in at the fundraiser link below.

DONATE

Some amount of crazy is healthy. Where do you think good art comes from?

Hallie Swan, “De-pathologizing Limerence”

it’s hard for me to write about this.

i know that you know that dominator culture gets off on punishing people. it especially gets off on it when we punish each other. and from my perspective, no one has been punished more than those who yearn.

the maladaptive daydreamers. the anxiously attached. those whom have been saved by their delusions.

i have seen countless ‘healing spaces’ dedicated solely to the degradation of the dreamers, the sensitives, the ones who are prone to limerence, drawn to emotional unavailability, who unconsciously wait for a saviour to whisk them away from their problems.

that’s part of why it’s hard for me to write about this.

i love every part of me that has fought to keep me alive, even the parts of me that have harmed me (and others) in the process. those parts are the ones who need that love the most. if i do not love them, they will continue to cause harm.

to be clear, i am equally sickened by movements that seek to justify imagination-based coping mechanisms such as limerence and maladaptive daydreaming. we aren’t magical superhero ‘empaths’ here to awaken humanity. we aren’t reincarnated ascended masters with special insights that other people are just too normal to access. god doesn’t have a plan for us that’s any more or less special than anyone else’s.

we are here in the shit soup with everybody else, and we have wise, intelligent bodies who know how to survive. we adapted then, when we were neglected, abandoned, violated, and punished.

we adapted then. we can adapt now.

enough with specialness, already. are you ready to disappear into the sacred?

are you ready to give up what you already know to make space for the mystery waiting to claim you?

if your answer is no, you’ll find no judgement here. i’m still in the very messy process of integrating this myself. for a long time, i’ve attempted the impossible task of maintaining flawless integrity, you see. (please, feel free to laugh at me!) dominator culture is ruthless in its demands for perfection. it’ll have you self-policing in accordance with values that don’t belong to you, in exchange for sacrificing your own.

at least in this moment, i am ready to give up what i already know to make space for the mystery waiting to claim me.

this is why i’m quitting the tarot.

being a tarot reader professionally for the past 4 years has taught me a lot. it has taught me discernment, and it has taught me about my own value. it has also carried an exhausting risk of enabling my hubris and entitlement as far as both seeking answers and giving advice are concerned.

intuitive practises are important because we can’t not have an intuition. that’s right, there is no such thing as ‘an intuitive.’ there is only intuition—a cognitive process that, contrary to what new age spiritual exceptionalism and myers-briggs typology would have you believe, is not a special thing only certain people have access to. some people are more practised or talented in the realm of intuition but anyone can cultivate it. practises like tarot exist to help with this.

they can also severely harm when it comes to this. in fact, this becomes more of a risk the better you get at the practise. having no intuitive practise is dangerous, but having too much faith in the intuition is just as much so (if not more).

to be clear, i am not quitting the tarot entirely. i am not making a great bonfire and throwing my decks in, one by one, until i have none to my name.

but as of 17 may (my 31st birthday), i will no longer be booking new clients for tarot readings. this is no longer the service i am here to offer the world.

i am now to heed a somewhat paradoxical call to both quit tarot as i have been using it and engage with it more deeply, beyond the practise of divination and into something wilder: possibility-mapping.

what i call possibility-mapping is, in some ways, the opposite of divination. divination is traditionally defined as trying to intuit what the future holds based on what information we unconsciously have access to. the problem with this is that we don’t always track all the possibilities. in fact, we can quite easily become conditioned to only track certain future possibilities based on what has happened in the past. this is induction—reasoning towards a general conclusion based on specific information.

however, there is a form of reasoning that is based not on conclusions, but possibilities. this is abductive reasoning. if i apply abductive reasoning to divination, what i get is possibility-mapping; i am looking at what choices are available to me, not what outcomes are ‘inevitable.’

i am learning who else it is possible to be.

this is, in some ways, divination at its finest.

now, it’s not impossible to practise tarot in this way with clients, but to put it simply, i don’t want to.

i want to teach clients how to do this for themselves. i want to teach them how to practise liberation in the context of dominator culture. i want to teach them how to see possibilities that even i cannot see.

i don’t want to steal their wild imaginations, to reign them in with realism.

i am not here to help you accept reality. i am here to help you actively co-create it.

‘creative augury’ is divination as possibility-mapping, and it is one of the five pillars of creative liberation practise, a method that I have applied to my own creative process over the years.

i smirk as i am writing this.

that’s because it is not a method in the linear, predictable, easily explainable way that dominator culture demands of us. no, friend. it is a wild, chaotic, emergent process—something that has taken years of permission and unravelling for me to ‘master’—or rather, to give up on mastering and commit to playing with it like a newborn playing with their toes.

in a future post, i’ll share more about how this and the other pillars of creative liberation will serve as the foundation of my ritual consultation work moving forward.

Happy underworlding.

A really wonderful string of opportunities has opened up for me to explore the world a bit and deepen my practise as a ritual artist.

It’s all sort of magically falling into place so far. I always take that as a sign that the path forward is clear.

If all goes well, as I pray it will...

I will be gone for 5 months. It is not likely that I will return to Asheville after those 5 months.

For my birthday (17 May), I am asking for some support to help get the ball rolling on this journey.

My fundraiser goal is less than a third of the estimated cost of my upcoming travels.

Learn more and donate below!

DONATE

empty hands sit still

between the knife and the sunlight

and the flowers reaching up to meet their father.

and to think,

he has tendons—

fluid and eyes

all his own. flesh across timespace is still so

warm somehow. his heartbeat echoes an empty answer and i think

what is keeping you,

sweet violet brightening the grass-nest,

so low to the ground i know you’re

not afraid of hell?

strange to state the obvious,

that a man is not merely a concept but a

walking immolation of all i ever thought myself

limited to being.

his life alone his

makes resonance within me and i think

ah.

this

is what my bones were made for—

to be made whole in his hands,

and to be unmade,

and be made again to be unmade again.

let us start by locating the imaginal.

it’s not actually possible, i’m sure. the imaginal is not a place, after all, but a perceptual mode. metaphorically, however, it is useful to locate the imaginal in relation to four categories: endosystems, exosystems, the soma and the mind. it is also useful to locate these categories in relation to each other.

this will help us understand the role of the artist in not just human societies, but within the earth-system at large. It can help us determine the particular kinds of art that would be most liberatory and meaningful, both to ourselves and the world at large. In locating the imaginal, we can approach the question: what is the role of the artist in systems change?

We must start by examining the two orientations of the artist: portal-between and mirror-to.

Artist-as-portal

As portal-between, the artist has unique access to certain kinds of information. This information is special in the sense that 1) it can only be accessed in altered states such as flow, trance, and meditation and 2) it can only be conveyed linguistically through metaphor or direct somatic transmission (i.e. visually, aurally, or kinesthetically). This information can be environmental data, but it can also be internally generated information such as a memory or an emotion.

The artist receives information from exosystems (i.e. the environment) and processes it through the imaginal. The artist also assimilates and transmutes this information through its endosystems: the psyche, internalized symbolic language, the physical senses, etc. The most apt metaphor to describe this process is that it is a constant cycle of emergence and withdrawal. The artist withdraws into themselves to process environmental data and retrieve interior data, and they emerge to share novel and meaningful insights through creative self-expression. An exceptionally skillful artist is able to oscillate in both directions, simultaneously withdrawing and emerging.

Artist-as-mirror

As a mirror-to, the artist gains deep insight into the nature of themselves, paradoxically arriving at universal truths about life and the human experience. The artist engages in a cycle of incendence and transcendence; as they attune more deeply to their somatosensory experience, gaining wisdom and mastery of their craft, they also master the states of meditation, flow, and trance. The skillful artist is able to engage in dual processing, a simultaneous inscendence and transcendence. In simpler terms, the masterful artist can process information bidirectionally: both bottom-up (from the soma; inscendence) and top-down (from the nous; transcendence). This gives a more holistic and integrated view of the system, revealing hidden connections and complex patterns.

The mirror-to process is a self-emptying one, despite also being self-expressive. In their expression, the artist becomes both a vessel and channel for greater systemic realities. In fact, it is through expressing their personal relationship to those realities that the artist becomes the mirror-to. Artistry yokes the personal to the general and the abstract to the embodied. The expressive act does this on behalf of not just the individual artist, but all those who relate to them.

Threshold of influence: ritual art as cultural catalyst

Bear in mind that the endosystems and exosystems are not separate; neither is the nous and the soma. Neither can the mirror-to and portal-between processes be defined independently of each other. This brings us to the role of ritual in arts-based systems change. Since we are dealing with one complex system, rather than a collection of unrelated parts, we can assume that all elements influence each other. As the artist creates and expresses, the transformations occurring within them ripple out into the rest of the system. Now I will explain how ritual can amplify the catalytic effects of artistry.

Ritual shifts what I call the threshold of influence—the point at which one’s agency has diminishing returns. The more ritual one practises, the greater their influence is on greater levels of a system. This is because, similar to artistry, ritual practise gives us access to more holistic and integrated perspectives of the world. The more complexly we perceive reality, and the more creatively we can think about problems, the more agentic and influential we become. This is why both artists and occultists have been some of the most culturally influential people in human history. It is also why you can especially feel the power and potency of an artist who is religiously inspired.

I want you to imagine the artist oscillating wildly across all possible points on the diagram above. The true artist is a chaos agent, here to reveal things that no one else can see. They are a harbinger of potentially uncomfortable change, and a revelator of potentially uncomfortable truths. But they are also an anchor into the deep peace and timeless knowing of what it is to be alive, or even just to be.

That’s what’s needed now, perhaps more than anything else: a remembrance of what it is to be. Great art allows us to fully inhabit the miracle of being. Liberation is simply a beautiful consequence of that.

If you are a purpose-driven artist that’s passionate about systems change, I am here to help you claim your impact, refine your message, and get creatively liberated. Shoot me a message to learn more about how I can serve you.

fingernails filthy with the sap of my core,

you human hell—

how can you stand to see your own hand’s shape

where another’s chest once was?

this struggle against immanent expiration

is so sharp and dense—

like jellied milk against my nostrils, sour like an unripe plum

wrinkling my mouth.

rot as i rot, then—

and be reborn as an insect

whom greater creatures give less thought to than

the lashes shed from their eyes as they are dreaming.

henceforth, make my name absent from your tongue.

i have already forgotten yours.

“There is no outside.”

Timothy Morton says this in their object-oriented treatise Hyperobjects, to illustrate what so many of us neurowyrd folks can already feel in our own bodies: we don’t exist in a vaccum, and we aren’t quite as separate as we have been trained to believe. Take, for example, the fact that intimate connections influence the way our brains work, or that our gut microbiome is modified by those we cohabitate with. When you look at both the big picture and the details, the boundaries between things really start to blur.

Consider the following quote from Bayo Akomolafe:

Today, popular images of the autistic promote the figure of the wooden automaton, an unfeeling specimen trapped in a cold bubble. …My son, Kyah, doesn’t feel “detached” from reality; indeed, in contrast to him, it would seem everyone else is. Kyah is a connoisseur of exotic affective intensities too nuanced for my neurotypical posture to detect. Kyah feels...and he feels intensely. For Eugene Bleuler, the soul was inside the body. For Kyah…the ‘soul’ is everywhere, a desirous, pre-individual force that shapes, convenes, travels, and melts between and through membranous borders, creating reality in its wake.

We are wholes that are also parts. We are physical bodies that also have non-physical elements. We are individuals that also are members of families, friend groups, nations, and ecosystems. We have profoundly failed ourselves by adhering to a model of reality that limits our bodies to where they appear to end and begin.

For the sensitive soma who is strewn across the great web of all there is, I have coined the term extended body.

The “extended body” is an experience we have at the intersection of the soma, the imaginal, and the environment. There are many aspects of it, and I could never claim to know them all. However, there are a few core elements that we can focus on, to start:

Centre

When most of us think about embodiment, we might start here. It’s arguably the best place to start. The phrase “find your centre” may seem to imply peacefulness and control. But this is only sometimes the case. Being with our centre can be profoundly painful, depending on what’s alive for us at any given moment. You might often find that your “centre” is somewhere around the body or even beyond the body. You can start by asking yourself the question, where are you right now?

Many of us are only inhabiting a portion of our centre. This is because we believe it to be one thing when in actuality, it is a multiplicity. Our centre consists of layered subsystems. To make this a bit simpler, I’ll focus on three very important layers which in themselves are centres. They are the head, the heart, and the gut.

Have you ever heard the colloquialism, “in one’s feelings?” One might be referring to a person operating from the feeling centre, otherwise known as the heart. If you tend to hear from others that you ought to “get out of your head,” on the other hand, you might feel most comfortable leading from the mental centre. Meanwhile, those who like to “go with their gut” are rooted in the instinctual centre.

In order to be truly “centred,” these hubs of information processing need to be in communication with one another. One must have an awareness of what centre they feel most comfortable inhabiting, as well as the ones that might be somewhat weaker or even shut down. Keeping smooth and continuous communication between these centres is crucial.

Practise

Find a comfortable position where it is easy to breathe. Once your breath feels easeful, you can begin to tune your awareness into the base of your spine, imagining the space between your pelvic floor and hips warming up and filling with vitality. once you feel this, allow that vitality to rise up into the heart centre and eventually the head. from the head, you can allow that vitality to filter back down through the heart and back into the pelvis. Do this a few more times until all three centres feel connected.

Periphery

The natural next step after finding our centre is to move outwards from it. There are four quadrants of awareness that we can shift our awareness to, consisting of a left/right axis and a top/bottom axis. These quadrants make up our periphery.

Periphery builds a spatial-relational map of our surroundings. The easiest way to tap into this area of the extended body is to try and sense a being in the room next to you without looking at them. Noticing where they are relative to your centre, you can begin to feel your awareness pool in that area until it becomes the new centre. This can be disorienting, so be sure to come back to centre afterwards.

Practise

In a standing position, first begin to notice the point of contact between your feet and the floor. Notice how your weight is distributed—is it even, or a little more on one side? Begin to shift your weight all the way over to one side until you’re leaning in one direction a little bit. As you are doing this, imagine that that whole side of your body is covered with eyes and ears. What do you see? What do you hear? Now do the other side. Try this with the front and back as well and see what you notice.

Edge

Have you ever been talking to someone and really just wanted to create more physical space between you, even if they weren’t particularly close? On the other hand, I am sure there are a few people you know who you’d like to have so close that you’d scarcely be able to tell where your body ends and theirs begins.

With a strong sense of centre, having explored the extent of our periphery, we finally come to edge. Edge exists out on the fringes of our extended body, at the threshold of what is us and what is everything else. Expanding beyond here is likely to lead to some kind of out-of-body experience—potentially even dissociation—so take care.

At the edge, we have the option to explore perceptual and energetic boundaries in a way that can push us out of our comfort zone. Our felt-sense of connection with the environment lives here, as well as our awareness of our limitations. Playing here is a great way to understand the degree of intimacy we are in with our environment.

Entities that cross our edge-boundary become entangled with our extended bodies, so it’s important to check in and be mindful about who and what we invite to share space with us!

Practise

Lying on your back, curl up into a ball with your knees and head bending toward your core. Imagine that your core is buzzing with vitality and invite that vitality to expand all the way through your body, from your deep tissues to the edges of your skin. Let all six of your limbs—arms, legs, head and tail—expand outwards as you’re doing this. Now, stretch your awareness in all directions, beyond the skin and out into the world around you. What do you hear, smell, sense? How far into the distance does your awareness reach? On some days, your edge might be very far out, but on others it might be nearly touching your skin. Experiment with this practise on multiple days and notice what impacts your capacity for expansion.

Conclusion

Regular practise of these dynamics improves proprio- and interoception. It also opens us to a wider perspective of our place in the world and the impact we have. Have fun with the practises. Try creating some of your own. Just be ready for things to get a little weirder! And always remember to come back to centre when you’re done.

Happy underworlding.

time shakes us loose and we become the prayer tie dangling

from the trees last year that is not gone

even though it is no longer there. it is not gone because it was remembered, in the same way our dead friends are remembered in the tangled lips that

haven’t happened yet. i haven’t said the words because they do not really

fit the feeling, you see. they are simply not haunted

enough / insufficiently surreal—

if i was to say that you are the

king of bees / wings unravelled by the tall blue / a

gash on the face of reality that bleeds honey / that i want to lick that

honey from the gash until its clean / until its raw / until i am fat, you would say

‘what the hell are you

talking about?’

and i’d say

‘???’—

so here we are—

silent /

dangling /

not yet /

until it’s gone.

What is the Web of Wyrdcraft?

All traditional rituals were responses to the life conditions of our ancestors. Some are timeless and should continue to be practised and preserved in the intact cultures from which they emerged. However, plenty of people outside of those contexts still need rituals and ceremonies that are meaningful, transformative, and rooted in ecological more-than-human relationships.

The Web of Wyrdcraft is a sigil representing the relationship between domains, qualia, and values relevant to ritual process. Inspired by my own ritual practise, which I have developed through both intellectual and embodied study, I created it as a ritual design tool and practise guide. It is for anyone who wants to design rituals that are relevant to contemporary life.

Modern Western culture does not suffer from a lack of rituals; it suffers from a lack of meaningful, devotional, earth-based, collective ritual process. Our rituals suffer from a lack of intergenerationality, transcontextuality, ecosomatic attunement, and post-religious inclusivity. The consequences of this are manifold—from ecological to psychological and everything in between.

By no means do I believe ritual is the solution to the so-called ‘metacrisis.’ However, I do propose that ritual is a necessary element of systems change. This is because ritual is both integrative and transcontextual: it can act within multiple domains simultaneously. Rituals have an impact on the nervous system, the psyche, the relationships between individuals within a given culture, and the relationship between that culture and the bioregion it calls home. It also has an impact on the relationship between those various domains. Another way of saying this is that ritual reminds us of how the lines between domains and institutions are necessarily blurred. Art is political, politics is psychological, psychology is embodied, and so on.

As John Vervaeke says in his Cambridge lecture on rationality and ritual, ‘ritual is a way of knowing.’ I would go so far as to say that ritual is actually various ways of knowing, learning, and being, all co-arising and working simultaneously.

Just because the Web offers five specific domains does not mean that ritual knowing is limited to them. It is merely a starting point to make the design process simpler. This structure is merely a set of guidelines. The more you engage in ritual praxis, the more you will see that the possibilities stretch out into a vast wilderness before you.

A statement on cultural extraction

Countless cultures and practises have provided inspiration for the Web. My attempt was to create something that was inspired by various traditional and indigenous lineages, but I explicitly sought to avoid extraction. Extraction differs, in my view, from cross-cultural pollination. The difference is subtle and has everything to do with intention and aesthetic. The truth is that cultural boundaries are in a constant state of flux, with clean delineations dissolving upon close inspection. Yet there is a way to adapt the cultural practises of another without regard for the sacredness and meaning of those practises. This is extraction, or as it’s more commonly called, ‘appropriation.’

The origin of cultural appropriation is a feeling of emptiness and disconnection from one’s ancestry. This is why it is most common amongst people with European ancestry in the Americas; it is less of an issue elsewhere because ‘Whiteness’ is a fundamentally American concept, devoid of any real connection to land and lineage. There is a deep hunger in the soul of those who do not have such a connection, regardless of their ethnic background, thus many are called to learn from other cultures who have retained such a connection. This is because connection to land and lineage through ritual is one of our more fundamental human needs.

The concept of appropriation has become a hotly debated topic in recent years, and it is not one I wish to spend much time on here. I will only warn you, the practitioner, that it is dangerous to strip practises from their original biopsychosocial context. This is less about risking impoliteness and is much more about the actual power of the rituals themselves. Rituals, without context, lose a lot of their meaning and functionality. The Web provides an alternative to cultural extraction; there is no need to appropriate practises from other cultures when you are able to create new ritual practises relevant to your own.

Being immersed in a culture which normalises extraction means that I have done an imperfect job of honouring the lineages that have inspired the Web. To those cultures, I express gratitude, grief, and remorse. Know that I have made my best attempts to create this framework with integrity.

If you are curious to know what specific lineages and cultures that have inspired this Web, check out the ‘Dedications & Acknowledgements’ section of the full article (which can be purchased for $11 right here).

happy underworlding.

If you believe in this work, if this or any of my other writing has touched you, and if you want to help me keep serving in this way, consider becoming a paid subscriber. You can also make a one-time donation via the following links. Thanks!

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Alchemical Writing 2: Meeting the Silence

I don’t listen to music anymore.

I put music on, of course, but I don’t actually listen. It wasn’t until recently, during a meditation session, that I realised this. The most beautiful song came on about halfway through my sit.

I wanted so badly to get up and add it to my digital music library. But I had committed to twenty minutes of stillness and observation; I couldn’t let myself break that vow.

Each moment the song played, I anticipated its ending—the moment when it would be lost to me forever. (Unfortunately, Apple Music doesn’t let you replay songs from its radio stations, and they aren’t saved in your music history, either.)

Something magical happened as I lamented during this meeting with transience. The song came alive.

I savoured each movement.

I actually listened.

These days, a lot of us put music on not because we want to listen to music, but because we want to avoid silence.

What this does to us on a neurochemical level has to do with desensitization to dopamine, but what it feels like subjectively is a lack of appreciation—a lack of aliveness. We take music for granted. It becomes mere background noise. It no longer impacts us, because we don’t appreciate its absence.

In a culture that normalises and encourages constant distraction, we must remember how to meet silence.

Silence confronts us with what we might not want to be aware of. We welcome noise and distraction, because if we were to actually sit in silence, we’d notice discomfort, grief, anger, anxiety...all sorts of unpleasant things would come to the surface.

Unfortunately, if you are an artist, you can’t really afford to avoid silence. Doing so is actually avoiding the art.

Artistic practise is a tool for meeting the collective and individual shadows, so that we can welcome them in. Only then can we live in true devotion to the art that wants to move through us.

Alchemical Writing is a practise of identifying the creative message that is ours to embody.

It is a practise of remembering our task as a mouthpiece for uncomfortable truths.

It is a way to get really intimate with what is real, here and now.

Alchemical Writing 02: Meeting The Silence is the second instalment in this year-long bimonthly workshop series.

This contemplative journaling practise combines the cognitive and emotional benefits of both mediation and journaling, so you can be more creative, resilient, and equanimous in the face of life’s difficult trials.

Come to learn how to

• listen with the whole body

• meet difficult thoughts and emotions with equanimity

• welcome silence like an old friend rather than a dreaded enemy

We meet at 12 noon ET on March 22nd. Sign up below.

JOIN AW

Paid subscribers have access to AW sessions for free as long as their subscription is active. If this applies to you, message me now to claim your spot or go here to learn more about AW first.

Happy underworlding!

I never wanted to become a poet; I became one out of necessity.

I became one to make sense of the tired mess of being human. The truth is that I’ve always thought being a poet was kind of embarrassing. I’ve never enjoyed reading my poetry out loud and I even dread writing it sometimes. It’s like releasing the valve on a pressure cooker. You just have to do it, you know? It’s not about pleasure or aggrandizement. It’s about naming what’s there and coming into relationship with it.

I have been publishing poetry on Substack for nearly 4 years now. At first, I wasn’t proud of what I was creating, and I was embarrassed to show it to anybody. From the outside looking in, I’m sure nobody was aware of this. However, in time, I started to create things that I could be proud of. I started to receive some acknowledgement that my poetry was meaningful to others. I felt like, even on bad days, I could keep going.

I think about some of my favourite writers—Mary Oliver, Charles Bukowski, Kurt Vonnegut. I think about what might have happened if they decided their work wasn’t worth being shared with the world. I don’t compare myself to them in terms of skill or greatness by any means, but still, I imagine there is someone out there in the world who will read my poetry and find a reason to go on living because of it. When I think about that, I feel like I can go on living too.

So, here it is, a collection of original poems I have written over the past two years. You can buy a physical copy of it and hold it in your very own hands. I hope it feels as special to you as it does to me.

Happy underworlding.

GET A COPY

as i am watching crows

a faceless man in my imagination tells me i am beautiful

and asks if he can kiss me.

half of my mouth tells him that he is

blind. i think it’s funny, this joke at my expense. he

does not laugh. he never tells me i am beautiful

again. the other half of my mouth begins to chuckle and

grin. my grin is so wide that it splits

time. my grin is so wide that my face begins to

crack and blood spills out of the corners of my mouth, which is freshly torn across each cheek.

it

hurts. the blood hasn’t even

turned red yet. the blood splays out into ten

strands like two sets of hands with five fingers each. the

blood reaches forward to grasp his face. his

face is smeared with my blood. his

face is smeared with my blood. covering my

cracked and bleeding split-time face with one

hand—like a lady—i sigh. i’m

sorry, i say to him. i’m

terrible at receiving compliments.

This is an excerpt from ‘The Web of Wyrdcraft: 5 Principles of Ritual Design.’ It’s a ritual practise manifesto and guide that outlines a simple, yet profound philosophy for designing communal and individual rituals for support, healing, clarity, and cooperation. You can purchase the full manifesto for just $11 right here. Paid subscribers get a copy for free, so consider becoming one if you want it in addition to a year of free attendance to the Alchemical Writing group.

What is ritual for?

All worthy things are a means unto life; life is an end unto itself.

At the most basic level, ritual is an instinctual animal behaviour. However, that is not the only thing it is. It is also a co-regulatory somatic practise. It is also a process by which we individually and collectively receive information and generate meaning. It is a way to engage in ‘serious play’ with our environment. It is how we stay in relationship with more-than-human forces.

Ritual is for so many things because ritual is so many things. It isn’t something we need to do so much as it is something we cannot help but do.

Rituals can be for a lot of things, but at their core, they are for life itself. Life created the conditions for ritual behaviour to emerge; it is certainly a human trait, but it goes beyond humans. Other sentient nonhuman animals display ritual behaviour as well.

Ritual is a practise of venerating life: participating with it, expressing gratitude for it, protecting it, and so on.

Ritual praxis in a fragmented world

There are few so-called ‘intact’ cultures on this planet. However the oldest and most ‘intact’ ones tend to do something that contemporary Western educated do not: assume relationality. Contemporary Western educated societies must work to consciously recall that this is the case, due to Cartesian influences.

The Web only exists because we exist in a cultural context of fragmentation. I speak about the domains as if they are separate things but I do not believe this to be the case in an ontic or epistemic sense. All domains connect to all other domains, either directly or indirectly. Nevertheless, because the contemporary Western mind assumes discreteness it also experiences fragmentation. The Web is a somewhat paradoxical attempt to stitch together something that is already innately a whole, complex system, in the hopes that we can once again experience that wholeness and complexity.

Ritual is a practise of relationality: becoming aware of it, getting better at being in it, and remembering how to assume it as default.

happy underworlding.

i want nothing more to know until the knowing

comes knocking. the drapes are drawn, the door is shut, i am

not home. longing is so sweet when first she enters, with a dream so

soft in it’s emptiness. she never mentions just how

hollow it can feel when she is gone in the morning, when

she leaves your hands weakened with the weight of

what you asked for.

what terror—this dream is alive and

breathing, waking me in the middle of the night

wanting. she never mentioned how its eyes would be so

tender looking up at me, saying ‘what now? what now?’ i never

pictured it quite this shape, this texture, never knew a dream could

be so heavy so warm so hungry.

i don’t know what to feed it. i

cradle it to sleep so in the respite i will have my own

chance to weep.

i do not know why i am weeping.

it is not the same reason why i wept before.

The most laughable thing that’s ever been said about me is that I “have a system for everything.”

My brother in Christ, I am goblincore exemplified.

my room is a dumpster fire of clothes piles and art supplies. i only have a sleep schedule sometimes. i’ve been known to spend days at a time doing nothing but staring into space and grunting half-intelligible greetings to my housemates while completely avoiding eye contact, because i woke up in a mysteriously weird mood that day.

who is more correct about who someone is—that person experiencing themselves or the people experiencing that person?

that’s not actually the point of this piece, but it’ll get us there. be patient with me.

the man who taught me trance induction claimed to have a strategy for everything.

he claimed that all of the things he did and said were pre-planned, set in place to procure a specific result. he said this with pride, as if it were the right way to be, the superior way to be. it took me 18 months to unravel the slimy pathways i’d entangled myself in because of his lack of facility with the unconscious. in other words, because everything had to be known, everything had to be intentional, everything had to be mapped and methodical and make sense, anything that didn’t was pathologised or even outright denied.

if you haven’t guessed, that relationship fucked me right up.

people who try to systematise everything are dangerous. this is why its comical to be seen as a ‘person with a system for everything.’ i have no idea what i am doing, and that’s okay by me.

the system itself—the one that i am a part of—is smarter than me.

when my body feels rigid from stress, i remember what water’s patience does to stone over time and i mimic that flow. when i feel alone, i remember that brain synchrony exists and recognise how, even in silence, i am connected to all the bodies that have ever existed. i notice my thoughts and the thoughts i have about those thoughts and the larger thought patterns resonating through the shared field of humanity. i watch them float like clouds across my clear blue mind, or i watch them get tangled in a midnight sea of overwhelm. i am only doing what every other system is doing: self-correcting, walking a tightrope, dancing with entropy.

ah yes, we’ve finally arrived at the point.

systems are self-organising. they express patterns and processes that can be generative, or destructive, or whatever combination of both. it goes without saying that i myself am a system, but i am not just that. i am a system within a system, and i am constantly learning and re-learning how to exist within this system.

most of this is unconscious.

people who are actually good at systematising aren’t trying to tell a system how to be. they aren’t imposing their will against the current of what is already set in motion. they are listening, mirroring, responding. they are modifying their behaviour relative to the changes in the environment.

go ahead and argue that this is a strategy—you’re not wrong. it’s just not what people mean when they say i’m methodical. it’s not what they think of when they think of someone knowing what they are doing. it is a style of being that appears chaotic as fuck from one angle and completely elegant and strategic from another.

it’s both. it’s neither.

trying to solve problems without understanding the complex nature of problems, how they arise, and the ripple effects of implementing change does not a good problem solver make.

surrender does. discernment does. the courage to not act does.

far be it from me to believe i am a good systematiser, or even a good problem solver. i really only have one insight to offer:

you cannot systematise everything, because the system is smarter than you.

we are inside of systems that are wider and wiser and wilder than we are. we are the systems and the systems are us. you don’t have to believe in one or more sentient creator beings to recognise the elegance of this. you don’t have to believe in one or more sentient creator beings to trust it’s unfolding.

remember, trust isn’t about expecting that you’ll get what you want. it’s about believing that you’re capable of handling what comes your way regardless of what that is.

may we cultivate resilience in the face of complexity.

happy underworlding.

my movement practise is kinda weird. wanna learn more about it? go here.

SOMATAXY is a movement-based mindfulness practise in the lineage of butoh.

It does not exist to help you regulate yourself into compliance with an inherently corrupt system. It does not exist to help you ‘make sense’ of your emotions. It is not for gaining control of whatever haunted artefacts might be burrowed within you.

It is not safe. It is not beautiful, at least not in any conventional sense. It is not easy to describe.

It is a bright glimpse into freedom.

It exists to show you what you did not know was there. To bring you back to the still, quiet place from where all sensations, emotions, and thoughts emerge. To remind you what it is like to be fully alive in a world that is constantly trying to lull you to sleep.

To ask people to have hope, to stay strong, to push through and maintain a sense of normalcy while everything collapses around them…

This is profoundly f*cking tone deaf.

I myself am not doing a great job of ‘carrying on’ in the face of every horrible thing that we have been forced to face in the past year or so. I’ve been having a hard time writing, a hard time committing to my meditation practise, a hard time feeling safe and present in my relationships…

I cannot pretend. I won’t ask you to, either.

I will only tell you that life is precious. It is sacred. It is miraculous and mundane, all at once.

I will tell you that these are the times to really slow down and enjoy the banal sweetness of humaning. To revel in the saccharine. To be kind to strangers, simply for sh*ts and giggles. Take a deep breath. Be present with every lovely little second of it.

I will only tell you that being human is a blessing. To treat it like a blessing. To cry for those who have fallen. Get angry, not just at those who perpetrate atrocities all over the world, but on behalf of the wounded ancestors that possess them to do so.

I will only tell you that an unshakeable peace can be found within this sh*t-show—not an emotionless bliss-void, but a radical acceptance streaked with grief and reverence.

// WHAT IS SOMATAXY? //

SOMATAXY is a movement-based mindfulness practise in the lineage of butoh. You can cultivate emotional regulation, mental calm, and mind-body integration through it. However, I consider these benefits secondary.

SOMATAXY is mostly here to help you make peace with the paradoxical nature of existence: wonder and terror, grief and elation, becoming and unbecoming.

This is the kind of work that empowers us to be the antithesis of evil.

As a ritual movement practise, SOMATAXY (which translates to “body between”) can help us rebuild our sense of communion with the more-than-human world.

Musicians, dancers, flow artists, and performers of all kinds will benefit from this process-based imaginal somatic practise, which expands the bodymind’s capacity for regulation, connection, pattern recognition, and creative expression.

There are 6 sessions in this series.

// SOMATAXY: VOID //

October 19th. 6pm - 9pm.

Trance begins in the place beyond place, in a time outside of time. Before accumulating new skills, perspectives, and qualities of embodiment, students will first be led to forget everything they think they know about being in a body. From here, they will re-learn and re-imagine the potential their bodymind has for expression, relationship, and movement.

// SOMATAXY: VESSEL //

December 21st. 6pm - 9pm.

What does it mean to fill, to hold, to contain? What subtle shifts occur when we move as a vessel for forces beyond the tactile world? This session will encourage students to explore the qualities of emptiness, fullness, containment, and integrity as they invoke what seeks to move through them.

//SOMATAXY: FLOW//

February 15th. 6pm - 9pm.

What is it like to shift shape, to be contained, to distribute the agency of movement to forces beyond? The body is a container of mostly fluid and space. Having related more deeply with emptiness and containment, students will now explore what it is like to fully yield, surrendering the body to the forces of gravity and momentum.

// SOMATAXY: FLAME //

April 19th. 6pm - 9pm.

Energy, warmth, friction, and impact are all qualities of an interesting dance. In this session, students will notice what it is like to bring tension, push, and heat into their movement, learning how to enfold discomfort, unpredictability, and edges into their movement.

// SOMATAXY: OTHER //

June 21st. 6pm - 9pm.

How do we dance with that which we cannot see? We do not dance in a vacuum; we dance as whole-parts in an interconnected web of complexity. This session will guide students deeper into relationship with unseen forces, such as ancestors, memories, mythic beings, and more.

// SOMATAXY: CENTRE //

August 16th. 6pm - 9pm.

In a distributed network of aliveness, what element can be accurately classified as “centre?” From an “extended body” perspective, the centre is both everywhere and nowhere at once. In this final session, students will play with techniques for re-distributing weight, oscillating attention, and leading from various systems of the body.

// COURSE PRINCIPLES //

Scout uses a system of 5 presuppositions, called the WEB OF WYRDCRAFT, to design ritual practises and containers. These principles are derived from a wide scope of domains, including but not limited to somatics, cognitive science, hypnosis, and occultism:

✪ The human body is a ritual body.

✪ The imaginal puts us in contact with reality.

✪ Ritual is a way of knowing.

✪ Ritual is embodied mythos.

✪ Ritual guides us through a reality that is unknowable.

// MEET YOUR FACILITATOR //

Scout Rainer Wiley (they/it/sie) is a poet, diviner, and ritual artist living on unceded Cherokee lands. Over the past 11 years of study and practise, they have learned directly with various ritual teachers, such as Josh Schrei, Jacquelyn Marie Shannon, and Jason McClain. Scout also draws from many theoretical frameworks, with influences from John Vervaeke, Malidoma Patrice Somé, Catherine Bell, Nora Bateson, Bayo Akomolafe, and more. Dedicated to bridging the worlds of intellect and intuition, Scout has developed a well-rounded and methodical approach to ritual that rests on strong theoretical and experiential foundations. By weaving together threads of animist practice, systems theory, and religious studies, Scout’s mission is to midwife a global culture centered in respect, reciprocity, and authenticity.

// PROTOCOLS FOR OUR TIME TOGETHER //

✪ Please arrive on time. This is a closed ritual container, and latecomers will not be admitted. Please plan to remain in attendance for the full duration of each class you register for. ​There are NO refunds, except for in the case of emergencies--so please respect everyone’s time, including your own!

✪ Please come dressed in comfortable, dark-coloured clothing​. ​This is to minimise distractions and bring us into grounded presence together. Refrain from flashy patterns and bright colours, if you can.​

✪ If you have specific accessibility needs, reach out to me ahead of time so I can plan to accommodate you. SOMATAXY is meant to be accessible to all bodies. Some of these practises may be taxing or challenging for some bodies. Some of these practises will require touch, eye contact, and being in close proximity with other bodies. If you need to stop, take breaks, or refrain from certain practises, do so. You are strongly encouraged to honour your body’s signals and needs above anything else. Tend to yourself before, during, and after our time together.​​

✪ Please arrive with a clean body and refrain from wearing any strong scents. Practise situational awareness, attunement, and consent. Be mindful of the needs and potential sensitivities of the other bodies in the space.

✪ Please bring a water bottle and arrive satiated.

✪ Please bring one portal object for the communal altar. In the practise in which I am trained, we often dance with ghosts, ancestors, and things that haunt us--things that exist in the world beyond. During this practise we will reach beyond the veil, inviting our senses to touch the unseen. Bring an item that is meaningful to you and represents such themes.

// ADMISSION //

Each class is $15 - $30, sliding scale. Purchase a ticket here:

https://hyperphantasiaritualarts.as.me/somataxy

// LOCATION //

These classes are all in-person in West Asheville, NC. The address will be emailed to you upon registration, along with the parking map.