As I watch the cruelty, the kidnappings and the horror of families and children being destroyed in Minneapolis and the surrounding communities where I was raised, and where I still have family - and as I watch a community bind itself together in solidarity and mutual care I am reminded of some of the thoughts Vanessa Andreotti and Gesturing Toward Decolonial Futures shared in Hospicing Modernity :

We swim when the flood waters reach our waist. When the crisis is upon us is when we can “reclaim exiled capacities” and reach into collective strengths that had atrophied. The whole world knows how to face crisis and come together and persevere and care for each other and we have all have told each other stories about it for millennia. Every enlightened being and the still small voice of the atman within each individual knows exactly what to do. If we pretend it’s some mystery we are so turned around and lost we can’t see what has always been right in front of us.

Care for each other. Protect and keep each other. Share what you can. Ask for help and support when you are in need.

And Call on the dead to help strengthen and guide us. I know I am calling on the strength of all my Quaker ancestors who stood against the imposition of a national church and were arrested over and over. Who refused to take their hats off to state authority. Who refused oaths and pledges to oppressive nations. Who abandoned pacifism to fight for the freedom of enslaved people. And the long line of Quaker mothers who educated and empowered their daughters, who had their stoops marked because they fed their neighbors and the homeward bound looking for work and meal and a warm bed.

I’m calling on all of them to guide me through and show me the work that is mine to take up at this crossroads.

Discussion: Talking with the Dead

with Martha Crawford and shea in the catskills

Saturday, January 24 11:00am Pacific 12pm Mountain, 1pm Central, 2pm Eastern via Zoom

In this community discussion, we’ll talk about:

• the ways that our current dominant culture denies the reality of death as a wholly natural part of life and obscures and minimizes our relationships with the dead

• ways to make connections with our dead—human and non-human, biological and chosen kin drawing on psychological, imaginal and spiritual frameworks

• how during this time of the collapse of our climate and political systems, calling on the dead for help can fortify and sustain us now, and remind us to consider the kind of ancestors we will become to the living we leave behind

This community discussion is recorded and recording links will be sent out to all who register before or after the live discussion

Discount codes are available

Click to register

Riding the Roller Coaster:

A workshop for grown-ups who have feelings:

WINTER 2026 - ACCEPTING MEMBERS

Wednesday Afternoon/ Evenings

2/4, 11, 18, 25 3/4

3:30 Pacific, 4:30 Mountain, 5:30 Central, 6:30 Eastern

(dates/times subject to change based on enrollment)

In an extreme era, when media companies and politicians hope to manipulate our collective emotional response - it is important to consider the functions our emotions serve.

• What are the psychological, relational, environmental, embodied, spiritual, biological and embodied functions of our emotions?

• How do they serve as guides or compensate for our habitual responses?

• How might we be overtaken, possessed by them?

• How do we tend to their call with discernment, prudence and respect for their embodied demands?

Six seats open, three seats are eligible for partial for full scholarships

For more information

Consultations:

My calendar is open!

I am available to support folks

• negotiating transtions in career, or life-stage, role or vocation,

• for those who want to examine their priorities in the face of collective problems of the era

• for those facing potentially life-threatening or life-changing diagnoses and their support circle

• for artists and creatives to support their projects and negotiate blocks

• for those who are seeking integration support after psychedelic experiences, near death experiences, etc.

• for those interested in integrating or establishing contemplative practices - including dream work, journaling, meditation, contemplation, and self-determined personal spiritual practices

• for therapists and other helping professionals negotiating stress, burnout, disability, or reconsidering their clinical frames or practices.

• for those wanting support in group development, non-clinical community care models, designing courses and presentations and re-imagining their work-lives

  For an appointmet

And I’m sharing a piecee from the mystic and poet Hafez Shirazi, that has been sitting on my heart, and in my minds ear every single day, that has become a kind of prayer for courage and clarity.

Like A Life Giving Sun

You could become a great horseman

And help to free yourself and this world

Though only if you and prayer become sweet
Lovers.

It is a naive man who thinks we are not
Engaged in a fierce battle,

For I see and hear brave foot soldiers
All around me going mad,

Falling on the ground in excruciating pain.

You could become a victorious horseman

And carry your heart through this world
Like a life-giving sun

Though only if you and the Great Spirit become sweet
Lovers

May we all free ourselves and this world, and carry our hearts like a life giving sun.

Martha 🌸

Note:

I post at Substack very rarely, if you want to stay connected to me, to read the free and paywalled essays that I share, to support my work, and to the pro bono and by donation services that I offer visit my webpage: Whatashrinkthinks.com or register for my free newsletter here.

Saturday 9/27 & Saturday 10/4

COMMUNITY DISCUSSION

Community work: Why Bother & What Stops Us?

With Deserie Charles & Martha Crawford

11:30am Pacific, 12:30pm Mountain, 1:30 Central, 2:30 Eastern

RECORDING WILL BE AVAILABLE

Community discussions are one-time, recorded events:

Ninety minute facilitated public discussions - via Zoom,

with opportunities for questions and response on specific topics

Deserie Charles is a licensed psychologist who has been practicing since 2005. In response to changing times, she is focused on creating supportive communities that offer connection and resilience. She believes this work is necessary to confront systemic crises and build a sustainable future

This work is necessary. Our community skills, methods and engagement has deteriorated profoundly. So many have forgotten how to come together, and so many of us have been harmed, traumatized, or at least made very distressed by community models that over-rely on business and compulsory educational structures that emphasize compliance with dominance.

Think you aren’t trained enough, that you don’t know enough, that you have to be an “expert”? Think that you have to “sell” something to someone or you need to be “in charge” or receive approval from some authority to get started?

We are all community members. We can gather together and build support in a million different ways, and we want to help folks get started.

Both Martha and Deserie have watched their own practices increasingly shift from highly individualized clinical practices to community-centered group work, in part because the challenges of these times demand it, as much as their own own sense of well-being and need for community engagement.

The first discussion on the 27th will focus on what stops us, where we get fussed and stuck, the fears we have about moving into collective spaces that our institutions have failed or overlooked, and challenging faulty cultural and personal beliefs that can stop us in our tracks before we even begin.

The discussion on October 4th will look at how to care and preserve ourselves as community members who are also facilitators, and identify tools for listening, structuring and encouraging shared boundaries, and healthy personal autonomy in community group work.

• Suggested donation: $40 total, 1/2 price discount available.

• If you have never attended a Community Discussion before, and cannot afford the 1/2 price fee you may use this discount code to attend for free: IDN6YBF

• You may attend one or both discussions, and recordings for both will be provided to all who register.

To Register for Community Discussion

5 Tuesday Evenings Starting 9/30

RIDING THE ROLLER COASTER WORKSHOP:

for grown-ups who have feelings

Right now there are multiple and frankly nefarious systems- oligarch owned media companies, social media algorithms, advertising, propagandists trying to manipulate you emotional response to their advantage.

It is time to become more curious, and more familiar with the function of your internal weather system than they are.

Lean into the “mystery” of our emotional lives and explore the way various contemplative practices can help us understand our unruly moods and emotions.

Too many are utterly mystified by their emotional lives, and think they must always locate the source or the trigger for an emotional response to accept that they “make sense” They are trying to perform many more sensible and essential functions that are far more reasonable than most ever consider

Several free seats, and “any donation you can afford” seats are available.

I really just want to get skills in hands to help folks negotiate the era that is upon us

For information and to register

• To explore all events and programs on my fall/winter calendar click here

• To learn more about my “pay-what-you-can” model, and why it is different from a sliding scale, visit this page.

• To receive free and paid subscription essays and regular updates please subscribe to my central newsletter here

"When we can look suffering and even death in the eye a dangerous weapon falls out of the ruler's hands."

~ Lobaczewski

I’m going to name a harsh truth:

Totalitarians manipulate us is through our heightened anxiety about death and dying - as the dominant culture has failed to initiate so many of us into healthy relationship to our mortality.

Everything the MAGA regime is doing reduces our life expectancy and increases death rates. We have to face this. We have to be prepared to fight and resist this.

But we also have to be prepared to mourn, and find meaning in lives that are finite.

We are returning to a state where we all have to become far more intimate with death, and to live in closer proximity to it - An attempted shift back towards “tamed death” from “forbidden death” in Ariès formulation.

We will need to form/reform a natural, meaningful and empowering relationship to mortality. Our ancestors, and colonized and indigenous communities didn’t have to shift their cultural relationship to death to fight tyrants. We do. This is our political reality but this is also a massive cultural shift in our relationship and proximity to death and dying We need to learn how to live and fight for justice with mortality death and grief alongside us.

Vaccine policy and climate policy, transportation policy, land and ocean use policy, science policy, international policy border policy, disability policy, Covid policy Medicaid, ICE, “People die” they say explicitly and indifferently. This is what has been unleashed and it is shattering our life expectancy. They are not just fine with it. This is the agenda.

Conscious death work is justice work. They are not separable and we can’t pretend that we can do one without the other anymore. They will try to control you through your unprocessed terror. We have to accept that there is a massively increasing likelihood we are going to lose people and lose loved ones and neighbors and maybe our own lives as they smash the medical system and social safety nets to pieces.

All of humanity has lived with this intimacy until antibiotics and vaccines and medical technology made death a rarer and medicalized event for some. We weren’t living in a world where death was alien and remote and erased where we could pretend it “only” happens to the sick, the disabled, the elderly.

We currently have no collective practices around death - beyond ignoring and avoidance - barely any bereavement leave, no real collective grief or grief support practices, support services for the dying are privatized and hospitals and hospices are increasingly profit driven or closing.

All of us will have to relearn this. And stand against the brutality and the weaponization of death.

And still commit to the sacredness and joy of life in the face of loss, precarity and increasing mortality.

Here is some good news: We absolutely can initiate ourselves and each other into a more mature relationship to mortality, where we understand that death and living are partners and not opposites, where how we live and how we die unfolds and effects and can even serve life long after we are gone.

There is a freedom that comes from knowing where you will not compromise no matter the consequences. Facing and forging a relationship with mortality is part of that freedom.

We can learn to talk to each other again about loss and dying and grief and what makes living meaningful. We have to.

And thankfully we can do this gently, and tenderly, playfully and practically, and in a way that helps us feel generative and grateful and clearer about who we mean to be and how we mean to live.

And we must do it together. We cannot even begin to do it alone.

Some reviews from past participants:

The Mortality Workshop is a beautifully paced, multi-leveled look at death and all of its ramifications. Martha creates a welcoming and safe environment that opens the door to much wisdom and grace.

I couldn't recommend it more. ~ M.D.

The most important thing I learned in Martha’s Mortality Workshop is that "justice" is fundamentally about proximity to/distance from death. That fear of death is at the root of every form of domination. That fascism can only function where there is a repression + fear of death + dying.

I would recommend this workshop for anyone who wants to develop a relationship with their own mortality, to do this with others, learning from each other's experiences.

The thing that surprised me most about this series is how fast it went + how deeply connected I felt to the cohort. When people gather around the heart of the matter, there is so much shared vulnerability.

Martha has done the deep study but has also had the unfathomable experience of facing down her mortality in a very non-abstract way! I've never encountered anyone who has thought more or more deeply about the many facets of death, dying + mortality than Martha. This made for an expansive + potent experience.

While it may seem scary, there's actually so much joy in beginning to come into relationship with this fundamental fact of our existence with others! ~ S. C.

Martha has designed and leads the Living with Mortality Workshop with such great care. It metes the topics out at a pace that matched my ability to comprehend, consider, and assimilate… neither too quickly nor too slowly, neither overwhelming nor disconnected. The opportunity to attend this workshop is an opportunity to be guided skillfully into turning to look towards aspects of reality that are so repressed (in our time, in dominant cultures) as to be almost invisible, yet so important as to demand our attention. It was a genuine pleasure to be able to practice, in conscious community, witnessing, thinking, feeling, questioning, not knowing, remembering, and relating. I hesitated to take this workshop, thinking it might be too hard, too sad, too depressing, but it isn’t any of those things. It’s a resounding relief, like taking a deep breath after holding it too long. ~ N.H.

This Mortality workshop was excellent -- the leader, the content and the group of people. Highly recommend for anyone who wants to think more deeply about life and to stretch themselves to be able to be more present with one of the things that scares almost all of us the most. ~ C. C.

Seven seats are open in this workshop

Three free seats are open

Any donation is accepted.

Click here to learn more and to register

A peer discussion group designed for anyone who wants to expand their ability to withstand and accept existential realities, to develop healthier, more related responses to encounters with death and dying

Free seats available

16 Wednesdays - 90 Minutes

Community discussions are one-time, recorded events: Ninety minute facilitated public discussions - via Zoom, with opportunities for questions and response on specific topics.

If you can’t join us live - you can now set up an annual subscription to access

The Whole Recorded Discussion Archive

with access to all past recordings, new recordings as they are added

_______________________________________

Christianity: Can’t Live With It, Can’t Live without it

Live Zoom Discussion Sunday 8/3

Rev. Wendy Vie & Martha Crawford

THIS DISCUSSION WILL BE RECORDED

TO REGISTER

The shadows however are shot through with flashes of light.

In mad moments of love or creativity, in the transparency of a glance

or when we are suddenly taken over by sheer wonderment at our existence,

depth of enlightenment are revealed.

~ Olivier Clément

Many have fled from the institutionalized Church for good cause. Many have been harmed by forms of Christianity entangled with the goals of Empire and colonization. Many associate all of Christianity with Christian Nationalism, and with Christian organizations and theologies that have promoted division, oppression and abuse. These brutal realities are not deniable, and for many, making any contact with them at all is toxic and re-traumatizing.

Yet, many have caught glimpses of underlying “flashes of light” in the Christ-myth - whether they consider themselves Christian or not - and work to imagine beyond the institutional failures that have harmed so many, searching out healthy, inclusive, liberatory frames and practices that advocate for and celebrate the vast spectrum of human life and all things in an interdependent universe.

A discussion for those engaged in the complexities of co-creation, and finding their way through the distortions, projections, abuses and the liberatory gifts of a vast continuum of Christian thought that extends far beyond institutional dogma.

Discussion Guideposts (although we will gladly abandon this and go where we are led!)

• Church, Empire and institutional Christianity

  • Who is Jesus, what is Christ-Consciousness to us?

• Mysticism, Deep Ecumenicism and the Cosmic Christ

  • Expansive theologies and Panentheism

  • Co-creation, Trans Identities and Transformation

• The Social Gospel

  • Patriarchy, Control and Liberation

  • Liberation as Sacred Work

Pastor Wendy Vie Trittin is a Spirituality Guide and Life Coach in Minnesota. She is an ordained pastor of the ELCA, and as a transgender human being, she is an imaginative reformer of her tradition. Wendy Vie is a member of Spiritual Directors International, Clergy Voyagers, and the Minnesota Jung Association.

Martha Crawford is an essayist, a psychotherapist and community organizer for thirty years, now focused on facilitating groups & workshops, dream work and death work, liberation psychology, & community resilience.

JOIN THE DISCUSSION BY DONATION:

Standard Donation

$20.00

________________

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If the donation is prohibitive use this 1/2 price coupon code when checking out

JXPZNEH

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For Free

If the donation is prohibitive use this 100% off coupon code when checking out through the Sign Up button:

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To register for Zoom link

What is a Gathered Meeting?

A Gathered Meeting is a secular group model derived from structures that are commonly used in Quaker meetings, and in other community groups such as Parker Palmer’s Circle Groups, 12 step programs, and Talking Stick councils. Martha Crawford, who has convened this project, spent several years as an assistant clerk at the 15th Street Friends Meeting in NYC as well as several decades in group work and community organizing. She has found this model to be particularly effective for structuring well-boundaried and reflective community spaces.

This process involves sharing questions, queries, and concerns that the group will contemplate together over the course of an hour through structured subjective sharing and periods of silence.

Above all, a Gathered Meeting is a space to drop in, sit still and in silence together, with an opportunity to draw on our shared strengths and resources, grieve and celebrate together when necessary, and stay grounded in the work in front of us.

We are building a network of facilitators who will be hosting online gathered meetings.

Who are “Helpers”?

Fred Rogers famously directed children in the throes of crises to “look to the helpers,” but as adults, we are not only the helpers ourselves, we must remember that “helpers” are vulnerable too, and in need of spaces to receive care and care for each other.

These meetings are organized to support professional and natural helpers (caretakers, parents, activists, teachers, medical and mental health care providers, community organizers, advocates - anyone in danger of burnout, over-extension or demoralization) as we negotiate a period of intense political and economic challenge and chaos ourselves, while providing logistical support and emotional mutual aid to our wider communities.

Those who have assumed helping roles in the community are not only attempting to assist others through this poly-crisis, we are negotiating the same challenges ourselves.

“Helpers” of all kinds are in danger of their own psychological injury through over-extension, and through vicarious and direct trauma.

Facilitation:

In addition to the organization and administration of their own meeting spaces, the facilitator’s primary role is to help the gathered meeting understand its established norms and practices and to adhere to them.

Facilitators will also craft queries and prompts for the gathered community to consider together.

We ask those who attend to support our facilitators’ labors through financial contributions

NOTE: Facilitators here are not acting as mental health professionals. They are community and peer-group facilitators

Pay-What-You-Can Contributions:

The suggested contribution ranges from $25 to $5.

No one will be turned away due to financial hardship.

It is hoped that those who are financially comfortable will consider contributing more to help sustain these financially inclusive gatherings

More Information:

Attenders may drop in as needed, attend regularly, intermittently or only once. Or attend different meetings with different facilitators on different days or times.

This group model and our norms and practices are not proprietary, and anyone is free to review, copy, edit, or modify our meeting norms and practices for their own uses.

If you click the button below you can review our Gathered Meeting norms, and download free pdf if you like.

New facilitators will be welcomed oriented to these practices regularly whether or not they choose to host a meeting as part of this project.

You will also be able to sign up to receive an email with a link to our Meeting Calendar.

We hope you will join us as we breathe, reflect and find our way together through a challenging era.

To learn more