Shiné: mind/body/spirit

10/26/2025

The last few weeks we've been exploring below-the-head discernment practices. Quakers talk a lot about discernment, and recently the term is getting more airplay in wider circles. By "discernment" I'm referring to the work of making choices in keeping with our values and commitments. In class, we've been exploring embodied ways to feel into this. First, a couple weeks ago, we engaged an approach from the late Suzanne River's "Global Somatics" program (as described by Susan Raffo). I'm adapting and paraphrasing here, based on some old notes I revisited:

Western Medicine didn't always believe that the brain in our skull is the enter of all ways of knowing. Up until Galen showed up in the 500s, the medical systems that eventually became Western medicine saw treating the body as a practice of balancing the humors. What was originally an elemental approach to care - in which the humors were as much about the land and the context around the human body as what was happening in an individual self - slowly became more diagnostic and focused on body separateness. Western medicine and Western culture evolved together, and as knowing things became more important than experiencing things, as individual knowledge was centered over collective knowing, so did the Western understanding of anatomy respond.

In this anatomized view of the body, the brain has a specific role. The brain brings information in through all kinds of body listenings, and especially the nervous system, and then determines a course of action. But for many generations, Western ways of knowing - like so many other cultural ways of knowing - centered on the heart-brain more than the head-brain. It matters, embryologically, that the two were physically connected at the start of our emergence, before separating and spiraling away from each other. The heart-brain, where information from many aspects of the body comes together and decisions are made, isn't just the heart organ, but includes the thymus (the "higher heart" spot we often tap in our practice together), the pericardium, and really, probably the lungs as well. If the head-brain is about making sense of things, a kind of executive function in relation to our survival and our sense of the future and our capacity for pleasure, then the heart-brain does the same, but with the ways in which we connect. And nourish. And are nourished. And then there's the gut-brain, this universe of microbiota and cells of human and non-human species, sorting out how to live together in harmony - or not. The gut-brain is the oldest brain in our bodies - it started learning how to be alive generations before the heart-brain and the head-brain became complex systems.

We can get out from the reign of the head and deepen our ability to feel our gut instinct, our heart's longing, if we regularly practice dropping into them intentionally. When we practice listening through all three brains together, rather than primarily through one or two, we can connect with the world in way that accounts for the sometimes contradictory information that comes in through our head, heart, and gut. We can feel them in the same way that we'd feel any community (including internal parts of our psyche) who, when asked what they would like, shares a range of opinions and needs that are based on each of their experiences and locations. We are listening to our own internal community and although there are times when they all pretty much agree, they are rare. Even if we are discerning a pathway that responds to a simple question like "should I get more rest?" (which for most of us is like DUH YES F**K TO THE YES), we'll probably get some contradictions. We might get a kind of primal slow yes from our gut, and a feeling of sadness from our heart, and a thought from our head-brain that tells us how much work we have left to do. Listening with all three brains is a practice for not assuming that single answers exist for anything. It's about living with contradictions and practicing feeling, internally, the many ways we respond, sensing our own layers, which in turn helps us hold space for other people's complexities and contradictions, as well. ☀️

More in this week’s newsletter:
https://us12.campaign-archive.com/?e=__test_email__&u=e2c17b1425a8cb6ac4566a750&id=9fa890e025

10/26/2025

If you've never read Hospicing Modernity, there's this amazing part I love to turn to when I'm confused. It's a collaborative text called "Co-sensing with Radical Tenderness" written by the GTDF collective (Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures). De Oliveira recommends returning to these four pages of the book "anytime you feel bewildered, disoriented, or discombobulated by what you experience..." - so I did. She offers that we choose just five sentences and create exercises to bring their wisdom into our daily life. So here it goes:

1. Be open to what you can't and may never understand. Creatively make space for the unknown and the unknowable, in ourselves and others. Don't cast upon everything a blanket of interpretation.
2. Don't hold "being" hostage to "knowing." Engage with creativity beyond the intellect by recovering exiled capacities, expanding sensibilities, and dis-immunizing intimacies. Allow your state of wonder to stay open, without always trapping it into meaning.
3. Turn the heart into a verb. Activate the sense of hearing in all parts of your body. Listen to unuttered wisdom, nurturing intrinsic rather than productive value. Dissolve the limits and weight of your body, allowing others to move through, with, and for you. Collectivize your heart so that it breaks open and not apart.
4. Allow yourself to be guided by a metabolic intelligence. Seek sense-fulness rather than meaningfulness. Integrate with a wider metabolism, feeling your entanglement with everything, including the ugly, the broken, and the messed up. Learn to breathe water. Be water.
5. Interrupt addictions to consumption, not only of "stuff" but also of knowledge, experiences, and relationships. Dance beyond the loop of identification and disidentification. Co-sense with radical tenderness and assist with the birth of something new. Allow it to come through you, forever changeable and fluid.

Confession: this is actually breaking the rules because it's 18 sentences not 5 and I also combined some and cut and pasted but I'm going with it. So what, you may ask, are my exercises? What are the nitty-gritty exercises to bring this wisdom into my daily life, to incorporate all these verbs? It might help to list them:

Be open, make space, allow, flow, don't blanket over, recover senses and intimacies, dissolve skin limits, collectivize, activate your heart, nurture inherent human worthiness, follow metabolic intelligence, feel entanglements, dance, transcend preferences, interrupt addictions, breathe, birth something new, BE.

When I read that list, I know that my exercises for manifesting these ways of being emerge while practicing with you. We discover new exercises for all of these, all the time. So again I'm saying thank you. Thank you for bringing so much of yourselves to this experimental space, for co-holding our disorientation, for holding our individual and collective complexities, and for practicing new ways of being and finding our way - together.

Read the whole newsletter: https://us12.campaign-archive.com/?e=__test_email__&u=e2c17b1425a8cb6ac4566a750&id=9fa890e025

10/19/2025

WAITING LIST:
The Wednesday night series in November and December will be part gentle flow, restorative with Reiki-style touch. The series is full, but please reach out to be placed on a waiting list, and you'll be contacted in the order of your sign-up week by week, as spots open up.
11/5, 11/12, 12/3, 12/10, 6:30 - 8PM
This and other workshops here: https://www.katyhawkins.com/upcoming-workshops.html

10/17/2025

1 spot left

Sunday fireside restorative & massage:
10/19 3:45-5:45pm
Ask me about staying for the James Turrell sunset skyspace opening afterwards!
Register at http://www.katyhawkins.com/upcoming-workshops.html

10/12/2025

When I was very small, whenever I got hurt my dad would take me outside to the Crybush, a shrub with flowering flowers and berries that seemed to have something new and different with every visitation, and I would pick something to bring back inside for my mother. The wisdom in this practice of "Crybushing" - the change of scene, the getting outside into something bigger, the practice of opening to something outside of myself and looking for gifts - is something I call upon again and again when I'm sad. When I feel depressed, I go to CVS and look through the greeting cards till one calls to me and tells me who needs it. Or I find a magical something on my dog walk - a lego on the soccer field, a lost computer keyboard piece, a slice of Wissahickon schist - and I bring it home for my altar.

To build the ancestral altar for Friday night's workshop, we started outside at dusk. Some of us were barefoot in the cool grass, and in the semi-darkness we engaged a specific practice for attuning to the natural world around us, listening for what called to us, and following the promptings. Then we spent some time communing with whatever phenomenon pulled our attention, listening for any messages it might hold for us, perhaps offering something back like a song or chant or a nursery rhyme or an expression of gratitude. We gathered the stuff that wanted to come with us, and we respected the stuff that wanted to stay, and came in to our cozy circle to make offerings to our grandparents, placing them one by one next to candles lit for each element. Afterwards, we felt our way into the query: what is the somatic imprint of orienting to the practice of offering? Like, how does it feel, emotionally and physically, this practice of making sacred offerings? It's kinda like breathing. You allow yourself to receive, to take in the abundant gifts of the world surrounding you, and then there's this feeling of fullness, and it feels natural to exhale, let go, give back.

My family is nerdy enough to have a book club. Nerdy enough, in fact, to study The Dawn of Everything, a gazillion-page tome with the wild goal of rewriting the history of humanity as it's been told. Graeber & Wengrow aim to reconfigure our ideas of "progress" and our definition of "civilization" by revealing the Western cultural bias that has colored anthropology's history of "mankind." If you're looking for a deep dive, dig in! But in a related vein, I just wanted to offer this more bite-size quote from Ronald White, in the CAC newsletter last week, on the conflict between settler-colonial and Native American approaches to money and wealth:

"The problems were those which arise wherever a stable, collective system and one based on expansion and individual profits collide. It was, for instance, impossible to run a store or plantation profitably without violating the [way] of reciprocity fundamental to most Amerindian societies. To obtain respect in the Native world, people had to redistribute wealth; for esteem in the white world, they had to hoard it. To a Cherokee, sufficient was enough; to a white, more was everything."

Our culture's individualist approach to consumption - when we have more, we spend more, and then we think we need more - could use a good dose of an Indigenous perspective that prevents an imbalanced distribution of wealth: "sufficient was enough." The CAC noted, on the remarkable tenacity of certain tribes in resisting the materialism and consumerism of settler-colonialism, that until the 19th century, the Cherokee Nation held on to the beliefs and practices that prevented poverty, in the face of forced relocation and cultural genocide. How might we take our cue from this strength of resistance in creating more balanced practices, over and against the dysfunctions of dominant American cultural norms? I'm hugely grateful to be raised with the countercultural radicalism of the Quaker testimony of Simplicity. At times it feels starry-eyed and unrealistic, and at times I wonder how many Friends practice what we preach - but at its core, it has the ring of Truth. Like the Crybush. What are the practices you inherited from your people to cultivate a balanced ecology of plenitude and offering back? May we find our way, bringing forward the healing knowledge that lives in each of our bones and blood and lineage. Happy Indigenous Peoples' Day - hope to see you tomorrow at Shiné. Check the newsletter with fall offerings (pun intended) here: https://us12.campaign-archive.com/?e=__test_email__&u=e2c17b1425a8cb6ac4566a750&id=b99730904b

10/10/2025

There’s still room for you to join us tonight!

TONIGHT, 6:30-9pm
A supportive collective space to practice somatic techniques that can facilitate the healing potential of psychedelics.

We begin with an accessible somatic practice, with various tools from polyvagal techniques to EFT (tapping) to embodied parts work. Then we do some journaling (or drawing or contemplative practice), with an option for drinking in the James Turrell closed loop of "Greeting the Light." We'll close with discussions in small groups and a closing circle.

In October: this witchy month we'll be exploring three mystical practices for working with the gifts and wounds of our individual ancestral lineages:
-inherited movement patterns (what did we learn from our people about the basic somatic cycle of yielding, pushing, reaching, grasping, and holding?)
-wayfinding in the animate world (techniques for centering, attending to, and engaging signs & omens in nature)
-elemental inheritance (what we've inherited from those who came before in our relationship to the elements, and how can we reinforce what's powerful and repattern what might not be serving us?) ​

Please note that you do not have to be undertaking psychedelic therapy to participate, only that you come with curiosity about it, and eagerness to explore the subterranean worlds of the soul more deeply.

Until our culture can embrace this cutting-edge healing modality, engaging in psychedelic work can be lonely and stigmatizing. Here is an intimate space to build camaraderie and connection with other folk doing aaaaall the deep soul-spelunking.

Deets: http://www.katyhawkins.com/upcoming-workshops.html

10/02/2025

Sunday fireside restorative & massage:
10/19 3:45-5:45pm
Ask me about staying for the James Turrell sunset skyspace opening afterwards!
Register at http://www.katyhawkins.com/upcoming-workshops.html

09/28/2025

TONIGHT, 6:30-9pm
A supportive collective space to practice somatic techniques that can facilitate the healing potential of psychedelics.

We begin with an accessible somatic practice, with various tools from polyvagal techniques to EFT (tapping) to embodied parts work. Then we do some journaling (or drawing or contemplative practice), with an option for drinking in the James Turrell closed loop of "Greeting the Light." We'll close with discussions in small groups and a closing circle.

In October: this witchy month we'll be exploring three mystical practices for working with the gifts and wounds of our individual ancestral lineages:
-inherited movement patterns (what did we learn from our people about the basic somatic cycle of yielding, pushing, reaching, grasping, and holding?)
-wayfinding in the animate world (techniques for centering, attending to, and engaging signs & omens in nature)
-elemental inheritance (what we've inherited from those who came before in our relationship to the elements, and how can we reinforce what's powerful and repattern what might not be serving us?) ​

Please note that you do not have to be undertaking psychedelic therapy to participate, only that you come with curiosity about it, and eagerness to explore the subterranean worlds of the soul more deeply.

Until our culture can embrace this cutting-edge healing modality, engaging in psychedelic work can be lonely and stigmatizing. Here is an intimate space to build camaraderie and connection with other folk doing aaaaall the deep soul-spelunking.

Deets: http://www.katyhawkins.com/upcoming-workshops.html

09/25/2025

This workshop is an offering to share the primary somatic practices from September’s craaaaazy awesome Ancestral Healing weekend retreat.
We’ll learn syncretic practices for ritually calling in our people, then explore how their imprints survive in our movement patterning, and experiment with two techniques for opening to intuitive nudges from the mysterium.
These deep practices for working with the wounds and gifts of our individual ancestral lineages will be followed by an opportunity for integration: bathing all five senses in James Turrell’s remarkable sunset Skyspace opening, companioned by a live harmonic crystal bowl sound bath (spots limited).

Check it out: http://www.katyhawkins.com/upcoming-workshops.html

09/25/2025

This workshop is an offering to share the primary somatic practices from September’s craaaaazy awesome Ancestral Healing weekend retreat.
We’ll learn syncretic practices for ritually calling in our people, then explore how their imprints survive in our movement patterning, and experiment with two techniques for opening to intuitive nudges from the mysterium.
These deep practices for working with the wounds and gifts of our individual ancestral lineages will be followed by an opportunity for integration: bathing all five senses in James Turrell’s remarkable sunset Skyspace opening, companioned by a live harmonic crystal bowl sound bath (8 spots left).

Check it out here: http://www.katyhawkins.com/upcoming-workshops.html

09/08/2025

I’ll be teaching at this symposium on the benefits of yoga to mental health. Parents, I would love to meet your kids!

09/01/2025

How Bread & Puppet reinforced my excitement about September’s Ancestral Healing retreat, excerpt 2:

…Like, where else do hundreds of people travel through the woods to convene at a natural amphitheater to witness a mythic rendition of why we have become lodged in this particular cultural moment of gridlock and how to free ourselves from it?… Then line up to join a somber procession through rolling fields to burn a giant 20-foot effigy of the world's evils (pictured above)?
But there was this moment of rub, y'all! With all the work we've done in social justice circles to shift the blaming-and-shaming vibe so prevalent in the early 90's (don't get me going on this), still there was this micromoment when there was only a few minutes to finish painting the evils of the world onto the effigy, which we named communally by calling them out into the circle, and when I called out "ancestral curse," the actor in the top hat paused and looked at me, and for just a heartbeat of a moment I saw a bewildered look pass across her face. You can see the other words on there: war, fascists, capitalism, trump, sycophants, propaganda, misogyny... do ancestral curses belong here in this particular assortment of evils? She saved the awkward moment by muttering as she painted on the words, "yeah, I was feeling that about my family this week too."
So I wandered off towards the amphitheater, feeling for the first and only time that homecoming-ish day a bit like a fish out of water. I was disoriented by a different kind of familiar - that frequent pickle of some neurospicy tidbit escaping out of my big mouth at the cocktail party, and hearing in my head the proverbial record scratch as everybody just kind of pauses like... who brought the weirdo? And I thought... we're still here? We're still in that moment where white folk can point angry fingers or self-flagellate about our complicity, but where it's considered self-indulgent to devote ourselves to healing or spiritual practice? How is it still unusual to approach the work of unraveling these tangles we're stuck in by reaching back towards their ancestral origins? There's still an unspoken conviction (at least on the East Coast) that the healing process belongs not in political spaces - even artistic ones - but instead in the private sphere of discussing our childhood trauma and maybe our families of origin with a trusted therapist.
STILL?!
Even as we proclaim the importance of community, interdependence, and mutual aid, even as we critique siloed individualism, the prevalent view is still that holding patterns that show up in our bodies and hearts are about little ol' us and not really about our cultural inheritance. They are dysfunctions to be addressed in our solitary practices of yoga and meditation and ruthless self-examination. Maybe a racial affinity discussion group or a book club. That look of confusion on her face betrayed the outdated-but-nevertheless-lingering tenet that art is a metaphor and the real work is in the action we all take on the streets after the show. As in: aw honey, we're not REALLY burning up ACTUAL evil - we're using art to galvanize resistance in the collective! (I'll return to this question about what's REALLY happening - what is REAL - at the end of this rant.) What I felt, padding silent across the pine needles in that haunted grove, hearing these atrocities named, wasn't metaphor. Real s**t was happening, in the tears around me, in the father holding his daughter, in the blanched faces looking into the faces looking back from the images on the altars. We were actually reaching beyond the visible world, the rational world, the contemporary strictures of space/time as our culture imagines them, and into an experience of mystery, of not-knowing, of the invisible realms that lie around and beyond all that. And as I wandered, I came upon the tree (pictured above) marking the loss of longtime Bread & Puppet leader George Bartenieff. And this vortex opened. I knew as clearly as I know in my practice that our wounds go way back, and to heal them we must learn to straddle space and time, and dance in the bardo between…
…I'll just sing it out one more blippity blip time: the patterns we heal through our practices are about things we have learned from our people, and shifting their shape is the way we change culture…

More here: https://mailchi.mp/7df248472a2f/fall-17991533