KINDLING RELATION
Deepening Roots Through Grief Tending,
Essential Relating, and the Medicine of Myth and Story
OCTOBER 2023 - MARCH 2024
Kindling Relation is an opening into experiential engagement that trades certainty for wonder, comfort for shelter, and growth for depth. Together, we will do the hard and meaningful work of composting grief into beauty using Way of Council circles, Essential Relating skills, and the medicine of myth and story.
Inspired by the vast question "How does one become an ancestor worth claiming?", Kindling Relation focuses on the hinge between the elder and the child: the adult. With the help of initiation, it used to be that children matured into adults. Now, in a culture without initiation, most children make it to adolescence, and remain in what Bill Plotkin refers to as “late stage adolescence” well into their autumn years.
Adults are a rare thing. Elders are even more rare. Our ancestors have been forgotten, disavowed, or selectively claimed as one-dimensional spirit helpers when it suits us.
This isn’t working so well.
The Earth burns while we argue about labels, enshrine identity, and oscillate between our worship of the hero and the victim narrative. The current fixation on individualism, oppositional binaries, trauma, and moral outrage are a bypassing of the deep grief we carry in our bones for all that we have lost. The lack of meaning and absence of a true feeling of belonging that define our times are symptoms of that ossified grief, and consequences of our forgetting.
Can we learn how to remember, and in turn be re-membered?
Kindling Relation is not so much inner work, as it is outer work. Your soul is not inside your body, rather your body is inside your soul. We are a series of relationships, and how we relate to all that is outside of us is the bigger story. Not so much your life, but life itself.
And what of initiation? This course will not initiate you into anything. We will use the initiatory lens of Separation - Threshold - Return to turn towards the endings and the little deaths that have come to you, and that will continue to come. We will work with initiatory stories - elders in their own right - to shed light on the meaning that is inherent in your grief, and to point you towards the next step in your trouble. Learning to recognize yourself in a bigger, older story can and will change you. And you are supposed to change.
Through the skills of Essential Relating, we will befriend some of the most temperamental and confusing emotions, experiences, and their expressions of being human.
In the process of locating our core ( authentic ) emotions, growing familiar with the unfinished business of adolescence, and reordering the pathways from that adolescence toward a strangely unfamiliar, but very natural and innate mature emotional intelligence, we can find the way toward the adult who can relate, rather than react, connect rather than confuse.
We will do this work as a group, held by the Way of Council circle structure. This type of work is important to do as a group, for witnessing and being witnessed in these depths weave the trust between us that we need as life-serving adults in our communities. And that is the point here: that you take this learning back to your time and place to do the work of sowing seeds of culture where you live.
We can support, witness, and hold each other, but we cannot do the work for one another. We need allies, humans and the more-than-human world alike, and we need skills.
Your unique medicine is needed. Let's get started.
THIS COURSE IS FOR YOU IF:
THIS COURSE MAY NOT BE FOR YOU IF:
- You long for a sense that who you are, where you are, and how you go about living with those around you, matters.
- You have developed a willingness to forfeit easy answers and succinct explanations and are able to sit in uncertainty and some discomfort at what may be your personal obligation toward transforming your own environments.
- You have thought that trauma and healing may have more to do with the work of belonging rather than the entitlement to belong.
- You feel called to sit with others in wondering toward something mysterious about belonging and are willing to have more questions than answers.
- You are willing to be hospitable to ideas that may confound and challenge you, that ask you to wrestle the uncomfortable, that invite you to unknowing and the curious, and to look again at what becomes confined or convicted by your own limitations.
- You are willing to listen to other worlds outside your own, and eager to learn and see things you would not have otherwise.
- You feel interested in what others in a similar inquiry may have to offer; and can imagine that there may be things to glean from witnessing and wondering with other members in the group.
- You are called to the coming together of kindly assembled souls on quest of homecoming and communing, kinship and reckoning.
- Challenging queries urge you to hold criticism of another’s views or experiences or if discomforting moments lead you to harsh denial or resistance to alternative perspectives.
- You are certain about the condition of your ancestral connections and have no interest in facing the possible inheritance of unwieldy truths that may occur during deeper investigation.
- Your convictions cannot withstand any challenge to your views.
- You require professional care and support that cannot be reasonably provided during an online course, given its limitations.
- You expect certain moral frequencies to prevail, or revere fast held positions about identity centered politics, and demand others’ adhere to those assumptions and assertions and are likely to consider yourself or another to be traumatized by others’ disinterest or unwillingness to concur.
INTRODUCTION AND DISCOVERY CALLS
We will be holding 3 introduction Zoom calls to answer any questions that you may have. Attend one (or all) of these Discovery Call dates with Trevor and Tanya to see if this course is the next step on your path.
Discovery Call Times:
Tuesday August 22, 6:30 - 8:00 PM PDT
Tuesday August 29, 6:30 - 8:00PM PDT
Friday September 8, 12:30 - 2:00PM PDT
Register for a discovery call here.
Applications for the course will be made available
after we meet on a discovery call.
COURSE DATES
October 1 - Assignment (via email)
Calls
- all group calls are on Tuesdays from 5:30PM to 7:30PM. The first call is in Pacific Daylight Time (PDT), all remaining calls are in Pacific Standard Time (PST)
Call 1 -Tuesday, October 24 (*PDT)
Call 2 -Tuesday, November 14
Call 3 - Tuesday, December 5
Call 4 - Tuesday, December 19
Call 5 - Tuesday, January 15
Call 6 - Tuesday, February 6
Call 7 - Tuesday, February 20
Call 8 - Tuesday, March 12
Call 9 - Tuesday, March 26
In addition to the group calls, there will be 1 on 1 mentor calls offered in November, January, and March. Calls times will be scheduled individually and will be an hour.
COST
Course Total: $1550 CAD / $1150 USD.
In our interest to offer this important work in a way that allows the opportunity to be a match for each one’s ability to afford it, we offer you two plans for tuition payment. The amounts for the course total are the same minus a couple dollars for the 3 payment option to keep the math simple.
Please determine your appropriate payment option based on your ability to pay rather than your preference.
For group 1:
Course paid in full by Oct 1st: CAD $1500 / USD $1100
For group 2:
1st payment by Oct 1st CAD $775/USD $575
2nd payment by Jan 1st CAD $775/USD $575
For group 3:
1st payment by Oct 1st CAD $516 / USD$383
2nd payment by Dec 1 CAD $516 / USD$383
3rd payment by Feb 1 CAD $516 / USD$383
FACILITATORS
My life’s work in the world is everything about relationships. I am the mother of 5 adult children, an interior designer, a relationship mentor, and have spent 17 years participating and coaching in the field of transformational education. I have trained in the Way of Council and have been facilitating circles since 2020. With another Way of Council trainer and facilitator I co-led and facilitated a recent yearlong course Kinship: Coming Home to Each Other, Coming Home to Purpose.
Since 2013 my life’s devotion has been to the creation and delivery of a curriculum I call Essential Relating, a course I created to help people discover the barriers between their core emotions and to the actions and interactions that are true to their core values. With the tools of Essential Relating we aim to restore the spirit’s innate expression with the soul’s intrinsic longing for their own distinct, deep and true human experience.
What I love to do most is supporting and training people in the discipline of cultivating authentically resilient, vibrant, relations which I believe to be the most basic elements of sustainable relationship environments.
Trevor is a journeyman carpenter, a musician, a father, and a Wayfinder. Trevor spent almost 20 years connecting to Spirit and Soul primarily through music, building containers of belonging in the guise of music production and events before a soul descent in 2020 took him down and broke him open.
With the help of a variety of teachers and guides, both living and dead, Trevor was gathered and re-membered into a deeper life of ritual, myth, initiation, grief, and reverence. Since 2021, Trevor has been organizing ritual events in the qathet, BC region, including hosting Medicine Story nights and Grief Rituals from his home in the forest.
Trevor is a scholar of the 2022 / 2023 cohort of Stephen Jenkinson’s Orphan Wisdom School, and is apprenticing under ritualist Randy Jones in Ritual Leadership and Storycarrying. He has attended an immersion with Martin Shaw, studied Dreamwork with Robert Moss, and is trained in Way of Council circle facilitation. In 2022 Trevor completed an 18 month adult-initiation sequence that culminated in a 4 day Wilderness Vigil.
"My passionate curiosity around the intersection between ritual, myth, culture, initiation, grief, and nature has laid claim to me. I believe in the sacredness of mystery, and the deep wisdom of the more-than-human-world, I believe in the night."