Working with Larger Groups and Communities
Originally, displacement was a social diagnosis reserved for indigenous peoples forced off their homeland and denied their spiritual connection with the land that sourced their culture. Now modern people in urban and suburban communities exhibit the same community symptoms of placelessness, including:
- feeling adrift
- individual, group and collective apathy
- mounting depression
- estrangement from others
- homelessness
The sense of rootlessness can appear in neighborhoods as vacant or abandoned spaces, vandalism, illegal dumping, and widespread substance abuse. The sense of estrangement can manifest as territorial defensiveness – either in gang activity or chronic neighbor-to-neighbor disputes – or as seeking a kind of hyper-reality by manufacturing homogeneous spaces such as chain restaurants, big box stores, and rigid suburban housing. The latter is sometimes marketed as a “solution” to find stability in a fast-paced world, but experientially this chronic interchangeability ultimately only serves to disorient people.
When working with larger groups (communities, cities, towns, etc.), we seek to draw forth a place’s greater story and consciousness as told, created and shared by larger communities or “tribes.”
- Interview multiple stakeholders to elicit the “story” of the Place.
- 1-day Calling Windhorse Workshop: experiential intensive for up to 20 members of community/organization to create the new “story” of your place through collective visioning and art.
- 1.5- Day Pilgrim of Place Workshop: experiential intensive for 2-4 community/organization members to develop skills to maintain the new story and on-going vision of your re-spiritualized place.
- Discover the imprint of a place by assessing everything from its physical characteristics and terrain to its spiritual, metaphorical and psychic story. This part of our work allows us to determine what needs to be released in order to shift the energy and begin the process.
- Facilitate collective artisan session and/or customize hand-made sacred objects specific for your community’s ceremonial use – this may be a form of World Tree, and/or grief shrine new story shrine.
- Release the old story and re-align place to its place-specific holy intelligence through community event/ceremony.
- Provide personalized journals to develop an on-going interactive connection to your re-spiritualized place with guided inquiry and visioning exercises – up to 20 copies
- Up to two on-site follow-ups.
- Telephone follow-up for 1 year as needed.
