Blog by Valerie Through my first formalised human spiritual teacher Tom Lake, I learnt how to describe a core teaching that defines my path: unconditional love and acceptance. However, English is a challenging language filled with binaries. When I explain…
Blog by Valerie “The story owns the storyteller.”–Traditional wisdom shared by the Nhunggabarra people (western NSW, Australia) Like all biased humans, I am predisposed to see certain things whether they are strongly there or not. For example, I was raised…
Blog by Valerie In 2016 I danced a healing ceremony on Tiwa country in view of their Place of Emergence (now the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado, U.S., image from here.) It was the height of summer when…
Blog by Lukas In her PhD Justice is Healing: An Indigenous Approach to Sexual Trauma, Valerie describes three main roles in violence: victim, offender, and bystander. In my view, it is vital for us to look at where we play…
Blog by Valerie The word gift has a very interesting etymology. I remember being surprised as a child to learn that Gift meant ‘poison’ in German. Turns out it means ‘poison’ in modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish too. The story…
Blog by Lukas Across the globe an increasingly dominant worldview sees reality as ultimately physical. There are various expressions of this worldview in Western philosophy, including: logical positivism, empiricism, physicalism, scientism, naturalism and causal closure. I would sum them up as follows: the only true reality…
Blog by Valerie Why does a crocodile hide underwater and then snap at prey (fight)? A sparrow swoop into a tree when there’s rustling on the ground nearby (flight)? A dog play dead (freeze)? Because trickiness is a part of…
Blog by Lukas The odds of any one individual getting the Corona virus are so far quite low, and the probability of severe symptoms or death even lower. Making individual decisions based on this low probability is therefore, on some…
Blog by Valerie Right now it’s easy to feel survival fears, to observe deeply ingrained panic behaviours and to hear people talk about ‘these strange times.’ I understand the sentiment, but I think it’s strange that so many of us…
Blog by Valerie I was perhaps one of Earth’s most alienated of beings, and by that I mean that I did not sense belonging here. My cultural context was such that I had no sense of relationship with my earthly…