West Coast teaching tour

The weather is changing. I can taste it in the air. We’ve had an unusually cool summer until the past few weeks, but something is afoot now. Last night, on the tennis court, there is a waft from some bloom I don’t recognize that catches me out and I stop to inhale, longingly– a full deep breath. This morning, walking outside to get something from my car early, there is this detection of a different scent note in the pre-dawn silence. Heat for a couple of weeks, and then the first rains, and now it smells and tastes different. The moisture has released an olfactory rain.

Last week we decided to do a 2-day training on the neurobiology of connection in Salt Lake City the weekend of October 24-25. I want to go and sit in circle with people and smell the air, and look at the mountains and talk about the ancestral neuro-technologies required to stay human in the midst of this moment of truth inversion.

I am feeling a strong desire- possibly a need- to capacitize people with these skills.

I called my friend Kenzie, and we started to set in motion the things required to do this. We have to find the right venue, a place in the living world, and put the call out through networks of people we know– Hey, we’re coming to town. Tell the people who need to know.

I hate staying in hotels. I refuse to train in conference centers, featureless hotels, venues not rigorously attached to place. I want a more human experience traveling to teach. I want to be hosted, I want to stay with people I know if I can. I want to go get breakfast with friends. I want to approach it old-school, make friends along the way, shake hands, hold babies. I want a campfire if possible.

I want to talk to people of the place, know how it has changed in the past few years, feel the shape of their knowings and yearnings. I want it to be the start of igniting friendships. I’ll start the Salt Lake training Friday morning the 24th, and it will go through Saturday afternoon the 25th.

I woke up this morning thinking about next spring. About mid-March in Portland. About coffee shops there, and ramen, and a Japanese men’s clothing store that makes shirts I cannot afford. My brother lived in Portland for several years. And I have a ton of friends there– more than a handful. And yet I’ve never been. Time to change this, I think.

Mid-march I’ll be teaching in Portland. I want to go have dinner with five or six of my friends from Portland, and introduce them to eachother. To strengthen the ropes of relating.

And then, in May, I want to go back to Duvall, Washington, and visit the Wilderness Awareness School. I had an awakening experience there in 2019 at a bird language training, during which I slept out for several nights on the land, in a hammock strung up beside their lake (is it a pond?), the stars wheeling above, in the presence of night creatures– and learned to understand the language of birds. I want to revisit that place of homecoming to a deeper, more ancestral knowing of self. So I’ll be teaching in the Seattle area in May, at the WAS if we can coordinate it with them.

These will all be two-day introductory trainings in living the neurobiology of connection, with a third clinical day (by invitation) focused on autonomic tracking for those who want to go deeper. We’ll cap them at 20 people so that there is spaciousness and time for questions and dialogue and call-and-response.

We may continue to add to this list of place-based trainings. I have a whole host of colleagues and friends with special land in the midwest (Illinois, Ohio), further east (Kentucky), and further south (Louisiana). And I’d like to get down to Santa Barbara and visit Lotusland. And I’ve not yet been to Sedona, Arizona… Don’t even get me started about Vermont and Maine and New Hampshire. At some point, perhaps we’ll be in your neighborhood.