It’s time to say something, so here I go….
I’m never sure what’s moving through me or what wants to be said until it pours out my fingertips and splashes into these black and white characters. Even then there’s always the space between the letters, the story between the lines, and the secret language of my heart that can’t ever be captured and may never be known.
These days the secret language of my heart has been singing a song of simplicity, of less-not-more. My heart has been yearning for stillness and for quiet and for less. Less busyness. Less shallowness. Less static and less noise.
Less bullshit. Less certainty. Less posturing. Less pretending.
Can you relate?
It’s as though all forty-nine years of my life, and the myriad lifetimes before that, have crashed down onto the beach of my life, spreading me thin across the sand and stones of time and space into an alluvial fan. More land formation, less person, my beating heart yearns for the non-lingual communication of the minerals and the elements. The non-rational communication of cosmic weather and deep sea creatures. The non-linear truth of Life that language might dream of when it sleeps.
This deep desire makes it hard to string words together when all I want to say is, “Shhhhhhhh, listen to the wind and rest here for a while.” If only I could extract the shining jewel from my floating rib, with its sapphire glints and sparks of light, and communicate fully all that I am and feel. If only a pulse of vibration from my heart to yours could calibrate our electro-magnetic fields and, in an instant, you could know me and I could know you. I long for and welcome that time when words won’t be the primary currency for communication among humans and how we feel and vibrate will say what needs saying.
Imagine the day when the language of the heart is how we communicate to one another and to life.
I try that here in this monthly transmission…to give words to what my heart is saying but language always falls short and time is always limited and it never quite contains all that I wish it could but I keep trying.
So, here come some words to explain something that only my heart can truly communicate. Bear with me…
I am deep inside a physical and energetic consolidation. The drum beat of ‘less’ is loud in my heart and, with a miracle garden full of delicious and desired offerings, I need to cull wisely. My goal before the snow flies in ~5 short months is to shrink the campus of Rootstock by about 50%, thereby reducing surface area that needs shoveling and maintaining by 12-16 hours per snow day, while simultaneously consolidating and fortifying my offerings into only those things that feed me as much as they feed others. I want to maximize the beauty and value of what I give while simultaneously simplifying what’s needed to give it.
"To do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing." - Buckminster Fuller
This shift is impacting the imagination farm, my relationships, my collaborations, and my plans for the future. Maturation is underway and it’s a staggeringly amazing privilege to have the power, discernment and freedom to change what I’m doing when I want and how I want.
Many entrepreneurs forget this part of the gig. The part where we get to decide what we want to hold and ensure that whatever it is we’re holding is also holding us. Growth is inevitable but ‘bigness’ and ‘busyness’ are a choice. My controlled decomposition is a welcome and necessary part of the life cycle of this healthy organism and I’m delighting in the whole process even though it feels quite misunderstood sometimes when reflected back to me from folks peeping Rootstock primarily through the windows of social media.
Being misunderstood is something I aim to accept and surrender to often but, still, I think we all long to feel seen and understood somehow.
So, Rootstock is alive and well and, the more I listen to my heart and allow myself to grow and change, the more potent and beautiful the medicine I’m able to share here becomes. It’s changing and it probably always will but, for now, here are two recent misunderstood changes explained:
The Oasis, my wood-fired bathhouse is and has always been an elemental temple of healing. For 3 years we sold out every bathhouse and many, many people from all over the country got be naked around other people for the first time, got to experience wood-fired hot water, and got to feel the impact of chemical-free, elemental healing. It was profoundly good. Profoundly beautiful and a deep honor to create and share. Simplicity isn’t always simple though and, in the end, valuing sixty years of sunlight pouring into a maple tree, and the cycle of time and effort that eventually feeds that sunlight-infused wood into a stove to heat water, well, money doesn’t really work for that kind of transaction. The bathhouse grossed about $25,000 a year for the last 3 years and took close to $28,000 a year to upkeep and staff. It was always a gift that I chose to share and no amount of money can truly honor the time and effort and care it takes to animate a temple like the Oasis and I understand that now. A temple to elemental healing demands a much more soulful exchange of reciprocity and love to be a consistently sharable space. As we speak, it’s in the process of shrinking into a dazzling gem of a nook that will still keep me well and will be made available to guests at Rootstock. Folks coming for medicine retreats, elemental day retreats as part of the microdosing immersions, and folks in the Moon and Sun circles will still enjoy the Oasis although, it’s likely that prices for Moon & Sun Baths will go up a bit before winter. Elemental healing is a core pillar of Rootstock Retreat and the bathhouse remains though opening that precious and delicate and soon-to-be smaller temple to the public is no longer on the menu.
The release of the Group Medicine Retreat elicited a lot of feedback which surprised me and I want to clarify that too. Group medicine work is very, very intense and sensitive work. Dosing 10 people on plant medicine in a therapeutic setting is a craft and demands a very unique kind of skillset and I absolutely love the dynamism and impact when people choose to heal in community. Group work has been a significant teacher in my development as a medicine guide and one of the only ways that it works is when I, Beana, totally 10000000% trust the people that I have working with me. I don’t take the risks I take to provide mediocre experiences and my ethos as a guide and format for practice require very special kinds of people. I require impeccability and humility and earned wisdom and style. My dear friend Hanna is such a person. She joined me over 2 years ago inside the Group work and, only then, did I get to fully understand how important it was for me to be inspired by the people that I work with and to need alternative points of view around guideship. Hanna brought medicine to me and my guests here and upleveled the group experience in potent ways. As she prepares for her second baby to arrive in August, a natural pause is coming with group work. Many people want to come and ‘help’ but this is a lot like the heart language I waxed poetic about above. This is not a job that can simply be filled. It’s a destiny and it’s unfolding. Group work is just as powerful - or more - than one-on-one sessions. It’s awesome and a joy to share and I am not letting this format go because I’m too tired or it’s too hard or because it’s not powerfully effective. I am letting it go because nature is running its course and I welcome that. I will still be working one-on-one, with couples, and in small groups with my trusted and dear Juliana and I feel excited and hopeful to see what blooms for us inside this pause and when, if ever, Hanna will want to come back to the pillow. If you’d like to experience our extraordinary medicine family before Hanna departs in August, we have 3 spaces left in the June retreat and August will open for booking on the 25th.
I’m sure that there are other things that I would love to let you in on….like the platonic love story that is unfolding with my newest resident and emerging Landwife, Rudy, or the outrageous truth that is menopause and the work and work-of-art that is aging, or the power of patience and acceptance in the hard work of ancestral healing with the Motherline, or the grief and praise that comes with navigating relationships and building community and a business.
I get to suffer all the things I am suffering.
I get to learn all these lessons.
I get to decide where to offer up my precious life-force.
I get to feel the full spectrum of what it is to be human.
It’s a lot and there is no possibility that I can really convey what it all means to me and there is no chance that you will understand but here I am anyway. Singing my song to life and to you full of hope that it will help and that it matters.
As I think about a prayer for this month ahead, I am feeling a call to courage.
May you have courage to let go of people and things you love and don’t love so as to allow for a deeper loving and holding of the people and things that you love the most.
May you have the courage to let go of the threads that you’re holding that you will never weave or tie or trim and delight in the emptiness that comes before a new thread or knot arrives to hold.
May you have the courage to say nothing unless the song of your heart pushes the words up and out of your mouth and into the world. May you delight in your own silence and find peace there.
May you have the courage to stop doing, stop doing, stop doing and sit still in the quiet and listen to your life’s great longing.
May you have the courage to change course and point at a new and different horizon and fearlessly set sail towards your destiny and the life that is waiting for you.
With all of the pressure and all of the options and all of the information and all of the ambition and all of the shoulds and coulds and woulds that abound, it is a revolutionary act to sit still. To rest. To shift. To grow deeper and slower and wiser, not bigger or taller or more popular.
I am trying in my small and also kind-of-public way to practice what I preach and apply the wisdom that I have gathered. I’m grateful for the opportunity to grow with you and have some things to offer that might help us both along our journey.
Medicine Retreats - The Booking Portal opens at 11am EST on May 25th. Space is currently available for a Group Medicine Retreat in June and space will become available on the 25th for one-on-ones in September and October. Reply to this email if you’re interested to book and then join a Discovery Zoom to learn more.
Medicine of the South: A 3 Month Guided Microdosing Immersion is currently open for registration and 3 spaces remain in this upcoming cohort. This format for learning how to heal with the help of the mushroom teachers is simple and very powerful. Join the Discovery Zoom to ask questions and learn more or go ahead and join us for a summer of subtle-but-real transformation.
Community Weekend (aka Moon Village) - Gathering with real life people around a real live fire with the shared intention to connect and commune and heal and play is the best! The first weekend of every month is dedicated to being together and we’d love to welcome you.
Sunday, June 1 - Kin Circle & Sun Circle Workday! - Our family circle is coinciding with a Sun Circle workday here on the 1st and you’re invited. The men will begin work around 9am and then the families and kidless kin will arrive around 12:30pm. We’ll work, we’ll play, we’ll connect and we’ll take good care of each other and Rootstock. Want to plug into the workday? Email Brian (rusticedar@yahoo.com) to let him know you’re planning to join.
Friday, June 6th - The Parlor: Psychic Salon & Tarot Circle - Rudy will be gathering curious people to explore the unseen realms and practice, learn, skill share, and explore the psychic arts. This is not space designated for psychic healing, perse, and is more of an exploratory space and playground to come and connect, practice, and learn.
Saturday, June 7th Moon Circle - Come potluck, kibbutz, circle, soak, sleepover, breakfast, heal, pray and play together! Moon Circle is a joy and new women join every month so, please, feel welcome to come try it out. Or plan ahead and come for a future circle.
If you’d like to look a little further ahead into the summer here are some other sweet things on the calendar. Keep in mind, almost everything that happens here now into the foreseeable future, will coincide with Community Weekend.
The Stone Circle - Solstice Celebration. Learn more and join us.
Indepen-DANCE! July 4 Ecstatic Dance. Nab a spot since this will fill!
I did my best to honor that urge for simplicity and still keep my promise of sharing my heart. I hope that it lands somewhere warm and soft in you and, more than that, I hope that it helps.
As Rootstock continues to shift its shape, I will keep sharing. As I, Beana, continue to shift my shape, I will keep singing my song to life and trust that I’ll know what to offer, when.
(((a silent pause here with you)))
Thank you for your beating heart and your nervous system and your out-dated stories and your coming-into-focus visions and your willingness and COURAGE to be in your life fully right now.
Blessings on all of you and all of IT.
I love you,
Beana