Fruits of our Labor
Dear beloved community,
If you are interested in Dream and
our future, read on—
There are a lot of words here
and I know that the word on the street is that folks only like to stay for five seconds, but I don’t know if that’s true for everyone.
Right now, on my bedside, I have Sophie Strand’s, The Flowering Wand, Raising Free People by Akilah Richards, David Kinsley’s Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine, and loads of my five-year-old’s books.
Dream has always had more words than most places. Words can be medicine; they can carry the prophetic imagination and, when paired with contemplation and relational care, are a way we work out our visions. Which is to say, I want to talk to you. Since my last communication with this community, I’ve completed my first year of Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University. Union is a space where religious leaders are formed, a space of intersecting conversations around justice, spirituality, and chaplaincy in many forms. At Union, folks come together to sit with the trouble and make sense through scholarship, ordination, or organizing what it means to have a calling. I feel a calling, do you? Union is the home of Liberation Theology and Womanist Theology, and I feel so blessed to be there. It’s been a rich and challenging year, and I’m excited to begin weaving some of the learning and gathering I’ve been doing into the fabric of Dream Hive.
The many years of embodied and somatic practices we have engaged with at Dream are a brilliant foundation for the future of this space, which I see as a space for collective healing. Right now, what is on offer is master classes with our friends and great Yoga Teachers; I recommend you show up for those practices; they will create a capacity to stay with yourself through challenging times and develop presence and shuniya. I haven’t taught Yoga in a long time, I’ve been holding Circles of Council and Practice, and I see my work at Dream as a circle tender and spiritual friend or Yoga Therapist, and that work has continued for a long time. For that, I am grateful.
There was a time when Dream hosted multiple classes a day, a men’s circle, off-site community rituals, kirtan, parent groups, frequent music events and breath work, retreats, it was amazing, but the truth is I wanted to slow Dream down and dream into what could be possible for the future of this organization with real discernment. With all due respect to the many spaces for somatic healing, I don’t want us to be a part of wellness culture as I see it in brick-and-mortar spaces in NYC; I don’t want it to be an expensive Soho boutique experience. As my consciousness has expanded, there is no way I could live with the consequences of being found up an inaccessible staircase. Imagine the rich and beautiful possibilities kept out of spaces requiring specific kinds of mobility to access. It was the best I could do at the time, but we can do better. I see Dream as a space for real soul work, and doing this with care has meant slowing it down to the speed of the soul, which is mysterious and geologic.
During the years of the pandemic, we kept Dream open with the hope that coming back together would make sense in the end. I remember tending the plants and alters at Dream, holding the space, and waiting. I won’t talk about the money, but you can imagine we paid a high price to hold that possibility open as long as we did. Recently my friend Jason asked if there was grief that Dream closed. I would say no; there is gratitude. When Soho went from a place of rarefied luxury to a public alter to remember our BIPOC family members who were slain by police. I was changed, and my relationship with the project of what Dream could be also was changing.
What happened at that time surprised me; it no longer made sense to push the success narrative. Our peers at other studios no longer felt like peers. I’ve been blessed to come closer to an understanding of the divine that lives on the margins and have come to recognize that scholarship, poetry, holding space for grief, and staying with the trouble are a ministry that communities that value and center the wisdom and medicine of the young, the elder, the Queer, the Disabled are the kinds of communities with the resilience, creativity, and love needed to face what my teacher Francis calls “the deep dark” of the Anthropocene.
I’ve come to feel that making Kin is more important than perusing personal victory and that spaces for emerging wisdom born from contemplation are reparative and holy in these times.
Suppose you want to walk towards building the kind of inclusive community I have begun to reference here. In that case, you are invited to warm the material of our co-awakening in a committed circle of practice and council.
Ouroboros Circle is a space that is defined by a curiosity about what might emerge in the interstitial space. It is a space for lament, a laboratory for co-awakening, a sheltered space for rest and creativity and collaboration; it is a care web, a place to make odd-kin and to practice both village-mindedness and to nurture the unique and powerful music of an individuated being. We commit to show up for what emerges with reverence and presence and bring our stories, needs, gifts, songs and grief to our circle. We meet most weeks for two hours. Between late fall and early Spring. We do this virtually but in an embodied and connected way.
This cycle will cultivate skills for the Anthropocene—the poetic imagination will be fed, we will work together as demon slayers of shame, and we be a soft mossy bed for the tired and exhausted parts, a container and amplifier of your gifts and callings. Ouroboros will inspire and challenge you to move into a more extraordinary process of discernment and aliveness. You will be settled and challenged. You will provide counsel, and you will receive support.
The origin story of this micro-community of practice and council is long and deep, and the container is resilient from the evolution of this space. We give thanks to all who have contributed to the rich soil we are planting a seed in. This summer has been a time of fallow rest and composting and reseeding and as we rested into the creativity and eros of summer. What wants to be expressed now is a space for prayer and poetry, a space that centers the tender truths we hold. Ouroboros Circle is not for everyone; it is for those ready to commit to the mystery of the magical other; it is for those who wish to develop a capacity to sit with the trouble, to be surprised by the rest and connection we can find together and the deep healing that can come from attuned spiritual friendship. Ouroboros is inclusive.
I’m proud of what Ouroboros has been and excited about what it can be. A space for grieving and loving this world.
“In the midst of the my multi-hustle life, circling is an amazing oasis and celebration of ground, of shared humanity, of kindness, of love of seeing and being seen. I am forever grateful to Luisa for her brilliance and to the special people of Ouroborous for their courage, their truth, their sweet and perceptive reflections. Circle work has for me been both the root and the bud of continued growth.” - Circle Member
May we remember our belonging,
Luisa