Self-Paced Program
This course is designed as an experience of wonder and not-knowing. Beyond Meg’s teachings, it uses visual images, poetry, and song to evoke your emotions and connection with Life. In each session, there are pauses for reflection and contemplation. For each topic, there are resources for further study. So it is important to go through this slowly, to let your analytic mind rest and awaken your senses and intuition. We are developing new relationships among energies and beings that have waited for us to pay attention and that now are eager to connect. If you proceed slowly and with your senses fully on, you will emerge as a partner, feeling held and appreciated by Life. We are not alone. Life is still calling.
Partnering with life means much more than getting into nature to soothe our troubled selves. We have been missing our greatest ally, this generous and intelligent world that is incessantly creative in responding to what’s needed. Life is waiting for us to join her as we struggle to maintain sanity through this dark and destructive time. She is our perfect ally, giving us the means to both persevere and create together.
Indigenous teachers summon us to our relationship with Life, with animate, sacred world. They note it’s us humans who’ve gone missing, that Life wants to welcome us back into relationship – as partners, not dominatrix. As lone individuals or even as committed communities, we do not have the energy, intelligence, strength, and wisdom to persevere in our efforts to bring more goodness into this world. Western scientific materialism has blinded us to this wondrous ally – Life, with her energies, dynamics, and other intelligences eager for relationship with us humans. We just have to respond to her invitation.
We inhabit a generous, intelligent Universe
where everything alive has intelligence,
nothing becomes manifest until it’s in relationship,
and nothing lives alone.
My aspiration is for these truths to become the trusted foundation and source for how we are and act in the world. As we learn to partner with Life, relying on her dynamics rather than imposing our own, we easefully develop practices and capacities that are life-affirming. We connect, create, and persevere as we join with Life’s momentum to create more life, more possibilities, more harmony, no matter what is happening around us.
Program Overview
Session One | The Nature of the Universe: What Are We Partnering With?
Intelligence is a condition of the Universe. Everything alive has the necessary intelligence to adapt and survive. Beyond survival, Intelligence increases in direct proportion to awareness: the more conscious we are, the more possibilities for imagination, creation, and contribution beyond self.
The newest research with more-than-human species and ecosystems – mycelial networks, Wood Wide Web, complex decision-making in the simplest organisms – reveals intelligences different than ours. There are no individual actors, no boundaries; instead it is a mesh of entangled ever-changing relationships that create the intelligence needed in the moment.
Personally, the sense of wonder and mystery I’m experiencing is equivalent to when I was learning of Life’s capacity to create “order for free” several decades ago. Then, I was introduced to a world of wonder and not-knowing. Now, that journey continues.
Science is slowly awakening to the workings of Life. But the wisdom of Life as generative, relational, intelligent and constantly creative has been with humans long before Western science. The original source of wisdom imprinted in humans was the Goddess cultures that thrived on Earth for tens of thousands of years. We learned how to participate with the Great Mother, how to be together, how to thrive. This wisdom was exterminated by warlike bands of men invading Europe from the north. In the Judeo-Christian faiths, the Goddesses were banished from temples originally built for them. Using the extraordinary scholarship of Anne Barring, we learn what happened in Western history to destroy the Feminine, and where She still thrives.
Life: rich in intelligence; manifesting only in relationships; inherently generous and creative; wants us to rejoin her wondrous and vast community of beings.
Session Two | A Magical Mystery Tour to Discover Our Allies
Every culture except Western scientific materialism has enduring and trusted relationships with both visible and non-visible beings. Many Indigenous cultures speak freely of the Star Beings; Lakota (in the US Mid-west) do not identify themselves as humans. They are clear about their origin story. Even though most people in the U.S. have experiences with angels or guides, in psychological categories we’re “science illiterate” or crazy.
What experiences have you had with feeling protected and/or guided by other-than-human intelligences? What stories have you learned from your parents, grandparents and ancestors who lived in times when these experiences were normal?
In this session, journey into the realm of Nature Beings, Meg’s personal experiences with them, and learn about Sweat Lodges in many Native practices. We also learn from an Australian Aboriginal researcher of the worldwide stories of the Seven Sisters/Pleiades, and the origin of the story.
Session Three | Being a Good Partner with Life
In this session, we explore partnership from many different traditions and practices. A co-creative partnership requires behaviors different from our usual ways of relating. We are not in it for ourselves, for what we can “get.” We don’t extract, we create together. We forego the demands of a needy self and cheerfully enter into a relationship with other people, energies and intelligences to explore what’s possible. As one quantum physicist described it: “We are all bundles of potential that manifest only in relationship.”
We learn “Taking Your Seat” – a centering awareness practice for connecting Earth and Sky energy in our physical body. This practice reminds us that other sources of energy are always available to support us – it’s not up to us to generate the energy we need.
Then we explore the question dominating modern culture today: “What does it mean to be human?” Most indigenous cultures answer this by noting we can be human only in relationship. We learn from Archbishop Tutu of Ubuntu “A person is only a person through other persons.”
We are given practices for Ubuntu, and for learning to walk “The Beauty Way” of the Dine (Navajo) people.
Session Four | Practices for Strengthening Our Partnership with Life
When we’re in true partnership with life, drawing on energies and insights far beyond our human frailty, we are able to persevere. We cannot persevere and contribute if we go it alone. We are suffering not only from the reality of escalating cruel and frightening events. We are suffering because we have been told it’s all up to us. It is not. We are not alone and life is still calling for us to partner with her.
We conclude by learning practices for being good partners with Life:
- Greeting everything as Sacred, relating as kin
- Tonglen – using our difficult personal experiences to connect to the human experience
- Developing a stable mind through meditative awareness
- Strengthening relationships with guides and non-physical beings
Session Five | Have We Developed Relationships with Life?
What has been your experience with Partnering with Life? This session reviews highlights from all sessions, giving you time to contemplate and reflect on your personal learning journey.
We began our explorations with this declaration:
We inhabit a generous, intelligent Universe
where everything alive has intelligence,
nothing becomes manifest until it’s in relationship,
and nothing lives alone.
Are you emerging as a partner, feeling held and appreciated by Life? As we learn to partner with Life, relying on her dynamics rather than imposing our own, we easefully develop practices and capacities that are life-affirming. We connect, cocreate, and persevere as we join with Life’s momentum to create more life, more possibilities, more harmony, no matter what is happening around us. May this be true for you. Remember, we are not alone. Life is still calling.
Program includes access to five hour-long videos of Meg teaching, along with supplemental resources and recommendations.