I have made more focused preparations over the past couple of weeks for the two tea blending workshops that I am facilitating this month, and that has got me pondering how I best like to create containers in circle and community with others. Making the time to create exploratory structure for the workshops I offer reminds me that it is pretty special to get to bear witness to the discovery and creation moments that take place in circle. Being a spatial cup bearer is really important to me.
According the calendar numerology, as regards the Tarot, we are in the year of the Emperor archetype. I like to think about ways that we have opportunity with this particular archetype to heal our relationship to fatherly structures, power, and leadership. My own relationship to power and leadership has been going through some transformative shifts over the past year+, and there is still a lot of work for me to do to heal things here. I am always learning new ways to better trust my ability to create containers. Hopefully, with the help of the collective, you and I can make some further necessary shifts in our relationship to a life in leadership.
The main thing that I have been learning, and re-learning, is how to be the type of leader that creates an environment which is conducive to inquiry, failure, and success - a space where judgement is used for creative inquiry, and not for shame spirals. Many common patriarchal structures want to trap us in linear accomplishment, but what if, like the winding switchback trails that I hiked up through Wakeena Falls earlier today, there were a constant flow of water meandering and spilling out along our path. Yes, there should be a direction, a goal to reach the summit of one journey, but with a lot of moments to feel and bathe in the smaller moments of juicy gain, beauty, and drama that occur along the way.
That’s the kind of container that I want to facilitate every time that I get the opportunity to share and learn from others. It’s a journey of delight in discovery that we hold in community. We cheer each other on along our paths to self-discovery, and hopefully gain a deeper understanding of how we are connected to one another through the magical, the meaningful, and the mundane.
I took a thermos of iwillalwaysloveyou, the self-love tea blend I formulated for the self-love workshop taking place next Sunday at Otherwild in NE Los Angeles, and was lucky enough to find one of the plants from this blend out in the wild of my Benson Park Forest hike today - there were patches of Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) trimming the entire ridge of a vista along our hike! I took out my tea thermos and poured some of the tea and sat with our friend yarrow for a few moments…
Yarrow wants us to make time to tune into the gift of strength in regulated flow which we hold in our heart. We are the container. Our hearts are the container. The heart brain knows things before the thinking brain does. The sooner we can accept that our hearts are in charge, the sooner that we can learn how to nourish them properly. On this path, we may heal our relationship to creating containers of love for ourselves, and through that learn how to best build containers in love with others.