From Power Over to Power With Pathway
The Lakota language has no word for domination, something that Tiokasin Ghosthorse of the Cheyenne River Lakota realized after conducting a ceremony at Auschwitz-Birkenau (site of the Nazi concentration camp) in 2013. Embedded foundationally in the modern, globalized western worldview, in our language (the Latin-derivate romance languages and English), patriarchy, white supremacy, hetero-normativity, religion, medicine, science, digital communications technologies, buildings, transportation: in short our modern world, is the perpetual desire/wish/need/impulse/tendency/habit of domination.
We seek power over ourselves, speaking to ourselves in the language of domination, subjugating our own bodies, impulses, and emotions. We seek power over others, instituting all forms of hierarchy. And we seek power over the earth, seeking to dominate her, extract from her, empty her. And yet, of course, we are both the dominator and the dominated, knowing and unknowing though we may be of this. And this entire exercise is one of alienation.
Most of us know almost nothing about being with. We don't know how to be with ourselves: with our own thoughts, feelings, tenderness, deepest selves. We don't know how to be in relationship with one another without the impulse to dominate. And we know almost nothing about being in relationship with the earth. This is a pathway for those who wish to awaken from the trance of domination.
Your instructors: Tiokasin Ghosthorse – an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Lakota – is an international speaker on Peace, Indigeneity, and the Mother Earth perspective. Tiokasin is the Founder, Host and Executive Producer of the twenty-nine-year-old “First Voices Radio” (formerly “First Voices Indigenous Radio”), a one-hour live program now syndicated to one hundred and eight radio stations in the US and Canada. Tiokasin describes himself as “a perfectly flawed human being” who is a Sundancer in the tradition of the Lakota Nation. John Stokes, founder & Director of The Tracking Project, Inc. in Corrales, New Mexico, is a well-known musician, performer, writer and teacher of tracking. Since 1980 he has worked and traveled extensively in his efforts to bring awareness of the natural world and the integrity of indigenous peoples to interested people around the world. Natureza Gabriel Kram is the Convener of the Restorative Practices Alliance, a connection phenomenologist, and a pioneer in the clinical application of Polyvagal Theory. He has led over 1,200 polyvagally-informed mindfulness trainings globally.
Most of us know almost nothing about being with. We don't know how to be with ourselves: with our own thoughts, feelings, tenderness, deepest selves. We don't know how to be in relationship with one another without the impulse to dominate. And we know almost nothing about being in relationship with the earth. This is a pathway for those who wish to awaken from the trance of domination.
Your instructors: Tiokasin Ghosthorse – an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Lakota – is an international speaker on Peace, Indigeneity, and the Mother Earth perspective. Tiokasin is the Founder, Host and Executive Producer of the twenty-nine-year-old “First Voices Radio” (formerly “First Voices Indigenous Radio”), a one-hour live program now syndicated to one hundred and eight radio stations in the US and Canada. Tiokasin describes himself as “a perfectly flawed human being” who is a Sundancer in the tradition of the Lakota Nation. John Stokes, founder & Director of The Tracking Project, Inc. in Corrales, New Mexico, is a well-known musician, performer, writer and teacher of tracking. Since 1980 he has worked and traveled extensively in his efforts to bring awareness of the natural world and the integrity of indigenous peoples to interested people around the world. Natureza Gabriel Kram is the Convener of the Restorative Practices Alliance, a connection phenomenologist, and a pioneer in the clinical application of Polyvagal Theory. He has led over 1,200 polyvagally-informed mindfulness trainings globally.
Your instructors: Tiokasin Ghosthorse – an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Lakota – is an international speaker on Peace, Indigeneity, and the Mother Earth perspective. Tiokasin is the Founder, Host and Executive Producer of the twenty-nine-year-old “First Voices Radio” (formerly “First Voices Indigenous Radio”), a one-hour live program now syndicated to one hundred and eight radio stations in the US and Canada. Tiokasin describes himself as “a perfectly flawed human being” who is a Sundancer in the tradition of the Lakota Nation. John Stokes, founder & Director of The Tracking Project, Inc. in Corrales, New Mexico, is a well-known musician, performer, writer and teacher of tracking. Since 1980 he has worked and traveled extensively in his efforts to bring awareness of the natural world and the integrity of indigenous peoples to interested people around the world. Natureza Gabriel Kram is the Convener of the Restorative Practices Alliance, a connection phenomenologist, and a pioneer in the clinical application of Polyvagal Theory. He has led over 1,200 polyvagally-informed mindfulness trainings globally.
The Language of Transformation: The Etymology of Who We Are
62 minutes
As Tiokasin explains so clearly, our noun-based language is designed to contain and possess. Our use of articles (the), of pronouns (me, my, mine, yours), and our prepositions (on, over, above, below) all reify thoughtforms that contain and manipulate reality. They pin a static world in place, despite our deeper knowing, from experience, from our own science (quantum theory), and the evidence before us that reality is a constant flux in dynamic change. We don't know how to speak a living language of relating.
We begin this pathway with language, because it is taxonomically structuring our reality, setting up the formation in which the pinball of thought moves. And so it is here, in this place that is invisible to most of us, that we must begin dismantling our vacant habits of domination; seeing them for what they are.
Now we turn our attention to our relationship with the Living World.
Now we turn our attention to our relationship with the Living World.
Tracking and the Arts of Life
21 minutes
With this shift in understanding of what is primitive and what is sophisticated: this inversion of what modern civilization teaches us, we begin to move once again toward our proper place in the scheme of things. To step further into this, we can open the heart by experiencing gratitude, which comes from knowing our real size: somewhere, as John reminds us, between the ant and the mountain.
Gratitude Practice
7 minutes
Let's go deeper now in exploring setting down thinking, which stands between us and direct relationship with all that is.
Setting Down Thinking: The Teaching of the Birds
6 minutes
What happens when we begin to open to the possibility that we can know things in ways other than thinking?
Ways of Knowing
24 minutes
Now let's explore bringing our attention to our feet.
Think with Your Feet
27 minutes