The TerraViva Journeys Approach
The Power of Transformational Eco-Cultural Walks-Workshops & Tours
Instead of promoting the linear, “hero’s journey” approach of traditional self help and life coaching, my transformational eco-cultural walks-workshops and walking tours offer an alternative. I ground my teaching in an understanding of life and the self as relational, holistic and embedded in the Living Earth. I believe in not only sharing interdisciplinary knowledge about global and local histories (especially silenced histories), cultural practices, and ecologies but also sparking critical awareness of the “how.”
How did we come to think of places and people and ourselves in a particular way? What are alternative ways of thinking about our relation to the world and our place in it? I believe in a sustainable democracy, one with “room for everyone and everything, now and forever,” as anthropologist Tim Ingold says. In my own small way, I am trying to build this democracy by transforming how people think.
My approach to my work is inspired by non-Western and pre-colonial ways of inhabiting place, without separation of “self” from “other,” mind from body, nature from culture, etc. and without the obsession for domination, separation and order that has led us to the crises we’re experiencing today.
Not 2, but 1
I find the the Möbius or Moebius strip to be an apt metaphor for how I approach my work, as it looks like it has two sides but just has one.
The figure below is named the Möbius or Moebius strip after August Ferdinand Möbius (Möbius is my ancestral last name). Neil deGrasse Tyson has a marvelous video that helps explain the Möbius strip — and what it teaches us about our reality.
There are four key components of my approach, described below. All are incorporated into my experiences.
Agency
Recognizing the capacity to make change and shift aspects of your reality. But also recognizing that “nature”–and what we think of as “things” have agency. Reshaping perspectives.
Becoming an eco-social self, in harmony with the web of life. Practice of dynamic balance.
Attentiveness
Learning through the practice of walking and becoming body-mind (as one) attentive to habitat, including forces like sun, wind, water–and human impacts. “Tuning in.”
Listening with all senses, including intuition and spirit, to the fellow beings–human and non-human, living and non-living. Feeling underlying rhythms.
Activation
Interaction, dialogue, and creative rituals that spark learning through connection, community and practice with others. Developing deep cultural insight, listening deeply, sharing stories.
“Shaking up” frames, orders and thought systems in ways that open you up to recognize connections you never knew existed. Valuing learning as practice. Feeling transformation individually and collectively.
Awareness
Understanding how hierarchies of knowledge limit how you perceive and orient yourself to the world. Learning how perceptions of the environment and supposed objects in an environment (bodies, landscapes, trees, etc.) relate to histories and cultural politics of nature, race and difference. Discovering the material, symbolic relationships used to legitimize injustices and reproduce inequalities. Remaking ideas about knowledge, order, nature, culture and difference.