3 Dialogues at the Seeds Program
We are honored to have health and blessings to bring about another Seeds Program. Seeds for us is an experience of reconnecting to what is truly important in life: our relationship with Mother Earth, to each other, and to our ancestors.
Seeds is our medicine, our foundation for our lives, our mission, our dreams. For people curious and looking to apply to the Seeds Program, here are 3 of the 6 topics that we go in depth during this experience.
The Long View — Decolonization
A couple of years ago, I was at a training led by Rev. James Lawson, an elder from the Civil Right Movement. In one of the sessions someone asked him, “What is the core message that we need to hear in these times?”
Lawson answered that one of the core questions that seems to be important for our species, our human family is, “Who are we?” — a question about what truly is our identity. Why are we here? What is our purpose?
In the following month I met an elder from Peru who is now my teacher, Don Jorge. We were engaging in classes where he was teaching me history. During our first session he asked me how much history I knew. I replied, “I’m not sure… 100 years?” He looked at me puzzled.
He then started to speak and share his perspectives. In one breath, he would talk about what happened in Africa 3,000 years ago, move on to a story about Asia 150 years ago, and then he would proceed to say, “Does that make sense?”
I was lost. There, my training began in having what we call at Ayni “a long view”. It’s about having a perspective of thousands of years because knowledge cannot be created without memory, and memory’s foundation is ancestral.
In that process I realized that to answer “who are we?”, we must know “when are we?”
We must look at each other in the context of our present and our past.
In answering this great question, we must first develop the muscle of memory, of expanding our being to able to observe, feel, and access the wisdom throughout the hundreds and thousands of years of our history.
In this journey what Don Jorge was telling me became clearer and clearer — we can not understand the problems of our world by just focusing on the last 500 or 1,000 years, we need to look to at least the last 10,000.
At Seeds we put up a timeline beginning with the birth of our oldest ancestor, Mother Earth, and we take a journey of billions of years until today.
Our Oldest Ancestor — Mother Earth
In that 10,000 year perspective it was clear that as a species we have abandoned 3 core relationships:
- Our relationship to Mother Earth — and through this, the negation of the sacred feminine and all other non-human beings.
- Our relationship to community — we moved from seeing ourselves as part of the cosmos, as part of a community, to now attempting to be self-sufficient individuals.
- Our relationship to our ancestors — we lost the connection with the 60,000 generations that came before us, the wisdom of our pasts.
The abandonment of these relationships has led to a society that is truly unequal, unsustainable, and miserable. We see the impact in our every day lives, in our relationships, and our social institutions.
We lived for 98% of our human story in a deep relationship with Mother Earth, but now, mostly due to colonialism and urbanization, we live a life where we don’t know the language to communicate with Mother Earth, and don’t understand her seasonal rhythms.
Seeds focuses on regaining our literacy with Mother Earth, to remember the sacred fire, water, air, and earth. To realign with the seasons. To begin to see our Mother as a living being.
Ancestral Wisdom — The Visions of our Ancestors
The whole world hasn't forgotten the depth of these relationships. Indigenous communities across the world fight every day to honor their culture s— they are the sacred protectors of these great relationships.
We focus in depth at Seeds with sharing the memory of our ancestral cultures, to see the principles, and ways of life of people today and how they were hundreds and thousands of years ago.
This is information that, because of our colonial system of education, has been intentionally hidden from us and misinterpreted by most of academia. But we know it’s time for the wisdom to help us as species to reclaim who we are.
Seeds is April 15th–19th, 2020
These are 3 of the 6 topics that we will be in dialogue and ceremony with. We hope you join us and be a part of the experiences and insights at the Seeds Program.
APPLY HERE: the application deadline is on February 15th.
May our whole species remember who we truly are,
The Ayni team
