I'm excited to share that I'll be joining the teammate the Evergreen Foundation @Brandon Decremer @Dinka Salvador tomorrow for a live discussion and I'd love for you to be there. We'll be diving into the Neuro-Somatic Integration Framework: → Rooted in science → Guided by nature → Embodied in practice This isn't theory for theory's sake. It's a framework for understanding how the nervous system, the body, and the natural world weave together — and what that actually means for how we live, heal, and grow. Come with your questions. Come with your curiosity. Come with whatever's been stirring in your own practice. Drop a 🌱 below if you'll be joining us — and feel free to share what you're hoping to explore. If you are not a member of Evergreen and you want to listen join here https://www.skool.com/foundations/about?ref=a3bfdcabb1224ddda298c11771774468

Rooted community 🌿 I’ve been holding something with me since Saturday, and it feels like time to share it here. Saturday was my 56th birthday. I spent it in deep practice and community at the Strozzi Institute — that particular kind of immersion where the body is organized through rhythm and repetition, where you arrive as one version of yourself and leave as something slightly different. Somewhere in the middle of feeling into my commitment and my dignity, something landed in my body that I’m still learning how to hold: My time has come to be an elder. Let me say what I don’t mean. I don’t mean old. I’m not stepping out of vitality, or aliveness, or the rising energy of spring. I’m not handing in my badge or going quiet. What landed wasn’t an ending — it was a role. A different way of holding the work, the tale, and all the wisdom that’s been gathered over decades of practice, mistakes, returns, and refinement. Elder isn’t a stage of life. It’s a posture. A way of standing in the body and in the world that says: I have something to offer, and I no longer need to prove it. What I’m noticing is a shift in the quality of my pursuit. For most of my life, I’ve been chasing — chasing more capacity, more clarity, more credibility, more enough. There’s been beauty in that chase. It’s what built this work. But somewhere on Saturday, in practice, my body offered a different invitation: You’re allowed to slow the pursuit. You’re allowed to feel enough. That doesn’t mean stopping. It means a shift in posture. From striving to sharing. From accumulating to offering. From leading every charge to holding steady so others can take the helm. The work doesn’t need me to push harder. It needs me to stand here with what I’ve gathered — the tale, the practice, the long arc of return — and offer it. Within the Neuro-Somatic Integration™ Framework, Rooting (formally regulation, more on that change to come!) is the capacity to synthesize internal sensations, emotions, and thoughts with external cues — to hold complexity without collapsing and while staying connected to ground. Elder energy, as I’m feeling into it, is rooting in its most mature form: the body’s capacity to hold the joy and the pain at the same time — to celebrate a birthday in a fractured world, to laugh fully in a season of grief, to keep speaking honestly to inhumanity while refusing to let go of our humanity.

Ok community it is spring break for schools here in the Bay Area and I am on vacation. Today's song is kicking it off. And as you will see from the daily dose I am breaking form everything including Skool! I hope you all will keep it going in my absence. I might pop on if I want the key is I don't feel compelled. I can say nothing would make me happier than to check in during my trip to NYC to see my son Gus than to log on and see a sound track of the day from one or many of you all! What is your go to vacation song?

Spring break starts today. And I’m doing something that feels both simple and radical—I’m stepping away. Heading to New York to be with my family. Closing the laptop. Letting the rhythm of this work pause so a different rhythm can take its place. If you are going to still be plugged in keep it going! Drop a daily dose even a small word of wisdom. Share the soundtrack of the day. Nothing would make me happier to have Hope reimagined keep going while I am not driving! I’ll be mostly offline from this space for a week. I may pop in. But I won’t feel compelled or required. And I wanted to name that openly—because how we step away matters just as much as how we show up. We talk a lot in this community about regulation—about rhythm, safety, and building capacity. But here’s what’s easy to forget: rest is not the absence of the work. Rest is part of the work. The nervous system doesn’t build resilience through constant effort. It builds resilience through the cycle of effort and recovery, activation and restoration, engagement and release. Radical rest is the practice of choosing to stop before you’re forced to. It’s trusting that what you’ve been building will hold while you step away—and that you’ll return with more capacity, not less. Within the Neuro-Somatic Integration™ Framework, this is the completion and rest phase of the rhythm of excitement—the part of the cycle that allows integration, recovery, and the quiet gathering of energy for what comes next. Without it, the cycle can’t renew. We get stuck in the awakening or the sustaining, running on momentum rather than capacity. And there’s something else happening here that’s worth naming: reconnection. Stepping away from work to be with people we love isn’t just rest—it’s co-regulation in its most natural form. New routines. Different rhythms. The presence of someone whose nervous system is home to ours. That’s not a vacation from the work of regulation. That is the work. So this week, I’m practicing what we preach. I’m composting the urgency. I’m letting the rhythm slow. And I’m trusting that this community—and the energy you each bring to it—will hold the space beautifully while I’m away.

Loving the mix of styles, the messages and these women bring fun and healing. This is new music to me and I loved dancing to it after my morning meditation. What do you think of this song? Want more Rising Appalachia? Got music that you recently discovered? Share it!