Hello Villagers, As we move through the final stretch of the Year of the Wood Snake, many of us are feeling it: old patterns surfacing, structures wobbling, roles and relationships no longer able to stay ambiguous. This is the part of the cycle where the snake shakes its tail — not to create chaos for its own sake, but to shed what can’t come forward. What I’m seeing, again and again, is this: -excess falling away -truths becoming harder to avoid -nervous systems asking for honesty, not coping -life paths narrowing toward what is actually sustainable This isn’t failure. It’s refinement. Before a year of action can arrive, the path has to clear. Before purpose can feel workable, it has to feel true. Before movement, there is discernment. Inside the Body & Soul Sanctuary, the next cycle reflects this exact moment. Beginning at the Spring Equinox, we’ll be entering a fresh and more elaborate phase, beginning a new cycle around the Wheel of Metamorphosis. The Sanctuary experience is like an epic heroine's journey, where you get to take whatever you're working through in life into a professionally guided, sacred container, alongside an intimate community of other brave, healing, change-makers who are not just talking about, but enacting the reclamation of their full-bodied full-spirited wellbeing. This year, we will be not only tending and transforming the soil of our inner territory, but we'll also be simultaneously cultivating our outer dharma, so Sanctuary members will get support for projects and structures that want to be birthed into the world, to signify the new self as she emerges. This phase is about embodied action, not self-improvement. About letting what is no longer essential fall away, so what remains has real weight and momentum. David Whyte writes in Just Beyond Yourself: “You are not here to be right. You are here to be real. And the real work begins just beyond yourself.” If you feel called to step into your next level life in a dedicated container along with a group of badass, humble, empowered women, now is an ideal time to connect and chat about enrollment.

As the dark season gathers and the natural world turns inward, I'm feeling the call to do the same. For the rest of this year, I'll be stepping back from social media and external marketing to turn my full attention toward the deep alchemy already underway inside the Sanctuary. The dedicated members of this initiatory space are stepping into courageous waters now. We are refining our skills of inner alchemy, the kind that deserves that sacred pause practiced by pre-colonial cultures when stepping through rites of passage. Whether it was a Vision Fast to pray for a sacred instruction, a blood rite to celebrate a young woman's fertility, a ritual dance performed to heal the sick, or a birthing or dying portal, there was always a space of limbo required to enter into Deep Time, beneath the ticking of the clock and the square boxes of the Gregorian calendar. On the elemental wheel, the movement toward winter is water and the slower oceanic rhythms taking hold again, reminding the body through gravity of our connection with the Lower World, where we can see more clearly into our subconscious, step into our dream body, and unravel the knots of our conditioning to unleash the next layer of our destiny. WHAT THIS MEANS LOGISTICALLY: Between now and February, I'll be pouring all of my energy, focus, and creative attention into the current members and active clients within the Body & Soul Sanctuary (including myself!)—tending our nervous system restoration, our breakthroughs, and our metamorphosis in real time. I will be taking a break from writing this newsletter and from running outward-facing campaigns. I will continue to follow the breadcrumbs I've been given by Spirit to share my story through public media outlets, and if any of those comes through during this time, I will post them on my Facebook page, here: https://www.facebook.com/elizabeth.stauder.5​ I need to role model the regenerative model I teach, and honor the season of rest, deeper subliminal work, and quantum recalibration.

As the light shifts, the air cools, and the days draw inward here in Oregon, I’ve been listening closely to what the body teaches about how to find the Goldilocks zone in letting go of the extraneous fluff while keeping the flame burning for the gritty work of showing up for the projects that resonate with the blueprint of the soul's ambition. After a late summer season of unexpected changes (including my intense inflammatory bee sting experience, my partner's work injury that led to a broken foot, his subsequent surgery, a need to move him to town for the months-long healing process, and the decision to co-habitate at a much quicker pace than we had planned, all during the eclipses of last month), I proposed we enter Autumn with a liver flush, to support us to cleanse and compost the past and make space for the new life and rhythms that want to sprout now in our lives. This was the fourth time I've done this flush, and I was struck by how easy it came this time, as well as how easy it was to introduce it into my life with my beloved. I believe it's thanks to the way I've dedicated myself to weaving these regenerative practices into the flow of my days and in alignment with the rhythms of the seasons, rather than approaching them as a separate task. And yes, I grieved the sudden loss of having my own dedicated solitary space in which to conduct the rituals of my life, but I know that this next chapter is teaching me how to maintain the authentic essence I have cultivated alongside the intimacy I have been calling in. In my final session with my dear O.I. mentor Dana last week I named a pattern that has always been there: Every time I’ve expanded — in health, in work, in love — it has followed a pruning. A simplifying. A letting go. We so often resist the fallow seasons, thinking that release means loss. But nature — and the nervous system — both know that space is what allows new life to take root. What no longer serves you to keep holding onto? And would it help you to let it go if you knew — not just in mind but in body —

We’ve just come through such an intense eclipse portal — and I want to pause to say: congratulations. We made it through! These thresholds aren’t easy, and every step taken is part of the alchemy required to deepen into greater coherence. The momentary turbulence is not random, but a surfacing and a clearing of patterns for purification, for the sake of bringing forth deeper gold, which is our essence and our birthright, a lucid kind of peace that comes not from complacency but from the ground of being awake within life. Thank you to those who joined our Fall Harvest Ritual last week. What we created together was so nourishing. As we turn deeper into autumn, I invite you to picture your own basket of harvest — filled with the fruits of this year’s growth. Before rushing ahead, let yourself feel some healthy pride in how far you’ve come over the course of recent months. For many of us, especially as empaths and sensitives, that pride can be hard to claim… but it is sacred fuel for the months ahead. I’ve pulled a short clip from the ritual where I share about the roots of trauma — how it’s really a separation from our nature codes, and why healing requires meeting a pattern with a greater pattern. You can watch that video below. And, as part of the Village, you can watch the entire recording of our ritual time while we are here on SKOOL (for a limited time, as I'll be transferring the free community onto Facebook soon). The paid membership will remain here on this platform, but it's turning out not to be the best place to offer public events (to learn more about this, watch the Q & A recording from last Thursday). And for those of you in Bend, I’ll be facilitating a free Somatic Soul Retrieval Sanctuary meditation journey on Sunday morning, October 12 at 8:30 AM at Hanai Center in the Earth Room. This session is part of the new Bend to Balance Health Expo — a full weekend of offerings focused on mental health and wellbeing, for only $8 entry. Hosted by Soundshala, Hanai, and UUFCO. More info here:

We are standing inside an eclipse portal — a threshold moment where what has been gestating beneath the surface is now pressing to be born. In birth language, this is the crowning moment: the most intense, stretching, and unstoppable part of the passage. Crowning requires resilience. It is not “stress” in the way we usually think of it, but rather eustress — the positive stress that strengthens us, like the pressure that builds a seedling’s stem strong enough to pierce the soil and rise. Without it, there is no emergence. The past few weeks have been a birth canal for me, with many of my foundations (body, relationship, rhythms & home environment) shifting. In the midst of it I drew the "tower" card (all about change) and in this version it was of a large pine tree with its top being blown off by a lightning strike. I immediately thought of the regenerative lessons from Robin Wall Kimmerer's book Braiding Sweetgrass, and how in it she describes the way that sweetgrass grows back stronger after the native people harvest it each year for their weaving and other projects. Sometimes we need to be shaken up and challenged to stimulate growth. Resilience is not the absence of challenge, but the capacity to meet challenge with deeper patterns. Not numbing out or escaping, but weaving in stronger threads of support, awareness, and connection. This is good news. It means that even what feels like a missed step can be leveraged as compost for growth. The obstacle itself becomes the way. Each pattern that challenges us invites a deeper, wiser pattern to take root. I invite you into our Fall Harvest Ritual next week — a time to gather what has ripened, release what no longer serves, and strengthen our inner patterns for the darker half of the year. We are crowning together. May this portal teach us to welcome the pressure as sacred, the challenge as strengthening, and the obstacle as the way.