Dear ones -

Did you see the email or my video on YouTube and social media from last week, talking about how safety isn’t the same as sanctuary and protection isn’t the same as refuge?

I’m curious - what do you think of my thoughts there?

And what does sanctuary mean to you? What does it feel like in your body? Do you know it when you feel it?

One of my favorite parts of our last cohort of Sanctuary was exploring what the word meant to us over the course of the six months we gathered.

It wasn’t an intentional practice - it organically arose as each of us started to feel sanctuary in our bodies and notice other places in our lives where we felt it, too.

In so much of the work I do, I’m aware that what we’re doing is recalibrating ourselves.

We’re not learning anything new, we’re finding the old stuff, the ancient and ancestral stuff; and we’re breathing life back into the beating heart, singing the flesh back onto the bones (there’s a beautiful story I learned from Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women Who Run With Wolves, which I told in our last round of Sanctuary, about breathing life back in and singing flesh back onto bones - we had such a powerful discussion afterwards).

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I believe you know what sanctuary is. It’s your birthright.

But that doesn’t mean it’s inevitable.

It’s something we can lose.

And we can find it again.

And once we start to feel it together, we feel it in our lives.

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Here are some fairly mundane ways I’m noticing sanctuary showing up in my life right now:

• I finally bought myself some of those Loop earplugs and am finding new levels of quiet. As I do, my body starts to relax. Sanctuary. I didn’t even know I needed it in this way.
• I also made myself a flannel and rice eye mask and I warm it each evening before bed and find laying it on different parts of my body helps me land deeper in myself after the day and sets me up for deeper rest. Sanctuary.
• And I finally listened to my dentist and got a night guard. I was surprised to find the form and feel of the guard soothing. Some structure so I can relax. Sanctuary.
• I’ve also been experimenting with praying the rosary while out walking my daily walks - but as an animist act; deepening my connection to the soul medicine and archetypes of Mary’s story, and the balance of the divine masculine and feminine (I’m sure there will be more to say about that journey at some point).

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There are lots of other little moments through the day where I find myself feeling sanctuary, lots of practices and mini rituals which remind me of my place in things in a way that feels nourishing and relaxing.

If you’d like to recalibrate to ‘sanctuary’; if you’d like a small offering (which is pretty modest all things considered; but may just be one of those small things that makes a big difference in how you feel), we start this weekend.

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​You’re most welcome around the warm hearth with us.

Kate

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P.S. There may not be another cohort of Sanctuary again. I’m not sure yet.

I don’t say this to add false urgency or as a bait and switch. I want to give you the most honest information I have at this time so you can make the right decision for you.

I’m in the process of dreaming into what might become a more robust membership. And if that comes to be, Sanctuary will get folded into that.

So if you know you’d like to do Sanctuary in this current iteration and at this current price, please know that this might be the time. I trust your sense of your capacity and what you need to feel nourished in this next six months of your life. Maybe it's joining us, maybe not. <3