A Healthy Society Relies On Its Disbelievers And Naysayers

When was the last time you purposefully engaged in a respectful consensual dialog around a heated topic––a curious fencing match with someone with whom you disagreed? 

I would venture to guess that few of us can remember the last time we engaged in that sort of robust and uncomfortable conversation. Censorship, canceling, and erasure create a preciousness and frailty within us individually, and in society at large, that tends to simply create more of the same. This frailty, in turn, undermines our sense of our individual wellness and our capacity to grow and learn. If we step into our jobs each morning aware of the threat of being canceled or called out, we are likely to become ardent censors of ourselves, ever-narrowing our risk-taking and growth. This is the antithesis of ecologically embedded ethical practice. And it’s also the antithesis of a healthy, generative society.

Society relies on its disbelievers and naysayers in order to innovate and thrive. A society that silences dissent or cancels its radical risk-takers is a society that cannot survive. Being an ethical participant in our current global climate requires that we remember how to engage in innovative, radical, and risky ways with each other and the larger communities and cultures to which we belong.

Embodied Ethics is a course for those who want to strengthen their radical risk-taking muscles. An adventure for those who long to excavate and evolve their capacity to engage in intelligent, respectful conversations with others who might not agree. 

In order to do this, we will all have to work together to weave a community of curiosity, respect, and care. We will take time to identify the places where we’re each likely to be ambushed by our shadow, as well as the places where we each shine with our own unique brilliance.   

The issues we face as a species, and as a global Earth ecology, are vast and mounting. If we envision ourselves as dynamic practitioners and guides capable of addressing the myriad problems facing our communities we will first have to do our own calisthenics. Embodied Ethics is the boot camp for this work. 

We will practice this critical craft of generative dissent in our free webinar on Wednesday January 5th.  

Most Of Us Lack Robust Communities Who Will Support Our Accountability

Who do you talk with when you’re facing an ethical dilemma? 

What do you do if you’ve done the wrong thing with a client and you need to get support and supervision? 

Have you experienced fear and/or shaming when you bring ethical questions to your professional communities? 

Unfortunately, most of us lack robust professional communities with whom we can explore the nuances of our ethical practices, communities that will support our accountability, and to which we can bring both our innovative (and perhaps therefore edgy) ideas and our mistakes.

To make the situation even more difficult, Western Industrial Culture largely relies on shame and exile as its mechanisms for obedience. So if (or when) we do find ourselves in ethically murky waters, we’re more likely to try to cover it up than step boldly into the light of day to acknowledge, learn and evolve. 

Yet our ecologically embedded Ethical Self––who behaves with the understanding that we exist within a context that is ever-shifting––requires a sophisticated and robust community of allies. Those who will courageously disagree and challenge and support but who do so within a container of compassion and care. We require resilience and devotion to create and sustain communities of this kind. Simply developing the muscles to participate in communities of this kind takes practice and determination.

In our upcoming course,  Embodied Ethics – for all those in a position of power and therefore responsibility – we provide just such a community. Across professions, cultural backgrounds, ages and personal belief-systems, we weave a community of care with the power to both nurture and challenge us all. We explore our unique geniuses and our shadows within a curious, practical and generative culture; a culture most of us have never experienced in our personal or professional lives. 

A week before we launch into these uncharted waters, on January 5th, we will offer our last webinar in a series of three. This is a wonderful opportunity to experience a quick dip at the edges of the deep water Embodied Ethics will explore.

Is It Possible To Be Ethical If We Do Not Feel Empowered?

Power and Ethics. This is complex and uncomfortable territory for many of us. 

As the divisiveness and extremism builds around the subject of covid and more specifically the vaccine, as communities and entire countries are establishing two classes of citizens, I am particularly concerned about the murkiness created within a culture that strategically disempowers its individuals in order to ensure ideological compliance and docile participation. 
 

Is it possible for us to stand in our ethical responsibility if we do not feel empowered? 
 

What do choice and consent look like in a culture that violently demands only one perspective? Even if we willingly agree with that perspective, what happens to our subconscious experience of choice if we witness our culture’s violent refusal to respect those who disagree? 

And what about those who feel dishonored and disempowered? When we experience the violation of censure, exile, and the loss of bodily autonomy, we are likely to act from a place of fear. Is it possible for us to behave ethically when we are in fear? 

For those of us who guide others––those of us in positions of power and therefore responsibility––the questions above are critical. Yet they require a compassionate, curious and diverse community that nourishes dissent and disagreement. This is a rare and radical thing these days. 

Please join our rare and radical Embodied Ethics community. Beginning in January we will courageously spelunk into the heart of this terrain, with care and curiosity. Guided by a fundamental desire to be cultural change agents in the Great Turning, we will honor each other’s ideas and wisdom as we grow and deepen our own. We might not answer any questions or solve any pressing dilemmas. But we will most assuredly become better, more engaged humans, with the capacity to engage in the most critical issues that face us today as ecologically embedded, ethical participants who share an emboldened experience of our belonging.

And if you’d like to dip your toes into this conversation and community space, please join us for two free webinars, December 8th and January 5th. 

What Is Your Relationship To Power?

In our upcoming course, Embodied Ethics, we will spend time exploring the terrain of personal and institutional power with care and candor. We do this because it is just as likely that we cause harm from a belief that we have no power as from a blatant misuse of it.

But this terrain is complex. For understandable reasons, most of us have a fraught relationship with our personal power. To name just two predominant themes, some of us believe we are entitled to a power we have not earned (and we wield it in a power-over way) while some of us cannot see the power we have (because we are wed to an identity that requires us to see ourselves as power-under). It’s no wonder this is true. As it is modeled and taught in Western Industrial Cultures, power is removed from its ecological embeddedness. It is a thing that is taken rather than given. It is a thing we use and often end up misusing. And contrary to the fundamentally erotic nature of power, we believe it moves in a linear fashion, which is as ecologically bankrupt and damaging a concept as ‘trickle down economics. Across the globe in dominant cultures of all kinds, power is a thing that is bought, inherited or forcefully taken rather than earned. We are modeled that some people are inherently power-full, while others are power-less. 

As practitioners, teachers, parents, clergy – all of us who are in a position to guide others – it is our responsibility to be clear about the nature of power and more specifically the nature of our power. If we do not attend to this aspect of our leadership our ethical compass is untrustworthy. But how would we develop a clear and intelligent relationship with power, and specifically our power, amidst such mistaken and harmful representations of it?

Please join us for an essential journey through this terrain. Beginning in January we will leave the shores of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ requiring that we develop ethical compasses far more sophisticated than simply Do No Harm. Together, in fierce, curious, and compassionate community, we will explore the intimate relationships we each have with power, both as a concept, and a deeply personal, inherited and inter-generational experience. We do this work so we are more capable of participating in the necessary unraveling of all that is broken as we simultaneously sow the seeds of a more generative and just future.

If you’re eager to dive in, please join us for two free webinars, Wednesday December 8th and Wednesday January 5th. I hope to see you there.

What Are Your Values and Where did They Come From?

I have previously shared an alternative definition of ethics from the one dominant society has given us — that the ethics required of us in this time are those that guide us to see exactly what is uniquely ours to do in any given moment, actions that will support the generative, innovative wellness as well as the generative dying. Today, I invite us to consider what it means to be ethical and where this capacity comes from. 

Ethical behavior, we are told, is the application of the morals, principles and values we each hold. But where do we get our morals, our principles and our values? In a human society like the Western(ized) industrial cultures most of us live in, the values, morals and principles we grow up with are often presented to us as unassailable requirements for all good people, with no acknowledgement that we might ever feel or think differently.

In the last few decades this critical process of developing an intimate set of values that represent our unique way of belonging to and in The World has become even more fraught. In the current climate of rampant and proliferating orthodoxies and unrelenting cancel culture, our values, principles and morals are often as much a survival response to ensure we are not exiled or silenced as they are a unique expression of our particular experience of belonging, participation and responsibility. 

At the very least, in conformist-consumer societies, we are often discouraged to hold values, principles and morals that stray outside the narrow (and ever-narrowing) parameters of what is currently acceptable and expected. 

Then what, exactly, is ethical behavior and what are ethics? Are they the internal compass, unique to each of us, that supports us to engage in the continued unfolding story of The World as a generative, innovative participant? Or are they the set of rules that assures we will not stray too far from the acceptable (and expected) narrative – whatever that narrative is?

Let’s explore this terrain a bit more intimately, somatically. I’m going to invite you to think of a value you hold. But first, I invite you to close your eyes and take a few breaths right now. Don’t rush this. See if you can settle into your bones and your breath even just 3% more than you already are. 

Don’t rush this along. Take your time. Make room for the first value that comes to mind – without questioning it. What value did you think of? Say this word or phrase out loud two or three times, slowly. Spend a few moments envisioning what this value looks like in action. When was the last time you embodied this value in your own life? 

For example, if you chose honesty, what does it mean to be honest? As you define your value and contextualize it, see if you can visualize its roots. Where did this value come from? Who modeled it to you? Did you ever question this value for yourself, allowing it to be shaped to suit your intimate experience of yourself even more uniquely? Have you ever found yourself acting in ways that seemed to betray this value? 

Spend a moment or two replaying an experience where you believe you betrayed this value, giving yourself room to investigate whether you genuinely betrayed it or simply behaved in a way that embodied this value differently from those who taught it to you originally. No matter what you’ve come up with, notice how you feel in this moment. Without attributing a narrative to your sensations and emotions, simply make room to acknowledge and attune to them.

There is no right or wrong answer in this investigation. The lionshare of its benefit occurs simply in the attuned and embodied investigation itself. 

It is this sort of exploration that will occupy much of our time in Embodied Ethics, beginning in mid-January. 

For all those who find themselves in positions of power (and therefore responsibility), this course will provide us the courageous community and gentle guidance to identify the internal ethical structures (including the values, morals and principles) we all carry. Together we will examine whether they accurately reflect who we are and the world we currently live in and belong to. From here, no doubt, we will need to spend time dismantling and searching for those values, morals and principles that are required for this particular time of unraveling and possibility. Those that will specifically guide us to participate brilliantly, at a time when it couldn’t be more important that we do so.

If this conversation interests or excites you, please join us for a free webinar on Weds December 8th as we explore this terrain of our values and our ethical compass.

And of course, please join us for Embodied Ethics.

Shame and Our Ethical Responsibility

Maybe you’ve had one of those moments when a client or someone in your life shares that you’ve impacted them. Negatively. 

It’s possible (perhaps even likely) that some part of you immediately goes into a panic. You might get defensive, pushing back, explaining, even blaming. Or, perhaps you collapse into a puddle of self-loathing and regret. Sometimes these reactions occur quietly, almost imperceptibly impacting how we show up. Other times they are loud. Front and center. Taking over an interaction. 

It is a natural nervous system reaction to experience a protective defensiveness when we are accused of harming or in any way behaving ‘negatively’. We often find ourselves somewhere along the spectrum of flight, fight, or freeze. Simply knowing the inevitability of this can be helpful as we work with our reactions. With the endowment of this information, we can find resources and lean into the important work of curiosity, listening, and repair. 

When we fall into shame, we are no longer available to engage, nor are we capable of acknowledging the impact we’ve had or the harm we’ve caused. If we can’t do these things, then we cannot take responsibility for our actions or their impact. This makes it impossible to listen, make amends, or repair the rupture. It makes it impossible to learn and evolve. 

We do not make our way out of shame in isolation. In order to be ethical practitioners, we must surround ourselves with communities of diversity and fierce support. Communities that will stay with us when we have fallen into shame. And we must work to cultivate communities that do not cancel each other, exile or call each other out.  

Join us for Embodied Ethics, starting in just two weeks. In this 12-week course for practitioners and others – all those in positions of power and responsibility – we will explore the roots of our shame, how and where it lives in us, and some of the ways to make ourselves less hospitable to its damaging effects.

Ethics Is Primarily a Dance Of Intimate Relationship

“To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness. Human beings came out of that wholeness.”

— Gary Snyder

In our upcoming course, Embodied Ethics, we explore ethics as a dance of intimate relationship. We in Industrial society have been taught that ‘relationship’ is reserved for that thing you do with the person you’re dating and then eventually marry (according to societal expectations). Yet for far (far) longer than this regrettable truncation has been part of our human narrative, humans have known and practiced an abiding and primary intimate relationship with all beings. 

Your ancestors and mine have all practiced their own unique forms of animism––for them, the entire world was alive and ensouled. To be alive and ensouled means that each individual (whether that individual is Rock, Stream, Aspen Tree or Madagascan Pochard) has a soul of its own, including a unique destiny and intrinsic part to play in the unfolding of Life. 

Within this cosmological compass our ancestors, all, had oral traditions telling stories of our celestial and chthonic parentage. Our ancestors came from the Earth and Stars, and were of the Earth and Stars. They answered to this eminence and were held in their accountability by this eminence. Your ancestors and mine oriented to a way of being that acknowledged this fact. 

When I say ‘they oriented to a way of being’ I mean they acknowledged the paradoxical dance between individual will, desire and sovereignty and the fact that our every action impacts not only the other human individuals in our midst but everyone within the Web of Life: human and other-than-human. This Web of Life included the dead and the not yet born. There are many societies on Earth today that still practice this way of living.

In the last 200 years so much has happened to our human consciousness as a result of the developments within the fields of science and metaphysics alike. We now have the data to understand, with grave clarity, just how much of an impact we have on––and therefore a responsibility to––all Life on the planet.  We now know, illustrated by crushing charts and diagrams of the climate and cultural collapses happening all around us, just how much we must learn to live with a daily, hourly, awareness of and orientation to our power, our impact, and our responsibility.

What I am speaking of is a thing we refer to as ecologically embedded ethics. And it’s complex. Unlike the ethics most of us were taught (about codes and rules and the threat of punishment should we stray outside the lines), ecologically embodied ethics depicts a world where the animism of our ancestors is woven with the twenty-first century awareness we all have access to, of the precarious and brilliant system upon which we rely for our survival and thriving, and just how much of an impact we can have on it, in all directions. 

When we conduct ourselves with ignorance and selfishness, we impact the Web of Life by diminishing and extinguishing other beings’ capacity to thrive. When we conduct ourselves with dignity and responsibility as beings in a position of power within the Web of Life, we have the potential to weave our particular brilliance with all that is unfolding in this erotically intelligent dance of possibility.

Ecologically embedded ethics asks us to remember that to speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness and that we, humas, came out of that wholeness.

For everyone who is honored to be in a position of power, this invitation is for YOU. This course is designed to push all our buttons and rattle our certainties. We don’t claim to have any answers. But in our world of ethics, the answers are not nearly as important as the questions. 

Please join us.

Our Ethics Are As Unique to Each of Us As Our Fingerprints

In an eco-centric human culture, one that operates as if all participants play a unique and critical role in the continued unfolding wholeness of the system, ethics are unique to each individual. Of course, there are still consequences for every action. Some of these consequences are brilliant and generative. Sometimes they are tragic. Sometimes they are generative and tragic at the same time. 

Even in eco-centric culture, we might find ourselves getting vigorously ‘checked’ by others whose boundaries we have crossed. But this is, itself, a process that generates more wholeness with the constant opportunity for all participants to pay attention, respond, and be implicated in the ever-unfolding process happening all around us. One of the great shortcomings of so-called ‘developed’ human society is that we have contracted out the enforcement of our ethics to remote, disembodied institutions. 

In our 12-week course Embodied Ethics, starting on August 31st, we explore the possibility that a diverse, generative culture requires us to acknowledge that our ethics are as necessarily and deliberately unique to each of us as our fingerprints.

In this exploration we are assuming a few things that go against the dictums of our current society––that at first might even feel unethical to assume, let alone explore! We are assuming that ethics are not simply a matter of not doing the wrong thing or even simply just doing the right thing. We are imagining that ethics are, more importantly, a matter of doing the particular thing that needs doing in this unique moment – the thing only you can do.

There are many bite-sized pieces in the whopper of the above sentence. And we will take the time to identify, chew and digest many of them in our 12-week exploration. For today I am going to point out the last phrase: a thing only you can do. 

In Embodied Ethics, we are starting from the ecologically correct awareness that you are an intrinsic, inextricable part of the moment that is happening around you, the one in which you might behave ethically or not. Our society, and its disembodied agencies of enforcement, tells us that we must do our work to make sure we don’t do the wrong things. 

But we, at the Institute for Erotic Intelligence, think this is simply the very first and least important of layers when it comes to developing an ecologically embedded ethical self. We believe that if there is a wrong thing, there must also, then, be an essentially right thing. And even more to the point, doing the ecologically right thing is often more important than merely not doing the wrong thing.

In Embodied Ethics we explore what an ecologically embedded ethics looks like.  This includes the possibility that, in any given moment, there is both a perfectly unhelpful (and even harmful) thing each of us might do as well as a perfectly helpful, even generative thing we might do. 

And we dare to take a step further, to wonder about the unique way we are each put together, that predisposes us to both the unhelpful/harmful behaviors as well as the helpful/generative behaviors. We acknowledge that developing our ecologically embedded ethical self means we not only accept the responsibility for not causing harm but also for causing good; for having a generative impact.

Exploring this terrain requires a bit of a map and we are fortunate to have one, thanks to Bill Plotkin’s Map of the Psyche. With his blessing we use this map to help us explore each of our unique landscapes. With the cross-cultural container of the seven directions of East, South, West, North, Above, Below, and Center, we explore those aspects within each of us that are obscured in shadow as well as our facets of wholeness.

From here, we are far more equipped to wrestle with the internalized narratives of the carceral model, as we step out beyond the field of right and wrong…(thank you Rumi for reminding us that such a place exists).

If this kind of exploration of ethics has your knees shaking and your eyes watering, we hope you’ll join us! We’ve been standing out here, in the field beyond right and wrong, quaking and shaking in our sandals for months now.

In case it helps to hear from one of the intrepid students of our previous class: 

“This course has encouraged me to look far beyond the cultural norm of ‘do no harm,’ to free myself from the prison this stance held me in, and to recognise both my impact and my ability to repair or create the space to enable others to heal. This freedom has allowed me to speak my truth and show up in the world far more as my true self, which in turn models this freedom for others. Thank you.”

Good People Don’t Break the Rules or Cause Harm. Only Bad People Do.

 “There is a foundational belief here, at the Institute for Erotic Intelligence, that our own bodies and experiences can, and indeed DO, ethically guide us when and if we choose to trust them.” — Rev Teri. D Ciacchi, MSW, past participant

About halfway through our last round of Embodied Ethics (enrolling now and beginning on August 31st), we paused from our didactic learning to explore the intimate consequences of the carceral system as it lives uniquely within each of us. Specifically, we took some time to acknowledge what it feels like, as practitioners (teachers, pastors, parents etc) to be in a position of power and responsibility within a system whose definition and image of ethical behavior is unquestioned obedience. A system that invented the narrative that there are ‘good people’ and ‘bad people’, and that good people don’t break the rules or cause harm while, of course, bad people do. 

We acknowledged that for many of us within this system we have internalized this undermining narrative:  ‘it’s merely a matter of time before I am found out and the truth revealed: that, it turns out I am, afterall, a bad person.’ 

In this pause, we explored what it feels like to navigate the complex terrain of power and responsibility while living within this system of good versus bad, that relies on shame and the threat of exile should we make a mistake or unintentionally cause harm. We located, within the intimate terrain of our own bodies, where the fear lives most palpably: where that voice of ‘don’t let them see you! Just stay hidden and you’ll be safe!’ lives. 

Then, we slowed down even more, closed our eyes, took deep breaths and imagined...how would I feel and what might be possible, if I lived humbly and transparently within a community that encouraged me to explore and develop my own ecologically embedded ethical compass, guided by my unique place within the community and my authentic responses, curiosity and longing? 

‘Ethics is how we behave when we decide we belong to each other’ 

Even though we were meeting on ZOOM and spanning several countries, the weight of fear, grief, and rage that filled the room was palpable. And so was the excitement, possibility and creativity. For me, the guide for our ethics journey, this was a memorable moment. 

It flagged, arguably, one of the most fertile areas to place our attention as we explore what it means to cultivate our embodied ethics within a disembodied, remote system that relies on our unquestioned obedience and our fear of humiliation and exile as its primary means of control. It also identified a  conundrum: How will we discover our ecologically embedded, erotically intelligent Ethical Self within a system that actively threatens us with exile––the very thing we are most instinctively afraid of?

It turns out that, just like our prehistoric ancestors, the threat of exile continues to be the greatest threat imaginable to us as we navigate the complex terrain of our ethical behavior in our roles of great responsibility.

When I say ‘exile’, I’m referring to the threat of being labeled as a ‘bad’ person, and therefore irredeemable, because someone else feels harmed by us. Exile can take many shapes, from being de-licensed and de-platformed to being shunned by our professional and/or personal communities. As our group of 20 people contemplated the weight of exile as it lives uniquely in each of us, some of us found ourselves quietly crying, and some of us felt imprisoned and enraged, the urge to fight against the imaginary shackles that concepts like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ impose.

We didn’t solve anything in this embodied practice. But solving wasn’t our goal. In this quiet pause, we simply began to acknowledge our (often unconscious) embodied experience of ‘ethics’ as it has been taught and told to us. If we are to identify and nourish alternatives to the system of unquestioned obedience we currently have, this is a crucial first step: acknowledging the ways in which we are each shaped by the philosophies and practices of the carceral system. Acknowledging the fear, rage, and numbness, as well as the curiosity, longing and possibility.  

If you find yourself hungry for a safe(enough) community within which you might explore your intimate and unique embodied relationship to ethics, a place to explore what your embodied, ecologically embedded Ethical Self looks and feels like, please do join us for Embodied Ethics, beginning August 31st and running for 12 weeks.

The Ripple…

It is sunrise, 5:50am here on the Eastern slope of the Continental Divide of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. I’m sitting next to the small pond I built over a decade ago that is now home to seven different heirloom water lily varieties, wild cattails, water grasses, and the odd assortment of plants I collected from the nearby streams. It’s also home to snails, green frogs (who are still in their tadpole form), snakes, water striders, damselflies and dragonflies, and an assortment of fish, the intrepid survivors of the relentless dusk assaults of a prehistoric Great Blue Heron who put this pond on her nightly dinner map years ago.

This place is heaven to me. It is alive with its own wildness. I lost whatever meager control of this ecosystem I ever had about five years ago when I noticed fish swimming around that I didn’t put here; the eggs having found their way here on the webbed feet of the wild ducks who come through for an evening bath now and again.

I came to the pond with my computer this morning to write to you about Ethics. More specifically, to speak to the Ethical Self that comes from our ecologically embedded, erotically intelligent rewilding. 

Enrollment for our Embodied Ethics course, starting August 31st, is now open! It’s my job to put a call out to practitioners, clergy, teachers, parents, business folks, leaders––in fact, anyone in a position of power who wonders how to take up their right-size in a way that is generative, inspiring, and even radical, while also being eminently beneficent. 

Marketing, as an endeavor, is not ecologically embedded nor is it erotically intelligent. In fact, it is the antithesis of wild. Here, I’m faced with a deep conundrum. It seems to be seeding the worst kind of karma to enroll a course using tactics and strategies that go against the fundamental principles we are teaching. 

So, as is typically my way, I delivered myself to the pond to observe and listen. Perhaps it has wisdom for me when it comes to how to simply put the word out and let you all take it from there. As I sit here, I let myself believe everything I ‘hear’ and see, everything that occurs to me in this deep listening place. And I simply observe...waiting for the morsel of ah-hah that inevitably comes.

I watch, almost without breathing, as a small green bottle fly gets stuck in an orb-weaver’s web. Its weight is just enough to cause the web to dip and its tiny body hits the surface of the pond, which creates a ripple in the water, and adds even more weight to the fly. The fly’s wings, beating rapidly, draw the attention of the fish who come up to see if the cause of this disturbance is of interest. 

And sure enough, it is of great interest to one of them. And the fish gobbles the fly in one gulp. With that, the web pops back up to its former shape, the surface of the pond returns to its glassy stillness and by the time all this happens, the fish is already back down at the bottom of the pond, where it’s cooler. Belly full. Singular task complete.

The ripple that is mine to make this morning, my version of the plump green bottle fly to your hungry fish, is simply the offering itself: that there is a deeply intelligent, Ethical Self alive and well in most all of us, whose relationship with power is a shapeshifting elegant dance of constant listening and reorganizing, one that is in intimate relationship with the many layers of Life all around and within it, who is nourished by transparency, humility and courageous boldness in service to what it holds dear. 

Including and transcending the dictums ‘do no harm!’ and ‘obey the rules!’ this Ethical Self also follows a far more complex set of guidelines and principles: the ones that guide thriving ecological systems. 

If this entices you to the surface of the pond this morning, I encourage you to join us for this 12-week journey. In addition to teaching some things, we will also be practicing together, in large and small groups, with real world situations that are the dilemmas we each face regularly. 

We will not come away with any hard and fast rules. But we will likely feel the presence of rarely-used muscles stretching and strengthening. And we will, no doubt, wrestle with ourselves and each other as we get quite intimate with the tendrils of the carceral model of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’...things that have almost nothing to do with authentic, generative, ethical behavior.

Shame and Our Ethical Responsibility

Maybe you’ve had one of those moments when a client or someone in your life shares that you’ve impacted them. Negatively. 

It’s possible that some part of you immediately goes into a panic. You might get defensive, pushing back, explaining, even blaming. Or, perhaps you collapse into a puddle of self-loathing and regret. Sometimes these reactions occur quietly, almost imperceptibly impacting how we show up. Other times they are loud. Front and center. Taking over an interaction. 

It is a natural nervous system reaction to experience a protective defensiveness when we are challenged with feedback – both 'positive' and 'negative'. We often find ourselves somewhere along the spectrum of flight, fight, or freeze. Simply knowing the inevitability of this can be helpful as we work with our reactions. With the endowment of this information, we can find resources and lean into the important work of curiosity, listening, and repair.

When we fall into shame, we are no longer available to engage, nor are we capable of acknowledging the impact we’ve had or the harm we’ve caused. If we can’t do these things, then we cannot take responsibility for our actions or their impact. This makes it impossible to make amends or repair the rupture. 

We do not make our way out of shame in isolation. In order to be ethical practitioners, we must surround ourselves with communities of diversity and fierce support. Communities that will stay with us when we have fallen into shame. 

When it Comes to Ethics, There Are No Experts

“Get your ETHICS here!”

What are Ethics? Where do we get them? And, just who are the Ethics experts, anyway?

The problem starts right here. In believing that ethics are a thing we can learn, and that there are ethical experts who will teach us, as if we’re learning about quantum theory or how to change the oil in our car. When it comes to ethics, there are no experts. 

Certainly, there are people who have devoted their lives to the concepts, constructions, and dynamics of ethics. People who have written and studied about power, dignity, trauma and shame, (thank you Cedar Barstow and Staci Haines among many others). There are people who’ve devoted their lives to the question ‘who is it for?’ (thank you Betty Martin). 

But even these people are not ethical experts. When it comes to ethics – the exploration of how we behave in ways that are beneficent, generative, and future-thinking, while staying right here in the present-moment, yet deeply informed by the impacts of the past – we are all merely humans together. 

Ethics is a community conversation and dance, one of transparency, humility, honesty, humor, generosity of spirit, ferocity of love, and so much more. 

One of the greatest blows to our ethical Self has been the relentless messaging and system structuring that tells us there are ethical experts – that ethics is a noun, not a verb, and that we learn it from others and then simply do it.  

If we turn our ethics over to others, we will never find our own, unique, ethical Self. 

Our ethical Self, like the experience of our belonging that feeds it, is a weaving unique to each of us. It is living inside each of us always, awaiting just the right nourishment and inspiration to unfurl itself. Without nourishing our ethical Self, it’s possible that some of our most inspired work will never be born.  

And what if we nourish our ethical Self? We just might be engaged and internally informed enough to come right up to the edges of the familiar and the known, firmly grounded in the present-moment, while being informed by the past, with an eye on what might blossom into the future...and take the next step. Our unique ethical Self is the one who takes that next step.

There are no experts here. There are those of us who have navigated this intimate terrain more than others. Yet in our humanness we are, each of us, only as ethical as we are grounded in humility, honesty, wonder, care and evolving self knowledge; embedded in our communities of belonging, human and more than human, with a clear understanding of who we are here, and the things that get in the way of us remembering. 

Please join us for The Source of Embodied Ethics, as we explore this very terrain, as humans searching for our ethical Selves together. This 8 week course will bring us into territory that includes our experience of our own value, and what we learned about power. 

It will invite us to take stock of our particular wounding and how it predisposes us to see certain things and not others, while showing us things that aren’t really there. We will talk about some of the cultural, community and personal fallacies about ethics and what it means to be ethical. In other words, we will explore what it means to be a human who holds other humans in their humanness. 

Please join us. We begin Thursday March 4th at 9am (Mountain Time) and there’s plenty of room for you.

With care,
Christiane (and the IEI Faculty)

We Do Not *Think* Our Way Into Our Belonging — We Embody Our Belonging

“There is a vast difference between believing something intellectually and knowing in the body, all the way down, deep into cells and neural networks — and into psychospiritual marrow. If our caring for the world is embodied, not just an abstract idea or an unrooted thought bubble, does it change our response when we become aware of yet another harm against Earth’s life support systems (or to our Earthly companions)?”

— Geneen Haugen 

We do not think our way into our belonging. We embody our belonging. Our belonging exists in our soma, in our ‘psychospiritual marrow’. When we acknowledge that we belong, we become aware of, and responsible to, an embedded, interdependent relationship of being. If I acknowledge and embody my belonging, I live with the awareness that what happens to you – and to the Earth, and to my neighbors, and to the generations yet to come, and to everything else – all deeply impacts me. As I embody my belonging further, I naturally concern myself with your experience and your wellbeing. I begin to behave in ways that support your wellbeing while I attend to mine.  

Once we acknowledge and embody our belonging – and therefore consciously accept this responsibility to act, to listen, to speak, to see, to feel from this place – we begin to develop our erotic intelligence. As our erotic intelligence develops, we grow an intimate body of ethics. Our belonging nourishes our Ethical Self. They are inextricable. 

Of course, even from this place, in our humanness, we are still capable of causing harm – moments that turn into actions (or a lack of action) that create a distortion between the intention of our (in)action and its impact out there. Being ethical is as much about sensing and tending to the harm we inevitably cause, as it is about not causing harm in the first place. 

We are here. We will have impact. 

Sometimes that impact is beneficent. Sometimes it is damaging. Sometimes it is both at the same time. The Web of Life is complex. Yet, we are monumentally more likely to cause harm if we refuse to accept that we belong to each other and everything else. Worse yet, in our refusal to acknowledge our belonging and the responsibility that comes with it, we are far less likely to lean in and attend to that harm.   

This is the primary terrain of our upcoming 8-week course, The Source of Embodied Ethics, starting on Thursday March 4th at 9am (Mountain Time). As we directly identify and grapple with specific ethical conundrums and complexities, we will explore our intimate experiences of belonging. We will explore the landscape of erotic embodiment as we weave our own desires with the dignity inherent in all other beings. 

I Was a Happy – if Naive – Graduate Student

I have never been much of a rule follower. In fact, I tend to receive the endless, and often erroneous, strictures of my society with disdain and a hearty dose of skepticism. 

When I was in my mid twenties, a happy – if naive – graduate student in Clinical Social Work, I was introduced to Ethics when I saw it listed in my third semester’s course load. It was half a credit, while all the other courses including Human Development and Statistical Research Methods (imagine me sticking my fingers down my throat here), were one or more credits. 

Nonetheless, despite being introduced to Ethics as if it were a second-rate, not-really-legitimate area of study on its own, I was beyond excited. The thought of sitting in a room with my classmates, debating about real-life examples of helpful versus harmful behavior was utterly thrilling. How would we decide?! What if we messed up?! What if it wasn’t cut and dry?! What would I learn about my classmates?! Hell...what would I learn about myself?! I imagined being offered complex narratives of ‘if this’, ‘then that’, ’but only when’, and the inevitable  ‘NEVER when!’ Some of the courses I had taken so far had moments of this kind of real world ‘do or die’, but in my imagination, this Ethics course was going to top them all, by far.

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this. The actual course was nothing like my fantasy Ethics course. We didn’t work complex real life scenarios. We didn’t bring in our own past experiences of ethical breaches and stellar moments. We talked a lot about Socrates and Aristotle – whom I was certain would not be a source of support and wisdom when I was sitting with my future clients. We almost argued about whether values are the same as morals which may or might not be the same as ethics. The overwhelming result of this course on Ethics, that was a whole lot like all other clinical master’s degree courses on Ethics, was that I (and I’m fairly certain everyone else in the room) caught up on much-needed sleep. As we were patted on the heads and ushered out of the last class, we were reminded that we would be operating under a strict code of conduct that would fairly tightly prescribe our behavior with our clients. Oh thank goodness. End of story. Nothing else to think about. No worries whatsoever.

Fast forward twenty years, and ten years ago, as I was transitioning my private practice from that of a fairly traditional psychotherapist, (mostly) operating under the strong-arm of the Department of Regulatory Agencies (DORA) in sunny Colorado, USA. I had realized the limitations of my role as a psychotherapist and had already become a certified sexological bodyworker. I made the decision to let go of my license to practice psychotherapy so I could more fully develop the hybrid practice of the two modalities. 

And that’s when the moment occurred. Just days after I deliberately failed to renew my psychotherapy license I was sitting with a client whom I’d been seeing for a few years. And for those of you in private practice, let me tell you, this is that kind of client. The kind of client who is clearly as much of a Muse to us as we might be a guide to them. Sitting with this person I realized I was operating without a prescribed code of ethics and conduct. In that moment I experienced a flush of fear, then diffuse energy, then a flood of excitement, possibility and gravity. An appropriate amount of humility and nausea followed. 

Where would my decisions come from, if not from DORA?! Who would watch over me if not for ‘them’ (whoever ‘them’ was, since it’s not like I ever met anyone at DORA, or ever, in my twenty years, had a single personal or intimate exchange with any of the ‘anyones’ in the entire agency)? Where would my clients turn if they felt unsafe or (god forbid) harmed or violated by me?! It was a moment that, in retrospect, was a lot like leaving home at 15 and realizing that, mostly, I was on my own to determine how I would conduct myself and what sort of human I wanted to be. Except back then, if (really, when) I messed up, I was mostly only harming myself.

Within weeks of being a lone practitioner out of the golden handcuffs that is DORA, I was feeling the ethical muscles I never knew I had, muscles I’d never had to use because my behavior, within the carceral model of ‘bad’ and ‘good’ behavior, and the do’s and don’ts it requires, was always cut and dry. Being outside my former container, combined with being a practitioner in a body-based modality that includes the entire body and the critical terrain or our erotic nature and arousal, had me feeling alive and accountable in a way I had not felt, even once, in my previous two decades of practice. 

But it also made me aware that I was longing for, bereft of, and desperately requiring a dynamic, rigorously ethical community of diverse practitioners with whom I could finally – finally! – develop the ethical musculature required of truly, organically, independently intelligent, engaged and generative practitioners. Just a decade later, I can honestly say this community has taken root in the form of the Institute for Erotic Intelligence and beyond that, all the tremendous practitioners globally whom I am so blessed to know and interact with.

I have taken my experience to heart. And I’m so thrilled to announce that because both this process of personal development, and the terrain of embodied ethics as a study, is very important to me (and my intrepid colleagues at the IEI), we’re offering a course, called The Source of Embodied Ethics. This is the course I wished I’d had thirty years ago. 

Beginning Thursday March 4th at 9am MST, this weekly, 8-week exploration and deep dive, will invite us to examine our individual narratives about what it means to be an ethical human being, unraveling some of the fallacies and imprinting we received from family, societal and religious institutions, and the carceral system that has deeply imprinted us all. We will work vigorously with each other to excavate our own unique ethical threads to weave a story that invites us into our responsibility and our care, while requiring of us that we acknowledge our personal and role power so we can discover how to engage with it, in right-relationship. We will wrestle with questions that include, ‘does it ever work to create black and white rules and codes?’ And ‘how do we handle the inevitable breach of ethics and situations of harm?’ Before all of that, we will have to confront our own internalized patriarchal and dominator narratives that tell us that only ‘bad’ people do bad things. 

Of course, if our intention is to understand where harm comes from and how to stop it, we will have to reorganize ourselves to understand that it is not only individuals who harm. We will have to refocus our lens to understand that cultures, communities and societies within which harm routinely occurs are just as culpable as the individuals. We must explore what it means to create a culture of transformative justice rather than carceral over-lording. What, within each of us, must transform to allow us to participate generatively in cultures and communities that refuse to condemn anyone; communities that holds themselves accountable as much - and sometimes even more so -  than the individuals in question?  

Together we will develop this nascent curriculum at a time when it couldn’t be more critical that we do so. True fundamental healing will not happen if we have not developed the musculature to make decisions in the organic unfolding moment of our client’s journey. If we have not been supported to remember who we are, and to whom we belong, we will not be capable of seeing the opportunities as they naturally and unpredictably arrive, moment-to-moment.

Whether you’re a psychotherapist, a therapeutic massage practitioner, a somatic practitioner or a sexological bodyworker, you are welcome and we’d be thrilled to take this journey with you. We hope you’ll join us!

Good People Sometimes Do Bad Things

How many times have you found yourself saying something like, “Oh, I really like him. He’s such a good person.”  

In most cultures dominated by monotheistic religion and kept in-check by a rigid carceral system, we are often raised by well-meaning families, teachers and communities, to believe that good people do only good things. And only bad people do bad things. 

Yet in my long and rather varied professional life (ranging from an assistant VP in venture capital, to non-profit consultant, activist,  psychotherapist and somatic sex educator) it is the ‘good’ folks, the ones who mean well and are doing genuinely good work, who have caused the most harm. 

I remember my very first experience with this. I was 23, living in Boston, unsure about what I wanted to do next in my life and I took a job as the ‘gal Friday’ assistant to a very well known author who had dedicated his life to writing about education, poverty and social injustice. He lived alone, with his old and beloved dog, in the country about an hour outside of the city. He was so dedicated to his dog that when he traveled – and he traveled a lot – he would pay me to come out from the city to stay at his house and keep her company. 

When he wasn’t writing about important topics like the disparity in access to quality education and opportunity, he was speaking out against public school consolidation and redistricting and receiving such honors as the Robert F Kennedy Book Award and the National Book Award for Science, Philosophy and Religion. This was a truly, really, honestly, noble and worthy, tremendously good man. 

Within two months of my employment with this genuinely, truly, good man I was in search of personal guidance and counsel to verify what felt, to me, like harassment. I was experiencing a slowly increasing pressure to spend more time at his house, with requests to stay over even after he’d returned from his work trips. When I awkwardly refused, I was subjected to outbursts of cleverly disguised threats that were aimed at disparaging the quality of my work.

Despite the fact that I was an ardent feminist, a rape crisis counselor, a fierce spokesperson for women’s rights in the workplace and so much more, I found myself second-guessing my experience, and hesitating to simply say ‘No. That doesn’t feel good’. My hesitation was borne directly out of my belief that this man was a good man. He was a dedicated man. He did good work in the world. ‘And Christiane,’ I told myself, ‘good people do not do bad things!’ 

One of the most harmful ethical falsehoods peddled by our carceral system – one that actually predisposes dedicated practitioners to harm their clients – is that good people don’t do bad things. 

The other day, after I’d spent hours immersed in ethical breaches within one of my professions, my partner came home from work excited from having just had an initial session with a new client. He exclaimed, “I really like this guy! He’s such a good guy!” And I’ll admit, I snapped. “What exactly do you mean when you say he’s a ‘good guy’?! Tell me what I’m supposed to know about this person, now that you have told me he’s a ‘good guy’?!?” 

What do we mean when we use this kind of language to describe someone? And what does it do to our capacity to allow for their humanness once we’ve placed them in the ‘good’ category? Genuinely good people do horrific things. And if there is such a thing as a genuinely bad person, I guarantee you, they’re capable of doing remarkably good, helpful things, and probably do these things with regularity.

If we dispatch the use of these categorizations, then what do we do about the fact that all people are capable of doing genuinely harmful things routinely? What structure will we rely on for our own important work, and the compasses required to help keep us operating within ethical parameters, if we are to dispense of the arbitrary categorizations?

In The Source of Embodied Ethics, our upcoming 8-week continuing education course for all healing arts practitioners, we will tackle these questions, and so much more. This is, perhaps, the most important course you will take. Beyond ‘right’ vs ’wrong’, the foundation of this course is the intimate terrain of our belonging; the relationship that brings us into a conscious dance with our power. 

After we’ve removed the carceral scaffolding sold to us as ‘ethics’ we will begin building our own, living, breathing structural support that encourages us to acknowledge our wounds, biases and shadow while we identify and nurture the ways we are each here to serve. 

We work intimately in small groups to give us all plenty of opportunity to wrestle with some specific and realistic choice points many of us face on a regular basis; where our next move holds the difference between harm or a deepening field of trust and healing for our clients.  

We will not find our ethical self within a set of rules or a code of conduct. Join us for The Source of Embodied Ethics, beginning March 4th at 9am (Mountain Time) to explore, discover, challenge and grow the deeply ethical practitioner of you.