NikiAnne Feinberg, Author at Earthaven Ecovillage

What Can We Let Go Of?

NikiAnne Feinberg — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 17:49:01 +0000

This time of year in Southern Appalachia the waning heat and waxing cold converge to produce sights, sounds, and smells unlike any other season. This weekend’s convergence was resplendent here in our village, with the red leaves of the sourwood trees and the yellow leaves of the oaks and hickories — some still on the trees and others carpeting the ground.

The morning after our first frost, the tender basil had a final hour of beauty before giving up for the season while the hardy greens toughened up for the winter. The zinnias will tough it out for another couple of weeks while newly planted shallots remain tucked under a blanket of straw to grow through the winter.

Nature reminds us to ask: What can we let go of in our lives to allow space for something life-serving to emerge?

Earthaven’s School of Integrated Living is itself in the waning phase of our 2021 in-person classes, which is making space for new online programs this winter and the emergence of a fresh slate of in-person classes in Spring 2022. While some of our programs wax and wane with the seasons, we give thanks for the steadfastness of our on-going, year-round tours (in-person and virtual), which give us a chance to connect and feed the fire of community with folks from all over the world.

Take a peek at our upcoming online programs:

Nature as Medicine — Gaia and Your Health, Vitality, and Spiritual Unfoldment with Swami Ravi Rudra Bharati. Five-week online workshop. December 6, 13, 20, 27, and January 3.
Thriving in Relationships — Five Tools for Success with Steve Torma. Five-week online workshop. January 10, 17, 23, 31, and February 7.

Join one of our upcoming Earthaven tours:

In-person tours: November 13, 27, and December 11.
Virtual tour: December 8, or view the recording anytime.

May we use this autumnal time to find clarity about what really matters and make space for something life-serving to emerge.

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Books we’re reading

NikiAnne Feinberg — Sat, 09 Oct 2021 18:32:40 +0000

This time of year, I love a good book. I’m currently reading a book about a beloved ancestor — Walking with Sobonfu by Susan Hough. It’s an intimate read about Susan’s journey as student and friend of Sobonfu Somé, one of my teachers and a former SOIL instructor and grief ritual facilitator. Susan shares fun and interesting stories about her time journeying with Sobonfu as well as lots of information about very useful and accessible rituals I can engage in daily. I recommend it to anyone who wants to reclaim their authenticity and deepen their sense of community.

I asked around the village to see what other villagers are reading. Deborah Clark recommended Helen Zuman’s book Mating in Captivity, A Memoir. It’s about her experiences in the Zendik Farm cult, which she didn’t know was a cult until she was in it for a while and discovered that her autonomy and self-worth were being eroded by the cult leaders. You might call it a cautionary tale of someone who was very interested in community life and looking for love, but found a distorted version with the Zendiks.

Deborah reports “I’ve actually read the book twice, and it’s really well written — she conveys what happened and her process with a satisfying balance of juicy description and economy: never a wasted word. Somehow she clearly speaks her truth while maintaining some objectivity, portraying the cult leaders as humans and not monsters. It was particularly interesting to me because I had read about the Zendiks and was curious about their ‘community,’ and also knew someone else who had gotten out (he was there at the same time Helen was). It was especially juicy the second time I read it, because by then I had gotten to know Helen as a dear friend, but I think the book would be of interest to anyone who is interested in the topics of community, cults, and personal transformation.”

Spoiler alert: Helen survived the cult, did some good healing and processing, or as she would say “composting” of her experiences, and went on to be a successful writer, activist, and entrepreneur, and now has a regular podcast called Chocolate Church.

Bruce Johnston is reading a book called Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country by Shelby Steele.

Bruce reports “The book is about how America’s ‘culture wars’ began in the 1960s, when America finally became accountable for its treatment of Black Americans, and then for imperialism, sexism, and so forth. The book argues a schism in American life has come from that awareness and the loss of moral authority that white America experienced as a consequence of that awareness. The book contends that this cultural war has prevented sensible policy in many areas of life and has generated an avoidance of principled discussion around sensitive topics like race and gender, mostly because American institutions still feel that they lack the moral authority to do so. I recommend it because it is a point of view on these topics that I rarely hear: unconventional, delightfully practical, humanistic, and relatively free of ideology.”

And our elder Arjuna da Silva is reading a book that’s 50 years old, but not yet known — The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. She says that it’s a radical and amazing investigation of the more likely evolution of human thought and consciousness based on ancient texts that have apparently rarely been seen in these lights. She recommends it for people interested in evolution, consciousness, or healing.

What are you reading? If there’s a book you’d like to share, please share it in the comments.

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Is Place Important? – Virtual Tour

NikiAnne Feinberg — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 15:33:07 +0000

Back in the winter, I attended my friend Lee Warren’s workshop on “Place-Based Living at Earthaven Ecovillage.”

She talked at length about place. Specifically, she suggested that “we are cosmological orphans” in part because we aren’t connected to place.

I’ve been sitting with that concept. Mulling it. Contemplating it. Considering it.

At Earthaven, we use the phrase “place-based” to describe our educational programs partly because we reside at Earthaven Ecovillage and all of our learning and teaching are born in that PLACE.

But also because we’re trying to become deep, respectful, and integrated inhabitants of this place.

Lee also went on to say, “In our culture, we seem to not know who we are, where we came from, where we are going, or who it’s for.”

So I’ve been asking myself some questions:

What does it mean to become familiar to place? To humble ourselves to place? To learn from place? To steward place? To become indigenous to place? To learn about the gifts of that place?

I’ve been settled in this particular place for almost fourteen years, even though I hail from a far different place (California). And I realize that I’m just starting to touch on the deeper understandings of the cycles, mysteries, and wisdom of this place.

Here are a couple of my favorite quotes about place:

“Sometimes if you move carefully through the forest, breathing like the ones in the old stories, who could cross a shimmering bed of leaves without a sound, you come to a place whose only task is to trouble you with tiny but frightening requests, conceived out of nowhere but in this place beginning to lead everywhere. Requests to stop what you are doing right now, and to stop what you are becoming while you do it, questions that can make or unmake a life, questions that have patiently waited for you, questions that have no right to go away.” – David Whyte

“A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.” – Wendell Berry

If you would like to know more about the place we call home, please join me for our next Earthaven Ecovillage Virtual Tour next Wednesday, October 13, 2-4 pm. Find out more and register here. I look forward to meeting you and sharing this special place.

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Autumn Equinox And End-Of-Life Workshop

NikiAnne Feinberg — Tue, 28 Sep 2021 15:48:32 +0000

As we pass through the autumn equinox, we can see the seasonal change in our Appalachian forest home. Bees are feasting on the goldenrod flowers, sumac leaves are turning red, and acorns are falling.

At autumn equinox, we celebrate our harvests of squash and corn, and also the ways we have grown individually and as a community. We make corn dollies, exchange our harvests, and have a feast. The next morning, we gather early to sing up the sun.

We also start preparing for the time of death. My friend and SOIL co-founder, Lee Warren, says:

As we move toward a land-based life, we start to see that death is inherent in everything we do. We respect death and decay in the composting process, in the cycles of giving death to animals, or in the cycles of the seasons changing. As we get more familiar with those cycles, we turn towards the idea that human death can be sacred also, an important and even meaningful part of our lives.

Because we’re a residential community at Earthaven, we have the opportunity to get to know each other over a long period of time. When our friend and elder, Kimchi, entered her dying process, she had a community of people who could really honor her decisions and support her. It was such a gift that she let us in close, let us be of service, and hold and support her as she declined and died. We were able to care for the body at home and have a home funeral as well. It was one of the most profound experiences of my life — there’s some portal that opens into whatever we want to call it, the source or spirit world or the great beyond.

We easily share these stories of the meaningful end-of-life home care and death care, including home burials, but rarely share some of the other stories. Stories of the ones who didn’t have their affairs in order before they passed and had not shared their after-death wishes with their family, creating conflict and stress, and thwarting their dreams for how their life savings would benefit future generations.

Now, I am on a mission to encourage all of our community members to prepare their end-of-life papers. Creating clear end-of-life paperwork is important for all stages of life and health. Written documents help loved ones know what to expect, guide our own inner and outer processes and, when the time comes, allow us to turn our attention to the mystery and magic inherent in the dying process.

We offer you a sacred journey to contemplate your end-of-life intentions and prepare the appropriate documents. Lee is leading a five-week online workshop on Conscious Living, Conscious Dying — Preparing for the End of Life starting November 12. This workshop emerged through our own experiences, help from our mentors, wisdom from the dying, and a synthesis of the celebrations and challenges.

Many people have good intentions for getting their end-of-life papers together. I hope that you will take this opportunity to complete this sacred work in a guided, supportive group process.

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What is Earthaven? Here are some perspectives…

NikiAnne Feinberg — Mon, 19 Jul 2021 00:36:31 +0000

Transcript of What is Earthaven?

Hi. I’m Dimitri.

Hi. I’m NikkiAnne.

I’m Paul.

I’m Courtney Brooke.

And we’re at Earthaven EcoVillage.

Where we are trying to answer the question, What is Earthaven?

And the simple answer is we’re this ecovillage that’s in Southern Appalachia, on 329 acres and at the time of recording about 100 people.

But the answer is so much more complex than that.

It’s harder to just summarize in one sentence, one of the things that we’re doing here is developing a new type of culture, a new way of being, and the ways in which we relate with each other and the ways we relate with the land, the ways we relate with ourselves, the ways we relate with different generations, some of the things that kind of really stand out to me, but I’m sure maybe NikkiAnne has some things to say about that.

Yeah.

Earthaven to me is a living experiment of what it means to be human and to stay in a place, even amidst conflict, to know how to practice doing it better, dissolving conflicts and continuing the relationships in growing healthy way. And I’d also say that we’re attempting to reinhabit rural America in a way that is regenerative versus exploitive extractive.

I would say that what this experiment is about is to form an antidote to toxic civilization in the sense that when civilization reach sticking points, often people return to a more human scale form of life. Basically, you call that village scale, and that’s what this is. It’s a model village.

Yeah, I would say Earthaven is is an experiment in belonging. It’s a group of people who weren’t born in the same culture who came from all different walks and something called them back to this more place based living way. And so here we are trying to figure out what that looks like and how that might develop over the next 500 years in our own lineages and in our own psyches and and how it might be like. So we’re here trying to live in our houses made out of Earth and be humans that are made out of Earth. And remember that we belong to the Earth and, you know, figure out how to stand up straight enough and look good enough and breathe good enough and celebrate good enough to be somebody that somebody might be proud to descend from again.

So if you read the Earthaven website and you’re still curious what it feels like and looks like and is about, please check out the videos here on YouTube.

And Yeah, you’ll get a little snippets into our life, what we’re doing on the daily, what we’re aiming for, how we’re relating to each other and kind of what’s possible and what might be in some of our classes coming up, true blessings on you and your place.

Hope to connect with you in a good way.

Bye.

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Healthy Relationships

NikiAnne Feinberg — Tue, 22 Jun 2021 18:53:05 +0000

I believe many of us desire healthy, engaged, dynamic, alive, and supportive relationships.

I know that I do.

I’ve noticed that when I have a strong sense of self and can name what I want and need, things tend to go better in my relationships.

And yet, I still do those all too human things, like abandon myself or hide myself from others or live in less than my fullest truth.

But more and more, I’m beginning to understand that presence with myself and ongoing self-discovery are the recipe for having solid relationships around me.

One of the tools I use to understand myself is nonviolent communication, also called NVC. It’s an entire framework and way of seeing the world that includes understanding my own and other people’s feelings and needs. Not only how best to become aware of those things, but how to communicate about them.

That might sound easy but I think I could dedicate the rest of my life to this study and still have far to go.

This year, July 15-18, we will spend four days together geeking out in an event we call Compassion Camp because it explores the tenants of compassionate communication. Join us to explore the many ways we can approach healthy relating with self and others. For more information and to register, see our website.

Check out these photos from our last two camps in 2018 and 2019.

I hope to see you at Compassion Camp.

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My House Got Plastered!

NikiAnne Feinberg — Sat, 19 Jun 2021 18:34:26 +0000

It’s a long-time Earthaven Ecovillage tradition.

When a house is ready for its exterior plaster coating, we have a big party and invite all our friends. Dozens of Earthaven houses have gotten their pretty exterior face that way.

It makes the work much more fun and the project goes way faster.

My partner Chris and I are building a new building, which includes two residences and a community space, and the first weekend in June was our turn.

Day two of a four-day plaster party on our new house
(Chris and I will be moving into the middle floor)

We are so grateful to all the helping hands, the cheerful hearts, and the supportive backs.

We are thrilled to be nearly ready to move into our house and I look forward to giving you a tour of the whole building!

In case you’re wondering, the plaster formula is three parts sand to one part lime, with a small amount of brick dust for strength. Mix in enough water to make it workable and you’re ready to plaster.

I hope you thoroughly enjoy this Summer Solstice Weekend!

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We Learned So Much From Death

NikiAnne Feinberg — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 17:14:41 +0000

It’s hard to convey just how much we have learned from the deaths of a few of our beloved community members.

Over a two-year period from spring 2016 to spring 2018 we had six deaths in our community.

These beloveds all had home funerals and home burials. And several of them died at home after being tended to by our fellow villagers.

A few of the take-aways:

A good death is possible. In fact, it’s actually accessible.
The dying give a tremendous gift to the living before, during, and after their death.
Death brings the community together in a way nothing else does.

Our experiences were so profoundly positive, including learning to grieve our losses, that we’re offering some of our wisdom to you in July through a two-part, eight-hour workshop called End of Life Planning & Paperwork: Honoring Your Life and Your Loved Ones.

Have you thought about your death?
Are you able to talk about your death or the deaths of your loved ones?
Have you considered what you would like if you become injured or so ill that you can’t speak for yourself?
Have you thought about your wishes once you are gone?
Have you shared these desires with the people closest to you?

This workshop is a beautiful way to invest in yourself and your circle of family and friends. In fact, it may very well change your life.

Here’s what some past participants have to say about this workshop:

“This workshop offers a bounty of resources, including the participants who lend support, education and direction. It’s truly a beautiful unfolding of community in process! I feel so much more well-equipped to address the issues of approaching my end-of-life.” — Benita Silver, LCMHC

“I highly recommend this workshop to absolutely everyone. And ASAP too! None of us can know when the moment will come that we must leave our body (and life as we know it) behind forever. Being as prepared as we can be for such creates more grace and ease in one’s living.” — 2020 Workshop Participant

“The workshop was comprehensive and impressive in regard to the content shared. The workshop was as thorough as it was spacious. I highly recommend this.” — Dr David Nygaard

“I was surprised at how quickly the time went, and I felt completely engaged throughout. This workshop was organized, informative, motivating — and most of all, human.” — Kitty Schaller

We hope you’ll consider joining us in July for this heart opening, playful, important, and inspiring journey. The workshop has a sliding scale from $96 to $170.

As an incentive, we are offering our newsletter subscribers a 50% discount for this two-part workshop, making the workshop as low as $48!

To receive the discount, use coupon code ELP-EBird when you register. The discount is available through June 22.

Find more information about the workshop and register on our website.

Interview with the workshop instructor Lee Warren

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Barnyard Basketball

NikiAnne Feinberg — Sat, 12 Jun 2021 16:57:05 +0000

Thought you’d enjoy this little snippet of fun.

This is the best of us.

Taking time out for a frolic in the barnyard.

With fellow ecovillagers.

Shooting some hoops.

Monday afternoon basketball back behind the storage barn

Happy Saturday.

And have some fun!

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Meet My Friend Steve

NikiAnne Feinberg — Tue, 08 Jun 2021 17:56:42 +0000

Have you ever met one of those people that lives for the good of the whole? Someone that does everything with the collective in mind?

It’s actually very rare. And I can only think of a couple of people in my life that fit this description.

And for sure, that’s my friend Steve Torma.For his entire life, he’s been a peace, justice, and ecology educator and activist. He seeks to integrate personal and social transformation in his own life, in the communities in which he lives, and in the larger society.

We are so lucky to have him in our village. In fact, this month he’s celebrating his 25th anniversary of coming to Earthaven!

We have him to thank for spreading Nonviolent Communication (NVC) through our community and weaving it throughout our formal and informal systems. It’s hard to convey how completely NVC has improved our communication and our lives.

Steve received a small grant a few years back to spread the message of NVC and with it he started a conference based on the practice of NVC. This is our fourth year of offering Compassion Camp at Earthaven Ecovillage. It’s happening July 15-18 this year and you can find out more here.

Steve Torma speaking about Compassion Camp

I’m grateful for all the creative, dedicated, passionate, and innovative folks in the world healing their communities.

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