SOMATIC
ENCHANTMENT
SEEDS & SURVIVAL AS A PROMISE
A 10-week devotional practice of embodied relationships with deep time elders in queer and crip-centered community
Listen like the future depends on it
conspire for eco-social liberation
feel your inherent dignity & belonging
Enroll by December 30th
It is time to remember ourselves as kin to all Earthlings.
We have inherited a world shaped by capitalism, colonialism, ableism, and the illusion of separation.
These systems teach us that worth is earned through productivity, domination, and extraction.
Yet we inherently belong to something older and wiser: the web of life that is Earth.
Returning to relationship with Land is both remembrance and resistance.
It is how we reclaim the wonder of our human bodies, renew our covenant with the beyond-human world,
and practice forms of interdependence that make collective liberation possible.
Somatic Enchantment is a politicized somatic practice space for queer and crip folks seeking to root more deeply into embodied relationship with our beyond-human kin.
Over ten weeks, we gather to weave connection in the places where empire has caused severance and isolation.
Together we cultivate somatic listening, allow our imaginations to be reshaped by the living world, and practice moving toward right relationship with ourselves, one another, and the Earth.
This season, we apprentice ourselves to seeds —
who withstand long periods of harsh conditions before sprouting back into life, continuing intergenerational stories across time and space.
Against the logics of capitalism and urgency, seeds embody persistence, restfulness, ingenuity and intergenerational strategizing. We come to them not as metaphors, but as living relatives and teachers whose ways of being can help us imagine different possibilities for our queer and crip bodies, our communities, and our movements.
Through the dark months of the year, you'll deepen relationship with the seeds, learning to recognize their distinct presences, rhythms, and gifts. As your attention shifts, your own life may begin to organize around what you genuinely long for rather than what supremacy culture demands. Together, we practice remembering that we, too, carry particular wisdoms and are capacities for moving life towards more life.
Our learning unfolds through embodied practice, political reflection, ecological teachings, and sustained relationship with your seed-kin. We welcome the wisdom that queer and disabled communities already carry about adaptation, interdependence, access, grief, pleasure, and collective care, and we place those knowledges in conversation with the intelligence of the living world.
Together we ask:
Who do we become when we let the living world reorganize us?
What changes in our relationships and organizing when we remember our inherent dignity and belonging?
What can seeds teach us about surviving together under systems of domination while continuing to nourish life?
What forms of resistance, repair, and collective flourishing become possible when we learn from beings who have practiced interdependence for millennia?
In Somatic Enchantment, we will…
Let the braided wisdom of embodied ecology and queer, crip experience guide us toward more profound self-love that will ripple through our web of relations.
Root ourselves in this political moment with clear eyes and open hearts, cultivating courage and listening for what justice asks of us now.
Enter into kinship with the seeds—learning their rhythms, their language, their active resilience—and remembering ourselves as living strands in the same breathing web.
Study the deep time — the evolutionary stories, cooperative lifeways, and ancestral wisdom that seeds offer across generations.
Explore the art of shapeshifting through embodied practice, loosening inherited habits and discovering more liberatory ways of moving, sensing, and becoming together.
Practice the discipline of shared attention: tending our own inner landscapes while remaining deeply available to one another, amplifying each other's gifts, visions, and capacities for collective transformation.
Let inspiration travel beyond these gatherings—into our friendships, families, neighborhoods, movements, and daily acts of resistance and repair—so that what takes root here can flower wherever we belong.
What’s Included
- 20 hours of live Somatic Practice
- Copies of Mini-Lecture Slides & Recordings
- Reading and Listening Materials
- Guidebook including Prompts & Practices for each week
- Signal Group for Ongoing Peer Connection
- Free Participation in Embodied Relations
How It Works
We meet every Friday for 2 hours on Zoom. Over the course of ten weeks, we learn the evolutionary history and life ways of seeds. We use certain somatic practices to guide you into deeper attunement with yourself and the seeds, and other practices to try on relational practices inspired by the cooperative life ways of seeds. Between sessions, you have optional reading and listening materials to get nerdy with, you can refer to a guidebook for practices inspiration & integration prompts, and reach your community of peers through a fully-encrypted Signal chat.
Sliding Scale Rates
-$65 - $95 / week
-Select a Payment Plan that suits you
- Rates and plans inaccessible? Follow link on sign up page to submit a request for a rate that works for you.
Enroll by December 30th
Where We’re Going
Week 1: Opening & Introductions
Week 2: Lineage of Seeds
Week 3: Humans & Seeds
Week 4: Memories & Archives
Week 5: Dispersal through Space
Week 6: Dormancy & Germination
Week 7: Plants & Their Seeds
Week 8: Interspecies Independence
Week 9: Spring Awakening
Week 10: Survival as a Promise (Integration & Closing)
When & Where We Meet
Fridays, January 8 - March 12
12:30pm - 2:30pm Central Time
On Zoom
Check your local time zone here.
Eris Johnson (they/them)
Friends,
This is an invitation to renew your relationship with your body, your bloodlines and with the living world.
We will all arrive in Somatic Enchantment in our own unique body spirits, learning how to best embody our particular role in our lineages and relationship to Earth.
I’ll tell you a bit of my story for the sake of connection while you are here.
I come to this work as a neuroqueer, non-binary, chronically ill & dynamically disabled person. I am a descendent of European colonial settlers on Turtle Island committed to both material and spiritual reparations, Land Back and indigenous sovereignty.
I am finding my way through the same world you are. It is a world that enacts violence in service of domination, and conditions us to reproduce oppressive and flattened ways of being human. A world that treats both people and the Earth as disposable when we are, in fact, sacred. And yet, it is also a world overflowing with wonder: a world that has been co-created over billions of years by elements and innumerable renditions of life interacting with one another. Every time I slow to notice, I encounter hope.
The overculture of humanity taught me my body was wrong. It tried to funnel my attention towards self-hate. It fed my fixations on dimming my truth to satisfy a patriarchal gaze in exchange for safety, dignity and belonging. Like many of us, I felt trapped by my own identities while living through systemic neglect and abuse. Eventually, I turned toward plants—at first for medicine and medical autonomy, and then for companionship. When I opened my consciousness to beyond-human kin, I found myself in community with innovative and collaborative wayfinders everywhere. They range from the tallest trees to the micro-organisms living under a canopy of moss at my feet, to the stories kept in seeds, to the bacteria eating rock in the depths of the Earth. Through relationship with the beyond-human world, I began to remember other ways of relating to my body: not as faulty, but as awe-inducing, powerful, purpose-filled and desired by the world. Beyond-human kin have become some of my central teachers, elders, and friends. They show up as an unwavering support system. With them, I feel the strong and consistent pulse of aliveness moving us toward eco-social liberation.
Somatic Enchantment is born from these experiences. It is an offering to find the wonder of yourself, experience safety, belonging and dignity in relationship to your vast web of relations, and to do it in community with other sweet humans.
How do you imagine seeds might best accompany you in this time?
What would become possible if they remind you how to dream?
I’m excited to find out - it’s an honor to be in exploration with you.
With care,
Eris
It’s all connected.
Frequently Asked Questions
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This is a queer and crip-centered group, rooted in queer and crip politics. Open to allies, too.
Everyone in Somatics Enchantment recognizes that the eco-social polycrises we face are rooted in cultures of separation, extraction, and human exceptionalism, and are drawn to practices that cultivate reciprocity, interdependence, and right relationship with beyond-human kin. Many come wanting to remember themselves as animal bodies, to be transformed by the intelligence of seeds and other beings, to re-member the human role amidst Earthlings, and to reclaim capacities for wonder, humility, and deep listening that overculture discourages. They want to engage complexity in place of spiritual bypassing, and trust that meaningful change emerges through devotional relationships. They are nourished by ancestral, ecological, and deep-time perspectives that situate human life within Earth's larger story. This group is for people who believe that learning to decenter the human—and the individual self—is a practice of cultural transformation that opens new possibilities for eco-social collective liberation. -
Groups meet once a week on Zoom for 2 hours. Each session has a built in 10-minute bio break (and folks are encouraged to tend to bio needs anytime).
Each session begins with gentle group check-ins to help us arrive together, connect, and attune to access needs. From there, participants are invited into pair or small-group shares with a few warm-up questions connected to the week’s theme.
We then gather as a full group to explore the theme more deeply and learn a related somatic practice. The remainder of the session is dedicated to practicing together, noticing what emerges, and reflecting on our experiences. Practices will range from solo, paired and group practices – all with the intention of bringing more of our embodied truths to the surface.
Practices are designed with multiple access points and levels of participation so that folks can engage in ways that feel supportive and sustainable for their bodies and nervous systems. Folks always have the option of being on or off camera.
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All levels of experience are welcome. Practices and frameworks are explained clearly enough for beginners to engage fully. Experienced somatic practitioners also benefit, as the group offers a unique container for exploring somaticized interspecies kinship.
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This group is for anyone developing their queer politic. Beyond that, all identities are welcome.
Typically, around 95% of people do identify as queer, and around 75% of participants are gender-expansive or gender-questioning.
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It’s perfectly okay if you miss a session.
The mini-lecture portions are recorded and shared out to the group along with corresponding slides and notes.
To honor confidentiality and create a safe space for everyone, the practice portions of sessions are not recorded.
Sometimes folks will reach out to people in their cohort to arrange practice time together between group practice sessions. -
Accessibility poses the question of how we move together without leaving anyone behind. I aim to honor you in your wholeness, attune to the complexity of group access needs, and be in a collective process of meeting as many needs as possible.
As a starting point, you can expect:
Attention to the access points that you mention in your enrollment forms
Regular opportunity to update access needs with me and/or the rest of the group
An emphasis on invitation & consent to practice. Nobody is obligated to do anything!
Various access points to every practice
Captions enabled on Zoom
Agendas, instructions and other essential information stated out loud and written in the chat
Encouragement to join in your wholeness and tend to yourself & loved ones as needed
Emails with recording clips to support cohesion & your integration
Opportunity of anonymous feedback mid-way through the series
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Yes! There is a sliding scale and payment plan options are available.
There are three payment tiers, and corresponding payment plans available. If none of the options are accessible to you, there is a link to request pay-what-you-can rates on the sign up page.
Tiers:
$950 (1 installment, 2 installments of $475, or 10 weekly installments of $95)
$800 (1 installment, installments of $400, or 10 weekly installments of $80)
$650 (1 installment, 2 installments of $325, or 10 weekly installments of $65)
The intention of this system is to increase accessibility to you all while generating the income needed to keep the program running. Of course, this relies on each person’s integrity when selecting their rate. Please refer to this page if you would like some guidance in discerning the tier that is right for you.The payment plans are there to support those of you who can afford a higher rate, but are not able to pay in one lump sum.