Welcome to the Last Mask Center

I found my first love at 5 years old when my mother placed me in dance class to save her sanity. Too young to articulate any of this awareness at the time, I can still access the body memory of finding safety and freedom in dance. Dancing taught me to live in my body in spite of the constant pressure from the dominant sexist culture to abdicate and vacate my body for boys and men. The discipline and repetition of ballet taught embodiment through movement, challenged me to find my center, again and again, and to extend my sense of alignment along my own central line. This orientation in physical space allowed me to develop excellent coping strategies for my wildly dyslexic mind that repurposed easily as navigation in alternate states of consciousness. Dance still brings joy, and this love only deepens with the years.

My next teacher was science. I find the answers to questions like “how does the world work?” and “why am I here?” dictated by organized religion, colonizer culture, and unhinged capitalism heartbreakingly deficient, even as a child. I figure the climate crisis proves that these answers are at best wrong and at worst greedy, intentional lies. But here we are. In the 1980s, I studied science, specifically chemistry, to learn how the world works. Science taught me how to use my mind, to question, and how to test a hypothesis. It confirmed that life on earth is inherently magical, elegant, and at times unknowable.

While I was learning to use my mind, I was simultaneously learning to question all I had been taught, question my thinking, my assumptions, and my reality. I was a distracted and argumentative student in an informal apprenticeship with master diviner, author, and artist William Douglas Horden. His enduring trickster impact taught me about discomfort and the hazard of certainty. During this time, I was a somewhat more disciplined student of Phyllis Pay, a master teacher of intuitive energy processing and energy body clearing. She presented the hypothesis that we have one true responsibility: the development of our souls. Her teaching became the foundation for The Basics of Humaning Well.

These loves and teachers and choosing to return to dancing changed my relationship with my own brokenness. Working with Life as the Teacher and my odd assortment of skills and practices, I disentangled myself from old mental and emotional trauma-based patterns. That commitment to liberation shoved me through a threshold into a kind of adulthood that was formed just enough to ground a spontaneous, 3-day initiatory experience while living in Manhattan. I did not know what happened at the time. I did know it was the single most significant thing that would ever happen to me and that the me on the other side of it was a better human.

Initiation is a specific transformation. It left me with clarity and questions. I traveled to learn from practitioners working in their traditional cultures to understand the questions they asked, how they asked, and how they worked those responses with their people. I am deeply grateful to the Shuar, Nepalese, Tibetan, Dagara, Zulu, and Quechua shamans and the many ways that they shared their practices, work, and the philosophies that interweave it all. While I do not practice or teach any of these traditions, they all helped me to understand what it means to enter into a working relationship with spirit.

I understand more after researching and writing An Encyclopedia of Shamanism. Colonization undermines initiation by design and creates ugly, broken cultures with a complete lack of functional community, true elders, and regenerative relationship with the land and planet. Today, my healing and teaching are offered to honor my teachers, my loves, and the land. My prayer is that it moves us toward the restoration of true animist community, elders, Ancestors, and regenerative relationship with the land.