The Cycle Teachings provide a radical roadmap for breaking free from the extractive models of the dominant culture and stepping into a truly regenerative relationship with Life.
This 5-year cycle of 9 in-person, week-long retreats for our experienced students to step fully into this emergent tradition embodying an animist lifeway and actively engaging the Dreaming by forging an effective working relationship with Spirit. In the Cycle Teachings you will engage spiritual technologies such as dance, trance, ritual, mask work, talismanic art creation to power your transformational work, embody and learn from the four Archetypal teachers, and renew your relationship with your authenticity and the courage to embody it in all aspects of your life.
"The Cycle of Transformation—Reweaving Self into the Patterns of Nature with the Wild Power of Fierce, Unyielding Love."
From founder Christina Pratt:
I offered Masks of Illusion and the Authentic Self in an extended, week-long, in-person retreat in Hawaii in 1990. The teachings offered were drawn from messages I received from Owl in my shamanic journey-based working relationship. These “messages” from Owl stood out from my personal messages. As I learned through trial and error to craft better questions, accurately interpret my journeys, and apply the answers to my life, I began to see the messages that were more enduring, or meta, or simply not really just for me. Eventually, I got a painful shove to “offer these now,” and I took the risk and booked Kalani Honua on the Big Island of Hawaii.
Masks of Illusion, now a refined and focused 5-day in-person retreat, remains the foundation of The Cycle of Transformation Teachings, or Cycle Teachings. This first year strips cultural conditioning, dysfunctional relationship patterns, and coping mechanisms through elemental rituals and restores right relationship with one’s authentic, animist self. It took several years offering Masks of Illusion before we had enough people through year one to offer year two, Dance of the Shadow Self, also offered first in Hawaii.
Dance of the Shadow Self moves from the wisdom of the Healer, Death, and the Body to the wisdom of the Warrior, Crazy Woman, and the Emotional body. Shadow Selves are rescued and transformed through elemental rituals and the Spirit of Dance. After many more years of Masks of Illusion and Dance of the Shadow Self, we gathered enough people to offer year three, The Sacred Syzygy: Dances with Power. This work confronts the shallow contemporary cultural assumptions about power, gender, and the divine with the wisdom of the Teacher, Trickster, and Spirit. This requires choosing life in ways that center restorative relationship with all things and are completely incompatible with colonization and transactional thinking.
In 2000, we were finally able to offer year four, Laying the Bones to Rest, and felt the cycle click into wholeness. In year four, we draw on the wisdom of the Visionary and train the mental wisdom body to engage with the greater world’s dreaming. By taking the time to skillfully move our unwell ancestors on to the ancestral realm, we are freed to learn to discern truth and the signal in the noise.
Teaching each retreat each year grew me up for the next year. The repetition of the retreats took me deeper and deeper into understanding the transformational process as “life processes” that are part of an archetype’s teaching for humans.
With the first offering of Laying the Bones to Rest, I took a step back and said “shit! This is what we are doing?” Through these teachings spirit offered us the transformational power of clearing the way for ancestors to move on and reconnecting our capacity as dreamers with The Dreaming. With this clarity, I realized that I needed to stop allowing people to do whatever they want whenever they want, however they want, which was the typical “whiteness” spiritual consumption at that time. These teachings were their own spirit. We needed to step into right relationship with that spirit and learn all four years as a lineage of teachings.
For this to happen, I had to offer the teachings in a way that was 100% consistent with the teachings. I learned from spirit and much more trial and error, that this meant offering them in community. In 2008, the first iteration of the Cycle Community was born. This community exists to keep the teachings in the world by offering the teachings through the four-year sequence of live, in-person retreats and applying the teachings in life, every day.
Through the creation of the Cycle Community, as guided by the teachings, we came to
understand that not only are The Teachings themselves a spirit, but the Cycle Community is a spirit. And then, in our first community Conjure Dance Ritual that we engaged in to reconnect with the vision of that community spirit, we discovered that the Cosmology that holds the Teachings and the Community is a spirit. They are alive, and we are continuing to learn from them. We tend them through our embodied relationship with them and our willingness to apply them to our contemporary lives.
The Cycle Teachings provide a radical roadmap for breaking free from the extractive models of the dominant culture and stepping into a truly regenerative relationship with Life.
Vision + Mission
As a vital, resource-rich community, the Cycle Community tends the gates of life as service to the larger community. The hemorrhaging of lifeforce and profoundly selfish decision making of dominant soci-religious culture persists by destroying our freedom and ability to become a people who can tend the gates of birth, death, and the initiation into adulthood.
Our Cosmology is expressed through stories that remind us where we are, where we came from, why we are here, and where we are going. With this cosmology, the teachings, and strong, working relationships with spirit Cycle Community members are positioned to offer services to tend birth and the welcoming of new spirits into life. Where there is birth trauma, the souls of the infant and birthing mother can be tended and the caregiver supported so that the first 18 months of life support healthy, secure bonding. This relationship is then a healthy, resilient foundation for all other relationships through life.
Our teachings define spiritual adulthood and help us to get there, even from our broken path. As adults, we can work with spirit to craft initiatory rituals for our teens, provoking their movement into agency, a working relationship with spirit they are now responsible for tending, and an adult relationship with all life, human and more than human.
Our older members share their teaching stories and unique life gifts as part of our ritual process for honoring our elders. With elders acknowledged and respected, we are better able to tend the gate of death and passing into the ancestral realm. For those who died without eldering well and find themselves stuck, we offer ancestral healing as a service to assist families in aligning and tuning their ancestral lines to support the living in the creativity and innovation necessary to move with the crisis of our time and create a future of restored right relationship for our descendants with all life.