We live in a time in which humanity is drowning in the deep waters of the collective mistakes of the dominant systems of power-over and systemic refusal to learn from those mistakes. We are dedicated to personal transformation that is an expression of social and environmental activism so that it does not create a new version of the old problems. Our online school is a direct response to our collective need for skills to dismantle oppressive systems, learn from our different mistakes, and risk relationships of responsibility, power, and intimacy.
Direct action for dismantling oppressive systems begins internally with Energy Body Mastery (EBM) and Energy Body Clearing (EBC). These classes, taught by Langston Kahn, are BIPOC- centered and lead, while being open to all students in our global community.
Mastery of these skills can be moved externally into training to teach these skills in your organizations and social movement spaces with EBM and EBC Teacher Training.
For those interested in history, ancestry, and deeper energetic work, we focus on skillfully freeing the unwell dead at the root of today’s ugly repetition of racism, fascism, sexism, and the authoritarian disregard for the environmental and economic well-being of all life, we offer Dismantling Collective Patterns, Part 3 of the Healing the Ancestral Lines Series.
https://whyshamanismnow.com/2018/03/moving-into-the-deep-water/
Langston Kahn writes, “I feel like Christina and Last Mask Center offer the “frog DNA” skills (to use Jurassic Park reference) that help us fill in the gaps many of us hold as contemporary people trying to reclaim animist ancestral life ways. These skills allow us to approach our ancestral traditions and live them closer to the standard our pre-contact, indigenous ancestors lived them.
Many other schools — even indigenous traditions I have trained in — didn’t offer the skills to help me examine and transform the extractive preset we are socialized into by capitalism. As a result, even when we were learning important skills and perspectives, they just got pasted over the capitalist cosmology we held. Those older beliefs continued to inform our actions and sense of what’s possible in present time.
These teachings and skills help us to release some of the brittleness our culture teaches us to hold around difference. Shared use of LMC skills allow us to forge relationships of trust across difference with healthy room for generative conflict and continual upgrades of our capacity to honor each of our unique perspectives. Being part of this community of practice gives me hope that we might still create a future for the next generations that we are proud to offer them.”
"The Last Mask Center teachings, cosmology, and a community allows me to steadily live into the process of decolonization necessary in these times if we want to create something different than the culture of extraction we have been given."
— Langston Kahn
At last Mask Center, we believe that life is innately valuable and inextricably interconnected.
That interconnection is held together by the ever constant and changing movement and pulse of greater than human love. And it takes emotional maturity and spiritual adulthood for humans to be part of that flow and not the “hairball in the pipes” that we have become.
Our community is structured by the deep mastery and sustainable sharing of The Cycle of Transformation Teachings, a set of teachings that guide people from the Broken Path into relearning indigenous thinking and accessing multiple ways of knowing.
The Spirit, Emotional, and Mental Knowing are rooted in the beauty and complexity of Earth centered traditions and today’s science. The Body Knowing, both physical and energetic, is rooted in relationships and systems of relationships needed for sustainable well-being for all life. The Center Knowing is rooted in pattern recognition and finding solutions to complex problems.
We believe that nothing—not skin color, religious affiliation, sex, gender expression, ability, or financial class— justifies creating separation mythologies that place one person or group of people over another or people over the environment. We are a single human family that must do the internal work to purge the conscious and unconsciously held divisive narratives.
Our story for the world is centered in the truth that each person carries a unique genius that is both a powerful gift and the responsibility to give it. And that to give this gift we must learn to hold dynamic tensions and use the true power that moves through complimentary dualism in our world.
Our gift to our world is practitioners skilled in authentic, non-traditional rituals and ceremony to tend the Four Gates of Life and Death: Birth, the threshold from childhood to adulthood, Eldership, and Death. We tend these Gates with support of our well Ancestors and blessing of our Descendants so that we, The Living, can mend, create and celebrate a just, sustainable, and inspiring new world.