Over the last few months I’ve had the deep honor and pleasure of being included in the collaborative process of co-designing and co-facilitating an incredible gathering of humans and more-than-humans in the mountains of Colombia. Micelio del Alma (The Soul’s Mycelium) came to life through the powerful partnership between Reconectando and ECCO, two organizations that have devoted years of deep-hearted work and have invaluable experience bringing Work That Reconnects and other forms of collective healing to territories across Colombia.
See more Soul’s Mycelium photos and reels on Instagram at @rconectando and @eccoplan
This gathering of 110 humans (and countless more-than-humans) grew out of the fertile soil of this deep work and was nourished by relationships of trust and the shared commitment to life of people from throughout Colombia, Latin America, United States, Canada, Europe and Palestine. The design team brought together brilliant co-facilitators from several different organizations and paths, including WTR, Deep Ecology, Collective Trauma, Internal Family Systems, Nature-based Art and Movement, Theater of the Oppressed, Theory U and more.
We came together as a mycelial response from the living world. A strong calling moved through each of the facilitators and participants, animating us to move toward each other and into this shared process of facing and tending to the collective trauma caused by the wounds of separation. From beginning to end, the process was alive with generosity, warmth and emergence.
During our time together in the mountainous fog forest, we moved through the WTR Spiral over five days with the following themes…
Day 1 & 2: Gratitude/Living Systems: We explore the wisdom of nature as a guide for healing fragmentation and disconnection.
Being together in physical presence to share and to actively listen to (and through) the Earth, allowed us to work on reweaving living relationships of reciprocity, regeneration, and collective care. These essential relationships have been continuously damaged by the project of modernity through intergenerational violence, trauma, colonization, genocide, and the overwhelming rise of techno-oligarchical fascism. In this gathering, we moved beyond the abstractions of these issues – that often lead to more disconnection. Instead, we came together across cultural differences as members of the Family of Life to explore and experience the wisdom of Life in a visceral, embodied way, in deep reverence, to align ourselves and be guided by the dance of the living world.
Day 3: Honoring Our Pain/Healing Collective Trauma: We reflect on trauma as a shared wound and how to heal it in the more-than-human community
In this sacred gathering we came together to tend to our personal and collective wounds with compassion for each other and ourselves, as we faced the deep pain and harm that pervades our collective modern experience. We approached each other with tender courage to bring the healing balm of loving presence to the tendrils of connection that have been left raw by harms caused by societies based on the delusion of separation. We coaxed from hiding the parts of ourselves that have been cast into exile by the regimes of violence that have been infiltrating our societies for centuries. We discovered that, bound up in our collective trauma is our divinely bestowed power: the power of the wisdom and fierce tenacity of the long, beautiful, ongoingness of Life that moves toward more Life. It desperately wants to flow through us as it does with all our fellow life forms.
Day 4: Seeing with New and Ancient Eyes/Ritual: The power of ritual in the face of polycrisis: We integrate ancestral wisdoms, ecofeminism and ecomasuculinity to transform the pain into regenerative action.
Ritual is an essential human practice that is deeply woven into the design of who we are and what our role is as humans within the Family of Life. For countless generations humans have come together with each other, the land they live with and their more-than-human kin to commune with the sacred lifegiving forces of our world – to listen, to feed, to praise, to inquire, to dance and sing and move our bodies in ways that help to reweave the tattered fabric of life and support collective wellbeing. Our time together was full of prayer, conjuring, communing with the sacred, grieving, praise, music and dance! As we engaged in this way, in authentic ritual of care of Life on the precipice of the Great Unraveling, we began to untwist the knots of disconnection caused by modernity and open the channels for Life to flow through us again, and to guide us into regenerative empowered action on behalf of Life.
Day 5: Going Forth/Regeneration: Collective Regeneration and Healing: We develop proposals for revitalizing the web of life with tangible actions.
Before parting ways, we prayed with the forest, sang with the river and ritually blessed the youth, mentors and elders among us for our paths ahead. As Miceliadores (or Mycelial Agents) as we affectionately call ourselves, we are servants of Life. Although it can be deeply enjoyable and fulfilling to gather with our fellow humans in communal ritual and it can indeed contribute to our personal healing journeys, that isn’t what ritual is for and it isn’t why we gathered. We came together from across the planet, carrying our tattered hearts and our good work, to feed Life and to tune ourselves like instruments through our collective resonance so we could receive guidance directly from the living Earth. She showed us how essential each one of us is in this glorious Interbeing, and She strengthened our resolve to keep on caring and stay committed to the work we’re doing in service of Life.
I offer deep heartfelt gratitude to Hector Aristizabal, Liliana Moreno and the rest of the heart team of Reconectando, Claudia González of ECCO, the wonderful team of co-facilitators from many countries and projects and the semillas of Reconectando who are doing truly powerful work in their territories across Colombia. Thank you for serving Life!
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If you’re interested in experiencing a similarly deep WTR immersion, I highly recommend participating in Interconnected Roots in Himachal Pradesh, India from October 2-8, 2025 – a collaboration between Hector Aristizábal of Reconectando and Arundhati Samudra of Kalaa Dhari
