Blue Heron Circle

 Please note: Registration for our Sunday group is currently closed. We will be completing our 6-month practice intensive on July 27, 2025. New members are then welcomed to join again on a rolling basis in August. Get on our list if you want to receive a reminder about this.

About Blue Heron Circle

Blue Heron Circle is a practice community that exists to support the process of living more and more from true nature - of living more and more as ourselves.

Becoming ourselves is essentially a process of de-conditioning. It is the great unwinding. This unwinding is basically a two-step movement.

On the one hand, we find what is actually reliable in us. We find what is beyond the conditioned mind. Beyond all the ways we’re dysfunctionally programmed to cope, survive and act. We first taste - and then eventually abide in - an inner knowing that actually knows what is correct for us in any given moment or situation.

This inner guidance system is discovered through awareness. Through the repeated willingness to ground, observe and quietly wait for the truth that manifests in our Being. Through the ongoing cultivation of a deep, profound inner listening. As this process catches fire, all forms of resistance in life decrease.

At the same time, the conditioned mind’s control over the system (and the collective) is vast and multifaceted. The de-conditioning process is thus also a grand tour through all the gross and subtle wounds, fixations, control mechanisms, justifications, compensations, survival strategies and energetic “stuff” that has been accumulated over the course of our journey (and at the transpersonal level, everyone’s journey).

This tour is not some excavation process that we “manage.” Our role in it is to completely meet and honor what simply appears - the continual, incomprehensible flow of moment-by-moment experience (arising & passing).

In this intimate meeting, this surrendered knowing, there lies the possibility of transformation. A great healing. An honoring of all the parts that were confused and hurt. All of them are welcomed home. All of them are slowly and completely alchemized by presence-awareness.

Unwinding is an incredibly subtle and multifaceted art that benefits enormously from support and selective outside input. It is also a highly individualized process, which makes creating supportive group environments for it challenging.

Facets of Practice

In this group, and in our approach to psychospiritual work in general, the following facets of practice are emphasized:

Building the container: developing relaxed, stable, & clear contact with the felt-sense.

• By felt-sense, we mean direct contact with what can be felt and experienced in the body/mind. In the broadest sense, it includes everything in the somatic/sensate realm, all the way to the experience of the subtle field of energy that animates the body. 

• We view fluency in the language of felt-sense experience not simply as a “beginner’s practice” but as a slow, rhythmic, life-long cultivation. All spiritual states are contained within it, and there is no end to the subtleties and mysteries that emerge from it. 

• Formally, this cultivation happens both in stillness and in movement. Our approach de-emphasizes anything that sets up inhibitory controls on the body, particularly in the initial stages of practice.. This includes the mandate to use specific postures and follow specific prescriptive cues. If you are serious, you will need to spend a lot of time here, but in a very relaxed and permissive way! 

• We view the body, in its healthy and integrated state, as a conduit for energy and information. Being a conduit implies the ability - developed over time - to “tolerate” different kinds of movement (emotions, sensations and energies). The gradual expansion of the ability to feel without having to suppress or dissociate is foundational to all forms of healing work and to the embodiment of true nature in form.

• For however simple “making direct contact with your experience” seems on the surface, it can take a surprising amount of trial and error to find the “authentic signature” of it. Often we have to wade through the subtle ways different parts of the ego-structure blend with and commandeer the process. Ultimately, the simplicity and power of unconditioned awareness is discovered deep in the laboratory of our own experience.

Developing inner authority: the ability to listen directly to true nature instead of the conditioned mind.

• As we return our spirit and energy to the body, we set the foundation to transform the mind. Rather than the conditioned mind using thought in a compulsive way to “figure out” what to do in our life, we open the potential for information to flow in exactly the opposite direction. With the energy and intelligence of true nature flowing freely in the body, we begin to experiment with letting that energy “translate” into the mind via thoughts of clarity and inner images. 

• This process, when practiced consistently, restores the mind to the creative channel it was designed to be. This is the dawning of what we call “wisdom-intelligence.” Wisdom-intelligence is the (initially rather startling) teaching that you have access to a flow of innately perfected and attuned information about the unfolding of all aspects of your life embedded in your body and energy system. Put simply, if you listen, you can know what to do in all states and situations. 

• Conditioned strategies - beliefs, points of view, moods, compulsions, fixations, and other ways of being developed by the ego to defend, manage and cope  - are what covers over wisdom-intelligence. Conditioned states and points of view are rooted in our developmental, lineage and collective psychology as well as in our own deep karmic past.

• We teach the development of intuitive awareness as essentially a “transfer of authority” from the conditioned mind to wisdom-intelligence. This transfer retrieves both our inner power and our sovereignty over our own life and decision-making.  

• The main practice for developing “the muscle” of inner listening is inquiry. Inquiry is asking questions directly to true nature and learning to distill the difference between its response and the noise, justifications, and manipulations of the conditioned thinking mind. While murky and tentative at first, wisdom and delusion are different in every conceivable way and leave completely different signatures at every level of the body/mind.

Seeing the classroom clearly: developing a mature and sober understanding of our specific conditioned patterns, wounds & fixations

• As the practice of inquiry catches fire, one of things we naturally begin to notice is unevenness. Unevenness is the realization that we are not uniformly unconscious or conditioned across all facets of our life. We might have areas of our life where we are highly conscious, integrated and responsive alongside other areas where we are deeply regressed, immature and avoidant.

• As we observe these facets more closely, the sense of what our specific spiritual classroom is begins to emerge organically. Our path is not a random collection of “triggers,” it is a coherent, interconnected curriculum that can be observed and sensed at deeper and deeper levels over time. 

• An intimate understanding of this curriculum allows us to drop below homogenized psychological and spiritual teachings. For instance, through sustained self-observation, we might notice that we subtly use certain teachings to reinforce an identity as “a really caring and compassionate person.” We might further see that this activity is a rapid, automatic habit deployed by the conditioned self to prevent us from feeling the fact that we are quite angry and that we have a passive-aggressive relationship with most of the major figures in our life. 

• Thus, as our unique classroom comes into full view, we develop subtler and subtler levels of sensitivity to the ways the conditioned self blends into our intentions, actions and relationships. We become comfortable and interested in looking in all the places we wouldn’t look before - the places nobody else can see unless they are extremely energetically sensitive or know us extremely well. 

Being honest about the limitations of the ego structure: gaining comfort with receptivity, surrender, devotion and refuge.

• Over time, this sustained honesty with the specifics of our conditioning results in a genuine energy of humbleness. The mind is such a dumpster fire if we are honest! Nobody is spared this realization if they are serious about looking!!

• Resting nakedly in front of the full force of your ugliest habits opens the way for one of the most neglected spiritual resources to emerge - surrender.

• In our work, the function of surrender is to support the ego-structure in seeing - over and over again in many different states and situations - that it is not responsible for (and therefore cannot in any way manage) the process of healing and transformation.

• We use a variety of tools drawn from psychic and shamanic work to support the unburdening of the ego in this way. What all of them have in common is a transmission to the ego that, despite the years and lifetimes it has spent in a compartmentalized state,  it is in fact not alone and without support. 

• On the contrary, by having the courage to admit, over and over again, that it doesn’t actually know how to decide, or what to do, or how to act, it opens the way for communicating with that which does. As the ego structure is able to witness true nature communicate through the intuition consistently over time, very deep forms of fear that were totally inaccessible before can begin to be worked with consciously and brought to rest.

Being at ease in the river: savoring enoughness and completion amidst perpetual change and transformation.

• The repair of Self-Trust, and the gradual surrender of the ego to the Self, changes our inner process in concrete ways.

• The conditioned self often imagines spiritual freedom as some kind of cosmic eject button from an existence it is basically burdened and exhausted by. Often, one can sense a regressed quality to this kind of desire. It is like a younger aspect of us made a mess of our life in some way, but (being cut off from true nature), has no idea how to clean the mess up. Instead of admitting this, all the angst and fear get displaced into a longing for some kind of spiritual experience that will magically cause us to never have to deal with any of it.

• Real spiritual maturity, arrived at through sustained embodiment work, dissolves this dilemma and replaces it with a profound sense that form (existence itself) is not a burden or a problem. 

• This is not the end of all conditioned arisings. Rather, it is a pivot on the path - the dawning of a maturity that knows that, no matter what arises in our experience, true nature will give us the precisely appropriate resources to meet it. Even in our darkest dark, the still, small voice is there, whispering, gently contacting us and giving us the next “breadcrumb.”

• As this realization sets in, the sense that we are “slogging through wounds” that have no resolution shifts into a sense of the path as a kind of river. The river has boulders! But it is also basically wonderful. 

• In this awe and wonder, we finally stop withholding the sense of completion from ourselves. We allow every cell and particle in our being to say “this is it, this is enough.” We allow the aliveness that we fundamentally are to shine forth in spontaneous, beautiful and totally uninhibited ways. There is something so intimate and familiar in this shining forth, and at the same time, it is not what we imagined at all.