Humans seek spiritual connection and personal transformation through Dharma work. This work is most powerful when done as a community practice.

Earth Eagle Somatics is proud to offer SoulSchool courses for the practitioner who is an everyday householder. These courses are designed to help everyday folx learn, practice, integrate, and reflect into a more soulful, spiritual daily existence. SoulSchool courses include somatic practices, energetic tools,  sacred texts, warm data, and ceremony/ritual to help us hold the small, everyday moments of our lives as learning spaces where transformation is possible.

This year in EES SoulSchool Living Liberation Book Club, WE READ 984 PAGES OF LIBERATION TEXT:

All About Love by bell hooks

Poet Warrior by Joy Harjo

The New Saints by Lama Rod Owens

Loving Corrections by adrienne marie brown

That's almost a thousand pages of liberation work between four extraordinary teachers — worth celebrating.

The Common Threads

Reading these four side-by-side, several through-lines emerge that make this a remarkably coherent syllabus:

Love as a discipline, not a feeling. hooks famously redefines love as a verb — care, commitment, trust, accountability. brown extends that into "loving corrections," where critique itself becomes an act of love. Owens frames compassion as practice, not posture. Harjo treats poetry, ancestry, and witness as love made tangible. All four reject the sentimental version of love in favor of one that demands something of you.

Liberation is inseparable from interior work. Every author insists you can't free anyone — or build movements that hold — without facing your own grief, rage, conditioning, and brokenness first. Owens's "broken hearts to spiritual warriors," Harjo's reckoning with intergenerational trauma, hooks's interrogation of her own romantic patterns, brown's call to apologize and be accountable — all of it points inward as the precondition for outward work.

Ancestors, lineage, and inheritance. Harjo's Mvskoke ancestors, hooks's Black Southern roots, Owens's "Black Buddhist Southern Queen" identity drawing from both Tibetan and Black liberation lineages, brown's debt to Octavia Butler and Black feminist tradition — none of these writers think of themselves as solo voices. They are in conversation with the people who came before.

Accountability over cancellation. brown's framework explicitly, but Owens and hooks too: how do we hold each other when we cause harm, without throwing each other away? This is the unglamorous practice underneath the politics.

The body and the spirit aren't separate from the political. Owens's somatic practices, Harjo's poems as ceremony, hooks's argument that healing is justice work, brown's emergent strategy rooted in natural systems — all four refuse the split between mystical and material.

Joy and pleasure as resistance. Not bypass, not avoidance — but joy as evidence that another world is already alive in us.

The most important consideration to ACTIVE reading, is to ask: What am I  learning from these texts and their authors, and how can I apply this learning?

Here are some ideas for us as individuals: 

• A "loving correction" letter. Following brown, write one to yourself, or to someone you've been in conflict with. Don't necessarily send it — the writing is the practice. Notice what shifts.
• Daily 10-minute somatic practice from Owens. Pick one (tonglen, breath, body scan) and stay with it through the summer. Spiritual warrior-hood is built in reps.
• A bell hooks love audit. Take her seven ingredients (care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, open communication) and rate one relationship — including the one with yourself — each week. Where's the gap? What's one small repair?
• Poet Warrior journal. Harjo listens to owls, plants, dreams. Keep a small notebook of what the non-human, Second World is saying to you this summer. Read it back in a few months from now.

GUTS Embodied Writing Retreats: A Year in Reflection

Story is medicine. Write from your body. Speak from your bones.

 What is GUTS?

GUTS is a year-long embodied writing journey at Earth Eagle Somatics — two semesters, eight full-day retreats, sixty-four hours of practice. It is for writers who suspect their best work lives below the neck, and for non-writers who carry stories that have been waiting for a body-honoring way to come through.

There is no prerequisite. No writing experience required. What is required is a willingness to listen — to body, to land, to lineage — and to let the writing follow.

The shape of a year?

The full GUTS year is a spiral in two motions. The fall semester moves inward and downward: reclamation. The spring semester moves outward and forward: orientation and action. Together they trace a complete cycle — remember, then respond.

Fall 2025: She Who Writes the Bones

Inspired by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés's Women Who Run with the Wolves, the fall arc was a four-session descent through ritual, ancestral remembering, and the wild woman archetypes. Each session opened a different door:

• Bone Gathering — Reclaiming what was lost
• Descent and Return — Shadow work and creative rebirth
• Ancestral Listening — Reconnecting to lineage and inner knowing
• Story as Spellcraft — Embodied voice and creative sovereignty

Spring 2026: The Council at the Crossroads

The spring arc was rooted in Indigenous teachings, ancestral repair, and the Wild & Wise Woman archetypes. Structured around the four directions, it turned the reclaimed self toward responsibility and liberatory creativity:

• East — The Doorway of Dawn: Beginning again and listening for the inner teacher
• South — The Hearth of the Heart: Healing the body and holding the little ones
• West — The Thunder Path: Ancestral guidance, grief, and the natural world
• North — The Quiet Star Road: Taking action and decolonizing the story

What does a GUTS day look like?

Each retreat runs 9am to 5pm and is built around a rhythm that lets the body lead and the writing follow.

• 9–12  ·  Morning instruction and embodied writing ceremony — ceremonial yoga, breathwork, and guided writing labs
• 12–1  ·  Lunch provided — charcuterie, fruits, vegetables, nuts
• 1–4  ·  Individual writing conferences, protected writing time in indoor nooks or the outdoor oasis, optional water circuit (cold plunge, sauna, hot tub), optional craft talk
• 4–5  ·  Closing writer's circle with feedback and celebration

What's included?

• Guided ceremonial yoga and breathwork to prepare the body for storytelling
• Personalized writing instruction and one-on-one coaching
• Narrative, poetry, and memoir support with mentor texts
• Protected writing time across the property's nooks and outdoor spaces
• Lunch and snacks provided
• Traditional water circuit practices (cold plunge, sauna, hot tub)
• A small, witnessing community held in sacred container

Who this is for?

GUTS is for writers working on their practice or a piece, and who want body-based ways into it.

It is for people in transition — grief, threshold, reclamation — who need a structure that honors that.

It is for those returning to writing after a long absence and those who have never called themselves writers, but carry stories that want out.

Seasoned writers find that the morning ceremonies deeply influence the work they are already in. Beginners find that the body knows how to write before the mind has agreed to.

How to enter the GUTS Embodied Writing Realm?

Writers may register for the full year, a single semester, or — when capacity allows — individual sessions. Payment plans are available for both in-person and virtual offerings at the time of purchase. Virtual embodied writing opportunities continue between retreats through The Praxis.

To learn more or register, stay tuned for Summer SoulSchool GUTS and visit kellyburns.net.