FOUR PILLARS ESSENTIAL TO FORGING NEW, HEALED WAYS FORWARD

Our revillaging project Starseed Root  is centered around four major pillars of content, emphasizing the life-skills we believe are essential to forge new, healed ways forward as a collective: The Primal Continuum of Human Life, Re-villaging, Healing Ceremonies, and Healing Workshops. Here below I share on these: 

I. REVILLAGING 

At Starseed School we are spearheading a movement of Revillaging that is different from “intentional communities” of the past decades. We are employing a model where spiritual maturity is of central focus, supporting adults in the necessary rites of passage, initiation, and witnessing of their maturation and initiation into adulthood, such that they may enter young eldership and eldership to be the living examples for the younger generations. Revillaging at Starseed Root School, means living a way of life that supports the developmental needs of children, models mature adult behaviors and in turn, grows thriving adulthood and intergenerational communities.

In our practice of Revillaging, we follow indigenous models of living, specifically the Calpulli of Nahua, Mexico. Calpulli's are centers of multidisciplinary wisdom and knowledge, where children are prepared from a young age for healthy maturation into adulthood. Within Calpulli's, artisan work is created and taught, traditional healing is practiced and taught, ceremony is practiced and taught, the Earth is cultivated. 

Starseed Root is working to restructure our lives in ways that honor our process in each phase of our human life-cycle; and in this way, create a thriving community. It has been widely evidenced that facilitating authentic connection -where we are accurately listened to and accurately reflected back to- is the most effective antidote to loneliness and social isolation that plagues modern populations and leads to adverse health outcomes.1

II. THE PRIMAL CONTINUUM OF HUMAN LIFE

The ‘Midwifery Model of Care,’ protects and exalts Nature’s design, the physiological design of the human body. Centered in Starseed Root is serving the period of life known as the ‘Primal Continuum of Human Life,’ through classes, workshops and trainings. The Primal Continuum of Human Development begins at conception and lasts through the first three years postpartum, after the birth of a baby. This is the period that directly shapes the architecture and “hard-wiring” of the human brain and the lifelong nature of the Mother-Baby and Father/Partner-Family-Community bonds.

Starseed Root works from the understanding that: Tending to the Primal Continuum of human life, is one of the best ways to assure thriving life for humanity.

We understand that in centering what is physiologically required for Mothers to thrive, we remember what is required for humanity to thrive. Modern culture has created this concept of “perinatal mood disorders,” and in so doing, has pathologized Mothers' normal, healthy responses to a collective way of life that is diseased and misaligned with her physiological needs. So, “perinatal mood disorders” are really our bodies intelligent responses to what has become common in our fractured healthcare delivery system: interruption in physiologic birth, obstetrical violence, thyroid disfunction, micro-nutrient deficiency, gut dysbiosis, autoimmune conditions, fractured communities, lack of support, ancestral grief. 

Centering the Primal Continuum means understanding that if mother thrives, her baby’s development will also thrive. A 4-week-old fetus forms new neurons at a rate of 250,000 every minute, and by the time a child is three years old, their brain will have reached 90 percent of adult volume. The Primal Continuum is therefore the most critical time of development in our human lives, and directly impacts whether we think and act from fear-defense-aggression and solitude or from trust-compassion-cooperation and a sense of belonging. The Primal Continuum deciphers whether we are physiologically wired to ‘survive’ or ‘thrive.’

III. HEALING CEREMONIES

Ceremony is the third pillar of our programming. All founding members have been initiated into ceremonial traditions. The indigenous teachings and healing ceremonies that have been preserved through time - through the genocides of the past several thousand years - are here to support and exalt Life. While the ceremonies we work with vary in lineage, the purpose of the ceremonies is to heal ourselves and our respective lineages. The ceremonies are the container to help us to do this vital work. These traditions though varied, are found in the same principles which we facilitate in our ceremonial practices at the school:

REMEMBRANCE

PERSONAL AUTHORITY

REUNIFICATION OF THE HUMAN RACE

RITES OF PASSAGE WORK

IV. HEALING ARTS WORKSHOPS AND MENTORSHIP

We are living in a time when the majority of people are and have been disconnected from their ancestral wisdom, teachings and homelands for many generations. This disconnect has produced a modern-day people that have forgotten many of the essentialities of what it means to be human, and how to sustain the continuation of human life. All the things that were once part of our respect cultural fabrics, which had been passed from generation to generation - not just by oral transmission but by daily will be revived. To remember these ancestral skills is the only way that human beings will continue to survive on Planet Earth.

For further information on Starseed Root, please register here: 

Rachelle Garcia Seliga

December 2020