EcoDharma exploration
Introducing the House of Yin
A Sanctuary for Spiritual and Queer Liberation
This special monthly series of EcoDharma Explorations is offered in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Spirit Rock Meditation Center. A recording of the conversation will be provided for those who cannot attend the gathering.
Session Description:
“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” – Lao Tzu
Come join a thoughtful and nourishing conversation exploring the revitalizing power of finding balance through right relations during these hyper-heated, hyper-consuming, and deeply controlling social and political times. The need for spiritual recentering calls for our most ancient wisdoms (led here by the Tao) to be brought through and applied to grave imbalances and harms in the modern project.
Many are feeling a deep personal and community call to rest, restoration, nourishment, and slowing down. Learn about the House of Yin, a liberatory community-learning home for reflective and relationship-grounded practitioners who want to continue to fortify the Yin in themselves and their work in the world. Fall into the call and medicine of the Yin, naturally flowing and growing during the autumn and winter seasons of the northern hemisphere, arriving seasonally and more broadly during the modern era as a balancing antidote to the Hyper-Yang times of excess growth, heat, consumption, and control. The medicines of spiritual and sacred inquiry, queerness as a liberatory force, and ecological wisdoms are required to bring Yin spirit-into-form. ‘Queerness’ is a word for an elemental quality of existence—a force of life—that refuses, transgresses and transmutes this deadly separation.
Through personal story, real-time takes on current social and political events, and guided small-group engagements, Sonali offers how the cosmic invitation of the Yin (rooting down, slowing down, turning towards relationship) emerges through queerness and spiritual practice as pathways to balance, ease, and liberation.
About the Teacher:
Sonali Sangeeta Balajee is a proud mother, artist, organizer, facilitator, mindfulness / yoga instructor, and emerging health practitioner who works at the intersection of spiritual wisdoms, queerness, and ecological knowledge. She is the founder and co-director of Spiritual Social Medicinal Apothecary (SSoMA) and founder of Our Bodhi Project, spiritual and political projects that elevate the medicines of our times, focusing particularly on the medicines of spiritual practice, sacred inquiry, queerness, and ecological wisdoms. Sonali’s life work has focused on strategies elevating wholeness, specifically calling for leading with multiple truths and perspectives required for collective health. She has spent 13 years in U.S. local government, creating and leading social justice and racial equity initiatives. Her community organizing background has focused on youth development, environmental justice, racial justice, and HIV / AIDS-related advocacy and service. Her current advocacy focus is on resource mobilization for projects and initiatives that speak to the spiritual-political antidotes our world so desperately needs.