BLOG: Reflections & Some Yoga Poetry

Sagittarius New Moon — The Long Arc

December 13, 2025

By Erin Anderson

We begin with an exhale.

We end with an exhale.

And everything we call a life

lives in between.

Not in the certainty of arrival.

Not even in the final release.

But in the long, trembling stretch

where breath is held,

where intention has been named,

where nothing has landed yet.

This is the space we know best,

though we rarely stay long enough

to honor it.

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Sagittarius understands beginnings differently.

Not as a starting line,

but as the draw—

the moment the bowstring is pulled back,

muscle engaged,

spine awake,

heart steady,

eyes oriented toward something

we cannot yet touch.

There is tension here.

Not panic.

Not fear.

A listening tension.

The kind that teaches us

what we are willing to stand inside

without guarantees.

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This is not the end of the Earth’s year.

The ground has not closed its book.

There are still moons to come,

still cycles turning themselves forward,

still breath moving quietly through the dark.

But this is the beginning of the winding down.

The light is learning how to leave

without vanishing.

The fields are no longer proving themselves.

The world is practicing release

without rushing toward disappearance.

Sagittarius arrives here—

not to finish,

but to widen what feels possible.

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The Archer does not force the arrow forward.

They practice the release.

The draw is intentional.

The anchor is precise—

jaw, cheek, breath aligned.

The aim is not hurried;

it is a relationship

between body, horizon, and trust.

And when the release comes,

there is no grasping left.

No correction.

No chasing.

Only arc.

That long, invisible conversation

between gravity and wind—

between what was intended

and what life adds.

This is where most of living happens.

We are rarely at the draw.

We are rarely at the landing.

We are in the follow-through—

the body still engaged

after control has ended.

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Sagittarius is the part of the spirit

that refuses domestication by certainty.

It says:

I will not shrink to remain comfortable.

I will not inherit beliefs

my body cannot stand behind.

I will not confuse safety

with truth.

It is spiritual hunger—

not for answers,

but for honesty.

Not for expansion that looks impressive,

but for expansion that rings true

through bone and breath.

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At the New Moon, this energy turns inward.

No declarations.

No announcements.

No visible target.

Only quiet questions

rising like breath in the dark:

What do I believe now—

after everything I have lived?

What truths no longer fit

the shape of my becoming?

What vision keeps returning,

even when I try to look away?

Where have I mistaken a cage

for a home?

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This moon does not ask you

to begin again.

It asks you to notice

what has already begun

without your permission.

The longing.

The restlessness.

The subtle reorientation of the heart.

This is not impatience.

This is alignment forming

before language arrives.

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Sagittarius teaches us

that life is not meant

to be tightly held all the way through.

There comes a point—

not at the end,

but before it—

when the hands must soften.

When the body trusts the release

it has already practiced.

When we allow the arc

to be shaped by wind

we could not have predicted.

The winding down is not a closing.

It is a widening made gentle.

Not through force.

Not through striving.

But through easing the grip.

A widening that lets the nervous system stay.

That allows the heart to remain intact.

That understands growth can be quiet

and still be real.

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Most of life

is not the moment of release.

And it is not the moment of landing.

Most of life

is lived in the follow-through—

suspended between who we have been

and who we are quietly becoming,

carried, at least in part,

by a wind we did not choose

but learned how to move with.

Sagittarius blesses this space.

Not as waiting.

But as living in motion,

in honest relationship

with the unknown.

Not everything needs to arrive

to be real.

Some truths are known

only while moving.

Some prayers are answered

in the arc itself.

If you feel suspended,

you are not lost.

You are in the part

where the wind participates.

Stay with the breath.

Trust the release you have already made.

The sky is still working with you.

The Full Moon That Splits the Sky in Two

December 17, 2025

By Erin Anderson

A Gemini moon that forces the conversation we keep postponing.

The Gemini moon rises

like a blade with two edges—

one for the truth we confess,

one for the truth we bury.

It does not warm.

It interrogates.

It asks:

What have you refused to name

because naming would require you to change?

This is the moon that holds a mirror

in each palm

and turns them both toward you

until you finally see

the faces you’ve been living with—

the one you show,

and the one you’ve been negotiating with

in the quiet rooms of your mind.

This year has carved me open

in ways I didn’t bargain for.

A diagnosis does that.

Mortality does that.

Sudden clarity does that.

People showed up.

People loved loudly.

And even then—

even surrounded—

I could feel the ghost of a larger ache:

we are a species addicted to crisis born compassion.

We wait for the crisis

before we become human again.

We wait for the phone call

before we check on the friend.

We wait for the symptom

before we call the doctor.

We wait for the eviction

before we question the system.

We wait for the body count

before we look at war.

We wait for the sirens

before we disrupt harm.

We wait for the child crying

before we consider the next generation.

We wait for permission

to say what has already been true.

Fear is a ventriloquist.

Denial is its echo.

Together they convince us

that time is elastic,

that the body is predictable,

that fragility belongs to other people.

But the truth is not dramatic:

Life is running on a clock

we pretend not to hear.

Gemini knows this.

Gemini is the child who listens at the door

and comes back with the secret

the adults tried to hide.

So let’s speak plainly,

because the moon demands it:

The world is not suffering

because we lack slogans

or community circles

or wellness tips.

The world is suffering

because we refuse to examine

the small violences we commit daily—

the selective compassion,

the curated empathy,

the convenient ignorance,

the borders we guard

not with walls

but with our attention.

Every lineage teaches love.

But almost no one teaches

how to love people

who unsettle us—

people whose grief is inconvenient,

whose struggle is not cute,

whose lives demand more of us

than a post,

a vigil,

a moment.

Our systems were designed

to keep us from recognizing each other.

But the harder truth is this:

we cooperate with those systems

when we choose comfort over consciousness.

Gemini asks:

Where have you been complicit

in your own forgetting?

This moon isn’t gentle.

It’s exacting.

A scalpel in the dark.

It wants you to stop looking away

from the un-uprooted things—

the generational silences,

the political cost of convenience,

the way our children inherit

our unfinished sentences.

It wants us to stop confusing

busyness with meaning,

and presence with proximity.

Let us end the year without illusion:

we don’t have the luxury

of waiting for the alarm.

The alarm has been ringing

in every language we refuse to learn.

So under this Gemini moon

that splits the sky in two,

may we stop waiting.

Not because it is spiritual.

Not because it is noble.

But because it is necessary—

and because the second face in the mirror

is tired of asking.

Under the New Moon in Scorpio

November 21, 2024

By Erin Anderson

Under this new moon, we descend

into Scorpio’s watery well—

its depths both sacred and wounded,

where ego pulses like a silent sting.

Scorpio: fixed, intense, unwavering—

a water sign that holds on

to secrets, to power, to the dark tide

that thrums just beneath our skin.

Here, transformation is not optional:

ruled by Pluto and Mars, this sign demands rebirth.

We feel our ego sharpen:

its edge was forged in survival,

in trauma, in that first fierce breath

when innocence cracked.

It keeps us alive—and sometimes it blinds us.

It can swell into narcissism,

but also shield a soft core that still trembles.

This moon asks us: what do you guard so fiercely?

Is it pain? Shame? The memory of being small?

Or is it hope—fragile, beating, unbidden?

In Scorpio’s court, we learn courage:

to admit our wrongs, to own what we hide,

to stand in the tension between ego and generosity.

Because healing demands both:

the fierce “no more” and the tender “I am sorry,”

the humility of falling and the audacity to rise.

This season, compassion blooms in the underworld:

we want to fight for those we love—

not with blades, but with rooted devotion.

We want to be studied, known, and never let go.

We carry sentimental value like treasure,

knowing material things bear cosmic weight.

And there is truth leaking now,

as the new moon coincides with retrograde,

as dark corridors open:

the Epstein files, the systems that governed our bodies,

the shadows in governing halls.

Here we witness how insidious behaviors hide under the veil of power—

how, historically and presently, harm has been dressed in authority,

camouflaged by titles, institutions, and the illusion of order.

And we must understand this:

until we become truly educated in the history

of how these structures were built—

and where the fractures were from the start—

we will never be able to form anything new.

We must know the roots of the rot

to grow systems that do not repeat it.

But here is the invitation: not just to unmask,

but to transform.

To choose love over shame,

to dedicate ourselves to recovery,

to build a system rooted in repair, not repression.

In our yoga practice, we meet this moon:

on the mat, we sink into the dark waters,

into our hips, our hearts, our guts.

We stretch, we breathe, we bow—not just in humility,

but in defiant grace.

We practice unbinding.

We practice presence.

We witness our ego rise and fall,

and with each exhale, we say:

“I release what no longer serves.

I hold what I love with fierce tenderness.

I choose healing, even when it stings.”

Under this new moon, may we swim deep,

may we transform, may we rise.

Under this retrograde and new moon, hidden things rise.

Reflect on a truth—personal or collective—that you’ve avoided, minimized, or compartmentalized.

Why is it surfacing now?

What part of you is ready to witness it without shame?

Scales at Quiet Dawn

For the New Moon In Libra

By Erin Anderson | 10.22.25

In the hush before the moon is seen,

we bend our bodies, inhale silence,

feel the weight of our limbs and the light of the heart,

and whisper: Here I begin again.

In Libra’s house, the pulse is soft—

the airy breath between thoughts,

the tilt of one side to another,

seeking balance through both motion and stillness.

We go quiet:

the mind’s clamor fades, the body listens,

finding its alignment in breath, in bone, in listening.

We reflect:

What in me needs tending?

What in us as a people calls for healing?

What in the world echoes as ache, as longing, as wakefulness?

The new moon bids us set intentions—

not as demand, but as gentle realignment:

to live with balance, to act with clarity,

to hold kindness as equal measure in all we weigh.

Justice is not punishment but measure—

a scale where compassion steadies strength,

where truth and tenderness coexist.

In the tribe’s body and the individual’s vessel,

we remember: illness in one is symptom of all,

and health in one opens possibility for all.

We mirror each other—threads in the same tapestry.

When the sky goes black, the stars retreat to listen.

It is then we see—

what we choose, what we repeat,

how each gesture ripples outward like sound over still water.

Every habit is a wave traveling far beyond the shore of self,

touching those we love, those we will never meet,

and the quiet spaces of the world that hold us.

The air, constant and unseen, carries every breath we take,

reminding us that what leaves one body enters another—

unless we tend to it with care.

There are things not meant to be passed on or passed down.

We must compost what is heavy, untrue, or misaligned,

not through avoidance, but through tenderness.

To meet what hurts with witness,

to move it through the physical body,

and also through the mental, the emotional, the sensual body—

so that what remains is clean enough to share.

And even then, we remember: pain is not required to grow,

but it is an element that teaches.

Its purpose is not punishment, but understanding—

a signal to realign, to soften, to begin again.

Through ahimsa, we practice loving action and non-harm,

starting with ourselves.

But non-harm is not silence, nor blindness.

It is not toxic positivity.

It is violent to ignore the wounds of this world—

wounds made by human hands.

And so we begin by reforming the self,

so that love may ripple outward with integrity and truth.

So we sit beneath the dark,

not in fear, but in reflection—

to ask: What do my choices echo?

What kind of light will return when the moon renews her face?

“What the Mountain Lions Know”

new moon, Leo season

By Erin Anderson | 8.23.25

We’re coming in from the waters now.

From the long soak in feeling—

weeks of wading through what hurt

and what held,

what was never said,

what pulsed anyway.

Cancer season.

We name it dramatic,

too much,

too tender.

But what if the truth is—

it’s just honest?

We confuse feeling

with fragility,

grief with weakness,

and joy—

with danger.

Because joy asks us to stay.

To let ourselves feel good

without bracing for collapse.

To linger in delight

without apology.

That’s the harder part.

Not crying—

but trusting the laughter won’t turn on us.

Not sorrow—

but believing that joy is also sacred,

also real,

also survivable.

This moon goes dark

not for mourning—

but for listening.

To the way our pride

has sometimes led us

away from each other,

away from the heart

we claimed to protect.

We were taught Leo meant loud.

Meant ego.

Meant spotlight and roar.

But here in the mountains,

the lion moves different.

Mountain lion knows how to wait.

Knows how to share.

Knows that survival

does not require

domination.

She takes only what she needs,

and still feeds others.

She thrives in solitude,

but stays part of the land’s quiet network—

deer, coyote, owl, and stone.

This season asks not for noise

but for truth.

Not performance,

but presence.

To walk tall,

not because of the show—

but because of the knowing.

Of who we are,

why we’re here,

and how joy,

when rooted,

is not reckless—

but revolutionary.

Let this new moon be a mirror,

not a mask.

A place to ask:

Where have I traded my peace for pride?

Where have I denied my joy

because I feared its fragility?

Where have I abandoned purpose

for approval?

This is the quiet threshold—

from emotion to embodiment,

from knowing to honoring,

from feeling to following through.

The lion doesn’t roar for attention.

She moves for survival.

She stays for balance.

Let us enter Leo

not to perform joy—

but to practice it.

Not to prove anything—

but to live on purpose.

The new moon is not empty.

It is patient.

It is watching.

It is waiting

for us

to be honest

and unafraid.

SOME YOGA POETRY

Gray Mornings & Hot Rooms

A reflection on yoga, addiction, and the sacred return to self.

By Erin Anderson | July 5, 2025

Some days begin heavy.

Gray mornings lean over the bed like a question:

Will you rise? Will you meet this day, or will the weight of it meet you first?

The room is already hot—

with summer, with memory, with the pressure of all we carry.

Sometimes the heat is outside.

But often, it’s internal.

A body swollen with feelings we haven’t yet named.

Sleep didn’t come easy last night.

It rarely does when the mind is crowded.

When grief simmers below the surface,

when unspoken words echo in the ribs.

So we reach—

for the usual: sugar, screens, scrolling, silence.

We reach for anything to soothe the ache of being.

But yoga waits.

Quiet. Consistent.

Not demanding perfection—only presence.

Not performance—only breath.

In the stillness, in the sweat, something softens.

We begin to trade avoidance for awareness.

We begin to notice what’s been there all along:

tight hips, a shallow breath,

an old wound hidden in the shoulder,

a longing wrapped around the spine.

And maybe, over time,

we begin to replace the old addictions—not with discipline,

but with devotion.

A deeper knowing.

A more honest relationship with the body as truth-teller.

If we are to become addicted to anything,

let it be to the feeling of coming home to ourselves.

Let it be to the intimacy of self-recognition.

Let it be the sacred noticing of what we’ve carried,

what we’re still carrying,

and what we are finally ready to lay down.

Because the more we know ourselves,

the more we learn how to show up—

in family, in friendship, in the fragile beauty of community.

We start to understand what parts of us learned to survive

and what parts of us are now ready to thrive.

In this embodied practice,

we remember that intimacy isn’t just between lovers—

it’s between breath and body,

between who we were and who we are becoming,

between our personal healing and our collective liberation.

And so, in a hot room,

on a gray morning,

sweat becomes scripture.

Breath becomes prayer.

The mat becomes the altar.

And the body becomes the first and final home.

What Comes Up

(a yoga of remembering)

By Erin Anderson | July 3, 2025

The body will whisper

before it wails.

It starts in the breath—

tight, thin, hurried.

Then the spine curls in,

the jaw locks,

the hips clench like a fist

you forgot you were holding.

Disregard is not neutral.

It leaves tracks.

In the fascia, in the gut,

in the way your foot forgets

how to meet the Earth with grace.

This is what yoga teaches:

What you avoid,

will arrive.

What you ignore,

will echo.

The wound doesn’t vanish

just because you refuse to name it.

And it’s not just your body.

When we fail to care

for others—

when we build walls

instead of altars,

when we hoard breath

as if it’s not the same air

we all depend on—

it shows.

In the community that frays.

In the silence between neighbors.

In the Earth that floods,

burns,

chokes on plastic

and profit

and pride.

When you stop tending the garden,

don’t act surprised

when it grows wild with warning.

So we come back

to the mat,

not to master,

but to remember.

To feel again

what still lives in us.

To touch the tender spaces

we’ve abandoned—

the inner child,

the aching back,

the truth in the bones.

Care is not just an action—

it’s an orientation.

A posture.

A way of being in relationship

with everything.

And yoga,

when it’s honest,

brings us back

into right relationship.

With breath.

With time.

With the truth that

all flourishing is mutual.

You can’t stretch your way

out of suffering

without also reaching

for someone else.

You can’t isolate

your healing

and expect wholeness.

So let it come up.

Let the grief rise

like heat from the hips.

Let the shame surface

like a storm

that finally breaks.

Because what we don’t feel

we force onto others.

What we refuse to reckon with

becomes the burden

our children will carry

in their blood.

But what we breathe into—

what we face,

what we stretch for—

can transform.

Let this be the yoga

of return.

Of re-rooting.

Of re-membering

that your body is Earth,

and Earth is body,

and what we do to one,

we do to all.

“This Is How We Feel”

for cancer season

By Erin Anderson | July 1, 2025

This is a season of feeling.

Not just mine, not just yours—

ours.

A season where the heart steps forward,

not as weakness,

but as compass.

Because emotion is not excess—

it is intelligence,

ancient and essential.

It’s how we know the world is shifting.

It’s how we stay tethered to what matters.

And when we feel together,

we remember:

change is born not only in the solitary spark,

but in the shared flame.

We live in a time that asks us to move fast,

to numb, to scroll, to push through.

But we know in our bones—

real transformation starts in the pause,

in the breath that quivers,

in the silence that breaks open with truth.

Feeling is not something to fix.

It is something to honor.

To witness.

To hold for each other.

Cancer Season calls us inward,

not to isolate,

but to gather

at the altar of what is real.

This is not just about the tears we shed alone—

it’s about the collective ache,

the universal grief,

the joy that surprises us mid-struggle,

the tenderness we offer when words won’t come.

When we bring our full selves to the mat,

we’re not just healing individually—

we’re laying groundwork

for the kind of world we want to live in.

A world that listens.

A world that softens.

A world that remembers

that our bodies are not battlegrounds,

but bridges—

between here and elsewhere,

between us and them,

between what is and what could be.

Our capacity to feel

is our capacity to care.

And our care—

is the seed of every just and loving future.

This is how we feel.

Together.

Tender and true.

Messy and miraculous.

And in that shared knowing,

we rise.

By Erin Anderson

As a triple Cancer—sun, moon, and rising—I’ve lived in the currents of feeling my entire life. From my first breath in July 1982, I inherited a nervous architecture shaped by global tension and personal landscape. My body learned early that the weight of the world might drop without warning. In those early years, I carried a pendulum of urgency and unease—until yoga taught me how to sit with that fear, how to register it, breathe with it, and allow it to move through rather than fragment me.

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The Power of Feeling—and Why It Matters

Psychological research shows what ancient wisdom has known: unprocessed emotions lodge in the body—tight hips, compressed breath, chronic tension. Yoga’s somatic practice offers a ritual container, allowing us to release what binds us so we can reclaim agency, openness, and clarity.

Feeling, when permitted, becomes a catalyst. By making space for discomfort, we soften rigidity. We expand beyond patterns of reaction. Judgment—as internal monologue or external critique—freezes life’s fluidity. When we release it, we uncage movement. We reconvene the wild intelligence of our bodies, and we welcome life’s full spectrum.

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Peace as the Keystone of Prosperity

Many discount peace as idealistic fantasy. But David Cameron Gikandi—author of A Happy Pocket Full of Money—asserts:

“Peace is the biggest boost to prosperity, and it is in your own interest, for your own prosperity, to promote peace.”

He exposes a radical idea: peace is not just moral—it’s economic. When our internal state harmonizes, our external conditions follow. He further reminds us:

“You are at cause for all that you see in your world.”

We are not passive recipients—we’re active creators. And in direct contrast:

“Whatever you wish to have, cause another to have it first.”

Through generosity we mobilize abundance. We become, as Gikandi puts it, “custodians” of wealth—not hoarders.

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Why This Matters Now

We live in a constant state of fear—fear stoked by capitalist and militaristic systems that profit from tension. Conflict generates GDP. Fear sells. But if we can hold peace—inside our bodies, between our breaths—we unshackle ourselves from that system. We begin living beyond its logic.

Somatic practice isn’t self-indulgence—it’s liberation. It’s a radical stance: I choose clarity over agitation. I choose compassion over fear. I choose presence over panic. I slow myself down so I can be spacious enough to care. To act. To build. To reclaim possibility.

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Invitation into Collective Somatic Practice

This is why, amid cosmic shift from Cancer’s water to Leo’s fire, we gather—on rooftops, in parks, in circles. We cultivate peace in community. We tend our inner atmospheres. We witness what emerges when emotion is honored, when breath moves with intention, when bodies speak before words.

We’re building a Home Series—a collective container for hard and soft conversations, for wonder and ruptures, for grief and celebration. It’s where we pilot this proposition: peace is prosperity, and it starts with our own felt intelligence.

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In Practice

• Feel before you act: pause in your body. Sense what’s alive.

• Move as a map: yoga isn’t just exercise—it’s navigation through inner landscapes.

• Give as economy: invest energy, care, presence without expectation.

• Anchor in peace: choose internal harmony as your default operating system.

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Our Shared Promise

If enough of us become custodians of love, peace, and felt connection, we create exponential ripples. And as Gikandi says,

“An apparently extremely small cause could have a huge effect in the future.”

From one body to one another, from one breath to the collective, we co-create a world that prospers—not from division, but from harmony.

⸻

Opening the container starts here.

Join us at our summer flows, gardens, and gathering spaces as we step into embodied peace.

With deep gratitude and full heart,

Erin

By Erin Anderson

This month, we’re calling something in.

Not a trend. Not a rebrand. A return.

At Eadem Arbor, we’re shifting the way we speak about justice, yoga, healing, and liberation—not to sound smarter or more relevant, but to sound more true. Because we’ve noticed that even though we’ve been using these words for decades, they still haven’t stuck in the marrow of society. And we have to ask: why?

Words like liberation, inclusion, embodiment, healing—they still carry power. But they’ve been stripped of context. Co-opted. Echoed without integrity.

We cannot begin to speak of ‘communal ecology’ if we still refuse to see how we’ve hoarded power and space… These new words are sacred—but they are earned. There is heart work involved - a feeling of the truth of the word and the ask behind it.

There are two ways people often approach language in our current culture:

1. We discard what feels overused.

2. We create something new to signal belonging.

It’s a pattern we see not only in language—but in how we relate to people. In colonized cultures, we’re taught to sever instead of tend. To leave behind instead of lean in.

We place our parents in homes—not always out of malice, but because the systems around us make interdependence feel impossible.

This isn’t about shame. It’s about noticing.

Noticing what we’ve normalized—and wondering what else might be possible.

This isn’t to say that, in some circumstances, leaving isn’t the right or necessary choice for you or your family. But too often, we are forced into that choice—pushed by systems of housing insecurity, economic disparity, lack of access, and cycles of abuse. And all of these pressures are products of a colonized culture.

So, we’re starting to ask ourselves a deeper question:

Is the shift really about language at all—or is it about changing our patterns and behaviors?

Language does matter so let’s start there. Because colonizer language has always been a weapon. It was never neutral. It was designed to divide, to dominate, to make people and places “other.” So yes, we need language that can heal. But not just new words for novelty’s sake. Language that roots us in love. Language that remembers.

Black culture has long shown us what it means to make new language out of survival, brilliance, and creativity. But often, what feels new is actually a return. A remembering. A rhythm in the bones.

So what does the shift back to the sacred really look like?

Maybe it looks like:

• Creating new language rooted in truth and relationship

• Returning to ancestral ways of speaking, of being, of naming

• Using structured words—but filling them with love and accountability

• Listening. Not just speaking.

This is not about making justice prettier.

It’s about making it truer.

“We are crossing the bridge even as we build it…

This shift in language is not a performance of certainty—it is a practice of reaching.”

So we offer you this living lexicon—not as a list of replacements, but as a constellation of ideas we’re working through in real time:

• Communal Ecology

• Relational Constellations

• Somatic Stewardship

These words aren’t “answers.” They’re inquiries. Practices. Invitations.

A Necessary Reckoning

This reimagined language is not a shortcut. It is not a hall pass around the heart work.

Especially for white-bodied folks—those of us whose ancestors and cultures created, maintained, and benefited from systems of dominance and hierarchy—this shift in language must not become a bypass.

We cannot begin to speak of “communal ecology” if we still refuse to see how we’ve hoarded power and space.

We cannot embody “relational constellations” without first reckoning with how we’ve demanded comfort over truth.

We cannot talk of “somatic stewardship” if we’ve never acknowledged how our bodies have been conditioned by supremacy, or how our nervous systems continue to replicate control.

These new words are sacred—but they are earned.

If we skip the work of justice, equity, and accountability, we risk turning soulful language into spiritual performance. And that, too, is a kind of violence.

We believe that BIPOC folks—though we cannot speak for them—are often more ready to move toward collective healing because they have already lived through and within the costs of our dominant systems.

White folks must meet this moment not with defensiveness, but with devotion. Not with guilt, but with grounded humility. Not for redemption, but for right relationship.

This work begins in the body, but it must move through the breath, the heart, and the relationship. Because heart work is the hardest work. And it’s the only way we earn our place inside this new vocabulary.

At Eadem Arbor, we also recognize that we are not “there” yet—because there is no final destination, no pristine arrival point where the work is done. We are crossing the bridge even as we build it, learning in motion, and unlearning in layers.

This shift in language is not a performance of certainty—it is a practice of reaching. And we know that at times, we may falter. We ask our community to hold us accountable, not out of perfectionism, but out of shared commitment. We are committed to repair, to listening, to course-correcting when needed. This work is generational, cultural, and continuous.

Each generation must take up the labor of unbinding what no longer serves, of loosening the grip of inherited systems, and of recommitting to what it means to be in just and sacred relationship. We are beginning again, on purpose.

History on Beginnings

There’s a reason why Eadem Arbor is written in Latin, and a reason why so many English words trace back to Latin roots. Latin was the language of the Roman Empire—one of the earliest large-scale colonizing forces in the Western world—and it became a linguistic foundation for colonization through both empire and church.

As Rome expanded across Europe, Latin replaced or absorbed many indigenous languages, a pattern later mirrored in how English and Spanish spread across the globe. In fact, Latin directly gave rise to the Romance languages—Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and many others—and heavily influenced English through conquest, scholarship, and religious doctrine.

The Roman Catholic Church further entrenched Latin’s dominance, using it as the language of liturgy and theological control for centuries. So when we invite people to explore the root of a word, we are not just talking about etymology—we are talking about power. The reason we return to the Latin root is not to glorify it, but to acknowledge its role in displacing the indigenous languages we all once spoke.

We return to the root in order to dig beneath it. Because now, we are in the soil. And the soil holds memory. The work, then, is not just linguistic—it is ancestral, ecological, and spiritual. It is about returning to the languages beneath colonizer language. To what was buried, and still breathes.

With love & gratitude,

Eadem Arbor

DEFINITIONS

In addition to “Diversity and Inclusion” → Communal Ecology → Ecological Freedom

Definition: Ecological Freedom is the interdependent, love-rooted practice of co-creating conditions where all beings can live in alignment with their inherent dignity, purpose, and relational responsibility.

It is not freedom as personal license—but freedom as collective flourishing, rooted in care.

Ecological Freedom understands that liberty without love is domination, and that no one is truly free unless all are engaged in the shared labor of tending, balancing, and belonging.

This freedom doesn’t extract. It doesn’t hoard. It listens, yields, nourishes, and adapts.

It is freedom with, not freedom over.

Why This Works: “Communal Ecology” reframed diversity and inclusion from static representation into a living system of mutual influence and belonging.

Ecological Freedom takes this further—it reframes freedom itself, not as an individual right divorced from others, but as a relational and ethical practice.

In a culture that equates freedom with unchecked autonomy, Ecological Freedom dares to say:

“There can be no freedom without love.”

And love, here, is not sentiment.

It is an ethic of interdependence.

A devotion to each other’s liberation.

A willingness to prune what overgrows and to water what’s been neglected.

This language is urgent because:

Freedom” has been weaponized by supremacy and colonial narratives to justify domination.

Ecology” reminds us we belong to a system larger than ourselves, and freedom must operate within those bounds.

This phrase demands that we ask: What does my freedom cost others? And what is the quality of my participation in our shared humanity.

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Instead of “Safe Space” → Relational Constellations

Definition: Environments where individuals orbit one another with fluidity, where needs and boundaries are allowed to shift, and where care is defined not by control but by mutual awareness and intentional proximity.

Why this works: “Safe space” can often imply a fixed guarantee—when in truth, no space is inherently safe for everyone all the time. Relational constellations offers a more dynamic model of care. It accounts for the ever-evolving emotional and social landscapes of a community, where people are free to express needs, draw boundaries, and reorient based on truth—not performance.

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Transitioning from “Embodiment” → Somatic Stewardship

Definition: A practice of tending to the body not simply as a vessel of sensation, but as a living archive of history, intuition, and adaptation. Somatic stewardship centers responsibility—for what we carry, what we release, and how we relate to others through our physical presence and nervous system patterns.

Why this works: “Embodiment” has become a buzzword that risks oversimplifying the depth of what it means to truly inhabit and care for our physical selves. Somatic stewardship calls us into accountability. It implies long-term commitment, responsibility, and reciprocity—exactly what is needed when we begin the work of healing.