BLOG: Reflections & Some Yoga Poetry

“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.

⸻

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.

⸻

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.

⸻

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.

⸻

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.

⸻

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.

⸻

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.

⸻

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.

__________

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.