RELATIONAL WISDOM CIRCLE
TALKING CIRCLE & INNER JOURNEYING
ALLOWING OUR ANCESTORS TO SPEAK THROUGH US
4-PART SERIES: SEPTEMBER 2026
Restoring our belonging with the stories and healing of our relatives throughout time, living through us.
“When we come together in communal circle to create intentional space for those who have come before to be remembered and communed with, we nurture a dormant relational habitat that offers intimate wisdom and healing. By giving our ancestors a conscious place within our lives, we begin to feel our kin throughout time– not in occasional concept, but an ever deepening sense of felt belonging as we restore our own place in the web of all our relatives.”
DATES & LOCATION
Sign up for either the circle on Sundays or Thursdays, meeting 4 times over the month. Please commit to each part in the series, as we deepen with each other.
Meeting in west South Lake Tahoe. Details shared after sign up.
SUNDAY CIRCLE:
9/6: 4-6:30pm, PART 1
9/13: 4-6:30pm, PART 2
9/20: 4-6:30pm, PART 3
9/27: 4-6:30pm, PART 4
THURSDAY CIRCLE:
9/10: 4-6:30pm, PART 1
9/17: 4-6:30pm, PART 2
9/24: 4-6:30pm, PART 3
10/1: 4-6:30pm, PART 4
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OUR ANCESTORS LIVE THROUGH US
We carry both burdens and gifts from our ancestors throughout time. From our very near ancestors all the way to those from a time beyond mind’s ability to track. Can you feel for a moment, this incomprehensible, yet immanent familial kinship?
We are the inheritors of the fullness of their lives, stored in the braids of conscious and unconscious memories within our bodies. Their gifts and medicines empower our own soul’s gifts and service here. And yet, so do their burdens and sacred wounds. These are the very areas that catalyze the exact journeys to uncovering particular patterns of love, healing, and wisdom from within, needed to awaken and support our soul’s purpose for these times.
When we don’t restore our ancestors’ right place in our field of relatives by creating space for them to be intimately known through us, we risk a deepest kind of orphanhood and isolation from the very foundational and primordial web of our belonging throughout existence, and understanding our purpose to be born to these very times.
Our contemporary culture doesn’t give enough space for ongoing inner and outer conversation with a deepening understanding of the significance of relating with our ancestors. Other more intact earthened cultures, however, know the imperative nature for these ways of relating to take up more and right space in our lives; for us to understand how we are shaped by them and how connecting with our ancestors may change how we perceive ourselves within the whole of existence.
So, this series is an offering to the wisdom that lives within us and traces back to the far past and how we come into communion, and be changed by this relationship.
As we reach through time to extend our hand to those who have come before, we may find there are already outstretched hands, awaiting to bring love and wisdom into our times.
4 PART SERIES
PART 1: Greeting our Ancestors:
How are they living through each of us?
PART 2: The Meeting of Our Earth-Communing Ancestors & Our Colonized Ancestors:
How does this meeting live within and shape our place in the world?
PART 3: The Healing between Our Ancestors of Distant Lands & the Ancestors of the Lands We Reside:
What ancestral instructions, guidance, and understandings emerge to tend to this continual healing?
PART 4: Becoming a Good Ancestor:
How do we find our right place in the great circle of all who have come before, and all those who will come after?
DECOLONIZATION /
RE-INTERCONNECTION WORK
This 4-part series is a piece of a greater body of decolonization and thereby, “re-interconnection” work within the community of people, inviting regular remembrance of our place amongst a greater web of relatives and interconnected intelligence:.
One of the primary original wounds from colonial ideologies and experiences is severance and displacement from all our relations: the cosmological, ecological, and inner community of living connections that give us sacred context to our lives and our place within the whole.
Working to dissolve colonial perceptual and experiential limitations, we remember that we have irrevocable and immanent relational fields with the ecological sentience like waterways, plant communities, and geological formations, seasonal intelligence, ancestors and future generations, to name a mere few.
That the various experiences and wisdom of our diverse ancestors are influencing our daily lives, just as generations of the far future are calling us into an exploration of integrity with them.
And how our inner relational ecosystems–like grief work, nervous system intelligence, sensoral & instinctual valuing, as well as cosmological relationships with death, soul, eldership, and time, etc.–have wisdom in showing us our place in the evolving world, as we, in return, give them place within our conscious tending.
Exploring decolonization through remembering and rhythmically engaging with all our relations within our own capacity certainly has its own place of significance.
Yet, by bringing this into a communal circle, it not only supports a deeper rooting of this healing, but the circle, itself, has a unique energetic capacity for relational resilience, solidarity, and flexibility to hold such a process that perhaps can only go so far on one’s perceived own.
A circle has the fundamental energetics of the essence of this work: restoring the sacred hoop.
As we find and tend to our place within the web of all our relatives, sacred belonging becomes real, known, felt, and created with a better chance for sustainability. The diverse web of all we are in relationship with then moves from being a mute, obscure, or objectified background in our experiences to a reclaiming and rehoming of their voices, intelligence, and place within our lives. We then find the relational habitat that we are meant for, not only dislodging colonized or disconnected ideologies from within, but opening an ability to reshape our expressions, participation, and way of life into community and culture.
From these emergent explorations of remembering together, we may give rise to the felt coherence along our way to the kind of belonging that liberates. And this work intends to cultivate pathways from simple thought or conceptual reminders to actual experience and embodied, integrated knowing of all relatives in the immanent presence all around and within us.
A HEALING ANECDOTE
For a time, a deep sense that “I don’t matter” would rise into my awareness and a felt sense of being in the world. Its acuteness would consume me and I would search in many therapies and modalities to seek understanding and liberation. Friends would say, “Of course you matter, you matter so much to me, and the world, during these times.” Although sweet to my heart to hear, something deeper was going on. One morning, I knew I needed to follow that depth and trace the thread of this overwhelming feeling. I turned inward to deeper layers, asking to be shown, and was led within to see the many women of my lineage.
They were so beautiful in their realness, rawness, and I saw their faces grow from childhood into elderhood, each unique in their appearance. Red, black, blond, brown hair and in bodies of many shapes. Then, they began showing me glimpses of their lives: many parts of them having to live in the shadows. Having to hide their voices, their medicine, their wisdom, their bodies, their emotions, their stories, their experiences. I felt a symphony of voices within me of various historical “I don’t matter”.
And in one moment, I both understood and freed them through me. I wept and wept and wept, feeling something foundational restored to my heart, feeling their belonging woven back in me, and how much they have been trying to get my attention through the years, to give me love, strength, and wisdom.
To offer understanding that I carry both trapped trauma from them and also their extraordinary gifts, and to liberate them is to catalyze my own gifts, supported by theirs.
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After this experience, I felt how much I deeply matter to them, and a kind of jewel to their lives and lineage for the healing capacity I have now, to live out, and to send through many unmeasurable moments and generations through time.
RESERVE YOUR PLACE IN THE CIRCLE
There are 8 limited spaces for each circle, to honor the ability to go into individual and collaborative depth.
This series is offered for a sliding scale of $80-$200 for the full 4-part monthlong. Please choose a payment value that is appropriate for you, considering that your choice may also enable scholarships to others of different social equity.
To reserve your place in either the Sunday Circle or Thursday Circle, please email through a link below with:
+ Your Name
+ Phone number
+ Be prepared to reserve your place via payment through Venmo
Scholarships available, if needed. If you have any questions, please reach out to mellenorth22@gmail.com
Can't attend these dates and want to attend future circles, send me an email to stay connected:
THE NATURE OF CIRCLE WORK & INNER JOURNEYING
CIRCLE WORK:
Within a circle, we remember that our voices are no more or less important than anyone else, but needed as a part of the whole. In this, the very structure of a circle invites healing and wholing. As we spiral around the circle, our whole selves begins to come more into embodiment. We bring the libraries of consciousness of our experiences and ancestry, the essences of all the lands we have been to and are connecting with, along with the gathering of all energetic wisdom we are threaded into. It is in the circle, together, that we hold both the inclusive and resilient space and surrender to the emergence of wisdom. And it is through the intelligence of each of us, that the wisdom of the circle as collective sentience begins to take form, giving space to the understanding laying just beneath the surface.
The circle meets us where we are at; each of our capacities weave together to hold and show us the next layers of revealing and shared healing we are ready for. In circle, there are no right or wrong answers, only authentic sharing and listening from a place of presence.
INNER JOURNEYING:
In inner journeying work, we step beyond the realm and limitations of the intellect into the intelligent terrain of our subconscious; we enter a field in which we can speak with the deeper relations that live through us and this world. The language in this place of being is visual imagery, symbolic, sensorial, and unlike the domain of the rationale, is sourced from deeper places and wisdom within our unique being and the living stories we carry. You may think of it like getting to know the ocean from studying the surface, versus, diving deep into its many temperature and ecological niches.
Through inner journeying, we enter the intimacy of our own deep receptivity; asking and being shown. Our journeys meet us exactly where we are, mirroring to us the truth and healing our consciousness is able to experience in the moment. We are shown the key we are ready for. Through inner journeying, we turn towards the only place that can nurture a more sincere knowing of our kin who has come before: within.
WHAT TO EXPECT
STRUCTURE, PRESENCE, EMERGENCE, WITNESS
The nature of circle work is inclusive, emergent, healing through witnessing each other, so come as you are, with presence, openness, honesty, and deep listening to what lives in you.
+ STRUCTURE: Each time we gather, we create a container and structure of a circle. At first it feels new, as we attune to the energies between us all. But as we return together over the course of the series, the energetic structure stabilizes and strengthens. Our bodies begin to feel a familiarity that allows us to cultivate natural relationship with the deeper things that live within us; things truer to you can find its way to the surface to be known.
+ PRESENCE: Within the circle, there are no right or wrong answers, no need to be performative in any way. It is an invitation to check that energy within you, and bring your authenticity; your communion with what lives genuinely within you. When each of us occupy that place of presence and honesty within ourselves-- in a way that feels gentle and natural for each of us-- it invites more of it out in the circle. So, bring your courage, your vulnerability, your knowing, your trust in yourself, etc. In circle, we speak not from our minds, but from our hearts, and other intelligent centers, allowing our minds to translate. This practice, alone, influences other areas of our lives. We also listen with our hearts, which allows us to receive more from each of our shares beyond the words being said. There is no need to judge another or yourself within circle, as this hinders the energetic flow and deepening.
+ EMERGENCE: Held in the structure of the circle, is the healing power of emergence. Because we center presence over planning or preparation what we are going to share and feel within the Talking Circle, has a life of its own. And we are all stewards to its aliveness, without any trying to shape it into anything our minds would prefer! From the place of group honesty, what is revealed reflects a unique wisdom. Sometimes there are obvious answers that are gleaned. And other times, these wisdoms or insights ripen over time within us.
+ WITNESS: As we witness each other from our hearts, we make a place for what emerges to find belonging and evolution within us. There is nothing to do but to witness, and trust in the power of witnessing others and allowing yourself to be witnessed in order to heal in ways that the great mystery tends to. Some things are liberated, some are seeded. Sometimes others brings things into the circle in which we needed to hear that helps us along our unique path. And it is important to emphasize that woven within the integrity and intention of the circle is that there is no one path; each of our own soul’s path is unique and yet walking it with our own uniqueness and integrity is helped by community when we continue to learn how to do this together. Each of us is a microcosm of the great whole: the healing and evolution of our own journeys is a part of a greater whole during these times.
MEET YOUR FACILITATOR
Melle North is a trusted guide to remembering all of our relatives, and tending to our sense of belonging amongst their ongoing felt presence. As a circle facilitator, she midwifes collaborative healing, allowing for the confluence of the known and yet-known to meet within the self, and within the group collective. As a gardener to endangered pre-colonial interconnected consciousness, her circles and work regenerates the aspects of us and culture that have become dormant, and yearn to give their wisdom to our lives and these times.
Sensitized to the brilliance of the unheard voices wanting to influence our world into more sacred remembrance, Melle bridges these allied intelligences of relational ecology into more embodied receptivity.
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With experience as a cultural illumination artist, curator, circle facilitator, community organizer, creative placemaking strategist, cultural & environmental activist, cross-cultural advocate, conflict resolution student, ceremonial artist & apprentice, and wilderness communion guide, Melle draws upon diversified abilities to hold a greater cultural healing within the group.
She holds a field of presence and creates safe containers of integrity and compassionate inclusivity for us to touch more of the sacred, ancient, and immanent understandings in the field that have the subtle and grounded power to shift everything.
Melle is based in Pamidu Toiyabe (the eastern sierra) and is a keeper of Talking Circle from lineage of Yup'ik Elder, Rita Blumenstein (now ancestor), passed to Unangan Elder Kuuyux, and Yael Zeligman-Merculieff of Wombs of Peace.
More of her work can be found: