SEEDS - School for Ecocentric Evolution & Design Strategies

As a global community, may we keep our eyes open. Rather than turning against one another, may we turn our attention toward the forces that incentivize violence and profit from war.

No matter our political or religious beliefs, may we grieve the staggering loss of life taking place in Palestine, the violent attacks in Israel on October 7th, and the countless other war-torn peoples and places across our globe.

As these words are written, children and elders are dying traumatic deaths, populations are forced into exile, families are trying to survive without basic provisions; and meanwhile, behind the scenes, certain individuals and corporations are only getting richer.

Amidst all the destruction and dehumanization underway, there are people and businesses consolidating financial and political power at the cost of human dignity and true global security.

Knowledge is power and power is potential. May we understand the way things have been in order to participate more fully in co-creating what can become.

The “military-industrial complex” describes the close relationship between the armed forces (military) and the businesses that manufacture and distribute weapons (industry). These two forces wield significant financial and political influence to direct governmental spending and militarized actions around the world.

In essence, the military-industrial complex creates a self-perpetuating cycle of violence in pursuit of profit that incentivizes militarized conflict over peaceful resolution and diplomatic cooperation because that limits spending.

In addition to causing harm overseas, the MIC also harms citizens domestically through diverting public resources, funding, and attention away from humanitarian needs such as healthcare, education, and poverty alleviation as well as ecological efforts such as localized agriculture and reforestation, alternative energy production, public land stewardship, and so much more.

And so the MIC hurts all of us and from a lens of collective psychology, it can be seen as a “complex” causing repeated patterns of self-inflicted trauma and internal conflict when we see ourselves as one human family sharing one planetary home.

"We live in a time of great epochal change. Ecological, cultural, and technological forces are now colliding in a dynamic and seemingly irreconcilable tension. We are having to wrestle with the complex reality that we humans are co-creative evolutionarily entangled agents, shaped by what has been and actively shaping the futures of ourselves and the evolutionary trajectories of all of our planetary relations through the qualities of our participations. We are now tragically encountering the living reverberations of multi-generational modes of being, a kind of collective ‘day of judgment’, where the karmic truths of inherited ignorance are showing themselves unmistakably and uncomfortably in the mirrors of our fragmenting planetary relational reflections. Such a ‘Self’ encounter is inherently threatening to the simplistic identity structures naively erected to take shelter from the dizzying complexities of being in and with the world.

And yet, this is not a linear story, this is not one time...

Excerpt from my manuscript

Wrestling with God:
Staying with the Trouble of Becoming

May we honor the innumerable ancestors and teachers, guides and leaders, philosophers and activists who have come before us helping to chart a pathway toward greater wisdom and justice. May we give particular gratitude today to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on this day of his birth in reverence for the fierce love and abiding commitment to human dignity that compelled him to champion an upswelling movement of change from within the wellspring of his own heart and the resilience of his community.

As he reminds us, may we accept both the gifts and responsibilities of our inherent interconnection with one another and all life. May this acceptance compel us to serve the holistic wellbeing of our people and planet now and into the future. May we vector toward a future world infused with beauty and celebration, morality and reciprocity. May we remember that there is no escape from this mutuality, for we arise out of the same conditions and our collective children are interwoven into a shared planetary destiny.

This vision is a multigenerational one, inviting creativity and demanding fortitude to something larger and wider, longer and deeper than any of our individual selves. May the deliverance of such a vision into actuality be a labor of requited love.

May we develop the vision to see beyond war,
to listen across time and homeland,
to remember our way through
this maze of separation
into an emergent future
already alive in our imagination
and the breaking open of our hearts.

May we tend our ancestral wounds
so as not to perpetuate them
on our children
or the world’s children.

May we grow leaders
who know how to lead
because they know how to live.

May we humanize one another
through seeing our diversity as resilience
and our commonality as kin.

May we honor the miracle of life,
of which we all equally belong,
first through the end of violence
and every day through the choice to love.

Artwork titled “Mother’s Embrace” by Palestinian artist Nabil Anani

Farewell for now, England! We’ll always remember this chapter of life spent studying, working, adventuring, and living in the UK countryside. Hayden has been pursuing graduate studies in Regenerative Economics at Schumacher College this fall, and Alia has joined him abroad for the past month while continuing to steward her holistic psychotherapy private practice

From the moment we took the leap into sacred union through eloping this summer, the pace and depth of our shared life and vision has taken on a whole new tenor and hue. Life is inviting us to show up with more capacity, stretch beyond previous conceptions of what’s possible, follow the threads of magic and mystery weaving us ever more deeply into life, and move lightly on the earth in order to go where we are needed.

We’ve been blessed this fall to connect with some of our ancestral homelands in Europe while tending the next iteration of our shared vision. We’ve been connecting with incredible visionaries from around the world, participating in local efforts of community-based resilience, and continually refining and evolving our Seeds ecocentric design principles in both theory and praxis through all we’re learning in the classroom, on the land, through dialogue, and in love.

We’ve been pretty quiet in digital spaces as we continue to navigate how to show up here while directing our energy toward all that’s emerging on the ground. But we love you all and hope to keep discerning authentic ways to remain connected in the cyber realms as well.

So here are a few pictures of our time abroad as we ready ourselves to return stateside to spend the winter holidays with Alia’s family in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

Blessings now and always! And thank you to all the friends and family who helped make these studies and travels possible through the generous gifts from our community in celebration of our recent marriage. You know who you are 💜✨

Thank you to The Open Nesters for this interview opportunity!

In this episode, SEEDS co-founders Hayden and Alia offer their perspectives on familial healing, conscious partnership, and growing a life-affirming future world. Tune in as they share personal stories from their relationships with their own parents, their synchronistic first meeting in the mountains of Colorado and the humbling process of living a shared vision into the world.

Thank you, Tessa for facilitating this conversation with such a warm, inviting, and deeply affirming presence!

Evolutionary Family, Partnership & Vision for Earth - The Open Nesters Evolutionary Family, Partnership & Vision for Earth | Meet Hayden and Alia, two extra ordinary people on The Open Nesters Podcast.

Our earth-based ancestors honored the changing seasons of our planet from time immemorial. Today’s solstice point invites us to recognize the deep roots of our shared past and participate in their meaningful integration into our present moment.

Amidst a predominant overculture that has not only forgotten these ancient lifeways but has systematically undermined, invisibilized, and violently suppressed these earth-based traditions and most notably the BIPOC wisdom-keepers who have preserved them, our choice to remember and reintegrate these earth-honoring ways into our modern lives and cultural norms is a gesture of humility in service to collective healing and creative liberation. It is a process of waking up inside of the great slumber of our times.

Through remembering the ancestral worldviews that live within each of us as descendents of earth-based people, we remember more parts of what it means to be human.

The seasonal turning points, marked by the solstices and equinoxes, are ultimately a celebration of polarity (light and dark, warmth and cold, day and night) that give rise to all life on our planet. Our earth’s miraculous fertility and habitability is a dynamic, emergent result of the ongoing harmony waged across this spectrum of seeming opposites.

Our planet’s yearly movement across this vast spectrum of relative difference, is essentially the reason why human and more-than-human life can emerge and thrive here.

This dance between polarity is the catalytic force of evolution itself.

The solstice points, like polarity of all kinds, have the potential to serve as pillars of containment necessary to create the conditions of vast differentiation within a larger context of unification. Within this context, harmony and synergy become incentivized as pathways and orientations to play and interweave seeming opposites into emergently integrative adaptations for life to explore and sustain itself across deep time.

All of this is true of us as well, individually and collectively. We are a dance of seeming opposites, waging meaning through the dynamic reconciliation of our differentiated parts.

Artwork: “The Sun” by Robert Fludd, 1617

Join us for a deep-dive dialogue exploring the irreducible yet interdependent facets that comprise The Three Primary Identities of the human self:

I. The Unique Individual Self
II. The Human Cultural Self
III. The More-Than-Human Ecological Self

In this second episode of our SEEDS podcast & article, The Three Identities: Foundations of the Ecocentric Self, we articulate the 3-fold human identity framework at the foundation of our ecocentric design modality in both theory & praxis.

Identity, as a construct, is a story/location/niche for being and becoming; it is a co-created, contextual, relational space that communicates the who, how, what, and why of being. Identity is a complex, ever-evolving conversation between what is, what is understood about what is, and how we express and relate to what is within the world.

The metacrisis of our times is a crisis of collective identity arising out of a narrowly defined, fragmented, and dangerously outdated self-concept.

A narrowly defined self is a fragmented self; a self that has forgotten, split off from, or never fully integrated core facets of itself. When such a self acts in the world, they will unavoidably generate recurring crises as a forcing function for self-encounter. Through self-encounter, integration of more parts of themself is invited, which is a maturational process.

Crisis is a kind of identity disillusionment that holds within it the invitation for maturation.

Maturation is the process of re-forming identity to include more inherent complexity & interrelationality, which affords greater resilience & coherence because it is more congruent with what actually is.

Maturation is a developmental necessity for evolution into a more meta-stable collective future.

In this article/podcast we posit a framework of universal human identity, as an adaptive response to the metacrisis of our times, in an attempt to cultivate fertile soil for conscious & collaborative evolutionary human becoming.

This framework strives to be generalized enough to be radically inclusive, self-evident enough to build consensus, and nuanced enough to afford healthy differentiation across scales of diverse experience.

We’re invited to serve as co-creative agents of ecocentric evolution for the continuity & liberation of life & consciousness into the future.

We’ve been grown by life as an expression of life endowed with the capacity to imagine & grow future possibilities into material form. Through the development of our prefrontal cortex, we’re able to imagine that which does not yet exist.

These imaginations are informed by all past expressions & also creatively attuned to the needs of the times. We’re able to encapsulate these possibilities (desires, longings, dreams) into seeds (vehicles of potential) to be sown into time & place.

The human being is therefore a unique instantiation of life with the capacity of imag-in-ation (image-in-action) to create & destroy worlds through the sowing of life-affirming or life-terminating visions.

What we choose to imagine & grow is fundamentally shaped by our worldview, which arises out of the current psycho-eco-cultural context. In this way, worldviews literally & figuratively shape worlds by privileging that which we make relevant (valuable).

Our valuation system, therefore, directly informs the nature of the choices we make, recursively shaping the nature of our reality & the quality of our experience over time. These choices are often unconscious & their underlying worldviews are often obscured from full illumination.

However, the effects of a pathological (fragmented) worldview will always reveal itself through individual, collective & ecological repercussions. Because we’re whole parts within whole systems, we will inevitably encounter all limited enactments. Although these karmic returns can be painful, they are benevolent evolutionary invitations to see & include more as a maturational process of collective development.

Thus, when we make conscious our operating systems of value & enactment, we’re able to intentionally infuse our worldviews & actions with ecocentric life-sustaining values. Only then are we able to embody the evolutionary superpower bestowed upon us as life made conscious of itself, inherently invested in visioning & growing more beautiful & viable future worlds that consider all life over deep time.

Thank you for joining us for this inaugural moment!

Our names are Alia and Hayden and we’re Co-Founders of The School for Ecocentric Evolution & Design Strategies (SEEDS). Our primary mission is to sow seeds of a life-affirming world at the fertile intersection of the individual, cultural, and more-than-human ecologies.

The SEEDS Podcast is a place where we explore the evolutionary invitation of the times through an ecocentric lens intended to help catalyze human participation toward the growing of a more life-sustaining future world.

Our intention with Season One is to explore and articulate how we’re making sense of these unprecedented collective times, what we see as the evolutionary invitation for our species, and how individuals and localized communities can design ecocentric pathways toward life-sustaining futures.

In this first episode - Origin Stories: Tending the Roots that Grow Us - we begin by telling the story of our first meeting in the wild mountains of Colorado in 2018. We explore how this synchronistic encounter with one another during a 2-week pancultural Vision Quest ceremony initiated our sovereign paths of soul rooted adulthood, gifted us with this romantic partnership, and sowed the seed of our SEEDS project in our hearts & minds directly from the earth herself. We then go on to introduce some of the basic tenets and guiding frameworks informing our vision that are directing our efforts in both theory and praxis.

Although we plan to invite guests to interview & dialogue in the future, the intention of this first season is to practice articulating & sharing our guiding ecocentric design frameworks & learned experiences from the past 4 years of rigorous conceptual modeling & grounded experimental first applications.

Thank you for being alongside us as we find our voices, share our visions, and call out to other (r)evolutionaries like yourselves.

May this podcast be a small act of creative service in solidarity with the collective metamorphosis already underway & essential for the writing of a next chapter of our planetary story. We’re grateful to all be in it together!

Jointheseeds.substack.com

As we settle into a small mountain town on the outskirts of Medellín, Colombia aptly called “The City of Eternal Spring,” we welcome the renewal & inspiration heralded by the chirping birds, protected forests, flowered roadways, and balmy afternoons that sweetly embrace us.

We’re here to nurture parts of our creative selves with an intentional period of visionary design & creative incubation. We’re here to broaden our network of earth-rooted allies beyond arbitrary borders. We’re here to co-write the next chapter of this love story.

We’re here, also, to integrate the lessons & further articulate the guiding vision of an ecocentric world that fuels this love story and informed the past three years of place-based community efforts in beautiful Durango, CO.

We call this vision Seeds but it has many other names and is arising in the hearts and minds of so many because it is ultimately the earth’s vision for her planetary unfoldment into a life-sustaining future world. We see this emergent ecocentric vision as the earth’s wisdom arising through each of us, inviting us to participate as agents of conscious evolution into a next chapter of our planetary story.

And so this winter, after 3 years of grounded labor, experiential learning & applied theory-in-practice (praxis), we’ve embarked on an open road in a foreign land to follow the threads of intuition, creativity, adventure, and learning into the next chapter of our unfolding work & unabiding love.

We are blessed to travel in this way through the individual enterprises we’ve nurtured into existence, which provide holistic psychotherapy and visionary mentorship to individuals and partnerships seeking somatic integration, radical wholeness, rooted purpose, pragmatic vision, and relational attunement for a life of sovereign empowerment & collective metamorphosis.

Thank you for witnessing us as we chart our unfolding path & for inspiring us as you each navigate your own 👣🌏🌀

As we mark the seasonal turning point of the winter solstice, may we allow the rhythms of the earth to do their work upon us. May our psyches be mirrored by the cycles in ways that remind us where we come from and therefore who and what we truly are.

For darkness is the fertile womb of the universe from which all has grown and all will one day return. Darkness reflects the innate mystery of creation that weaves all things into their inextricate wholeness across profound diversity of form and function. Darkness offers significance to light, although it is not dependent upon it for its own purpose.

Through honoring the darkness, we honor the feminine principle of the universe. The formless and unfathomable birthing space for all that is, ever has been, and ever will be. The wisdom of surrender, immersion, and redemption within a larger story of belonging than the linear mind can fully comprehend. The cyclical grace of release and renewal that shapes the developmental journey of the individual as well as the collective evolution of our planetary iterations across the seasonal wheel of time.

And thus, we need not be afraid of the dark for it has made us and it sustains us. It is us! Just as the rich, dark soil of the earth infuses itself into the composition of the growing seed. The dark offers itself as a nesting place to be alchemized by the indwelling light within us that may appear as its opposite but is in fact made meaningful only through the seeming polarity that it is as an offspring to the mother of all things.

May we praise this mothering force of darkness for teaching us of all things, including light and form. For it is only through contrast that we can recognize the wholeness of life across the spectrum of light and shadow, form and formlessness that instills all things with meaning.

And so, as we honor this seasonal transition, may we allow the darkness to have her way with us such that we may recover deeper remembrance of who we are as a conscious node within an unfathomable totality.