<![CDATA[Regenerative Life Design - Blog]]>Wed, 02 Jul 2025 05:43:52 -0400Weebly<![CDATA[For You: Six Ways to Ask Earth Embodiment to Put Wind in Your Sails]]>Wed, 09 Nov 2022 17:56:11 GMThttps://www.regenerativetraining.com/blog/for-you-six-ways-to-ask-earth-embodiment-to-put-wind-in-your-sailsFor You: 
Six Ways to Ask Earth Embodiment to Put Wind in Your Sails 
 
Small and Mighty Regenerative Actions: Here are 6 ways to ask earth embodiment to put wind in your sails today. Give yourself 5 minutes. See what it unlocks and releases. Body. Mind. Soil. This is creative resilience.
  1. If you're feeling stuck, move a little. The mind influences the body. If the mind is in fear, fight or flight, the body will orient around the energy state. Invite yourself to put on your favorite song, get audible, get your heart-rate up, and send your breath to the parts that need tending, and move the energy pent up in the body.
  2. Tune in to how the moon and sun move across the sky at your home. Get grounded to the earth's bio rhythms.
  3. Take your bare feel to the earth and stand on the vital ground. Invite yourself to open the pores of your feet to the earth for a few minutes and let yourself bask in connection, sending any emotion that needs releasing through your feet to the earth to neutralize it. Open your shoulders, neck, make circles with your hips (hello psoas!). Stretch, wiggle, and shake.
  4. Before drinking water, offer gratitude and thanks for the water cycle, the fishes and plants that filtered and clean the water, praise the well, reservoir, or origin of the water, and ask for it to forever run clean in your own way.
  5. Collect season biological artifacts (leaves, flower, stems, seeds, etc) and take some time to create a nature mandala. Set some intentions that feel alive for you and speak them when preparing the piece. Once complete, let the elements decompose in place and your intentions will be received back to the earth. 
  6. Do a sit spot meditation. Sit in the sun or shade and release into curious open mind. Feel your breath, soften your gaze, and let yourself be still and orient around you. Let nature welcome you. Observe a food chain in nature, be inquisitive in your discoveries, relax into a childlike state of open, relaxed curiosity. Let your breath soften and allow your awareness to bring your body heightened senses of sensuality, intimacy and connection.
Excerpt from:  An alive love letter to your regenerative self 
 
More earth inspired life practices in the 
Regenerative Life Design Playbook ​]]><![CDATA[Big thanks! on the brink of our book launch]]>Fri, 27 May 2022 17:48:19 GMThttps://www.regenerativetraining.com/blog/big-thanks-on-the-brink-of-our-book-launchPicture
The Regenerative Life Design Playbook is over a dozen years, hundreds of conversations, thousands of interactions, starts and stops, and nudges to keep going.

There’s a time when a project feels never ending, each day amounts to new discoveries and research and notes taken but we can’t see the 5000 steps to the end. I have felt that often with this book, the inspiration of my creativity that has needed 15 years of gestation, patience, detachment and my attention. Often, I wondered if I ever would see myself to the end of it. With steady footing, a willingness to stretch my edge, ask for help and receive high caliber input, and continue to leverage funding and resources towards this project, I am writing to you a week and a half before the baby will be born into the world. And while it may be my name on the front cover, there are lots of people behind the scenes to thank and appreciate.

This blog, or really love letter of appreciation, would not be possible if it weren’t for peers and heroes, as my friend likes to say “Peeros”, who have believed in me and challenged me to follow through. I want to give my sincerest appreciation to Niki Faldemolaei for inviting me to glasses of wine on the Hawaiian coastline and describing to me how this book within me is a gift to humanity. Additionally, thank you for my landmates Philippe and Max, for being with me during a time of deep debilitating pain as I navigated my return to my community after three years of nomadic exploration. Writing the book grounded me, distracted me from the external suffering of sciatic, and helped me value my experiences. 

This book and writing process went dormant in me for a few years as I returned to my holistic landscape design business, Healing Roots Design, expanded into teaching, and developed other businesses. 

Deep thanks for Michele Ashley, my first editor with a racial equity lens that encouraged and challenged me to make an anti-oppression piece of work that was relevant, informing and action-oriented. Thank you to the students at Omega Institute where I first compiled a day-long course to the staff and heard from my peers that this earth-based toolkit for living was refreshing, grounded and very much needed in a sped up world. Thank you to Kayla Thomas, my first assistant who met me at a Regenerative Life Design class I offered at Lake Eden Arts Festival, Spring 2021, and asked if she could learn more and support streamlining the content, adding her science background and editing powers to curtail some of my verbosity and ambiguous writing. Special thanks to Samara Jade for the guitar classes, the rich worlds of her music, and taking me into her studio to record and polish the songs and meditations, my first public recordings. And thanks to my All-Star team Caroline Williford and Michelle Shine who brought their dedication, organization, editing skills, pizazz and design sensibilities to see this project to completion. I want to dearly appreciate the 24 funders (y’all rock!) from the IFundWomen crowdfunding campaign who answered my request for financial backing at a critical stage of production to keep motivated and infuse much needed funds into the book project. To my momma, whose inherent belief in me is simple and staggering, and to my beautiful, trusted friends and readers who I have asked to read, constructively critique, hear my insecurities along the way and nudged me to keep going: Juanita Brown, Christine Josephine, Alina Talladen, Sunil Patel, Brandy Hall, and Caroline Williford. 

Special thanks to Michael Bartholme, for holding down Healing Roots Design with me as I stretched myself across 2 businesses to follow my dreams. 

Momma Earth, thank you for your inspiration in my life, my muse, and for being with me always, as I walk in your image, and help translate for people your love and resilience.

May this work serve to unlock worlds untapped with nature’s beauty and resilience, resourcefulness, interconnection, health and vitalistic life-giving , and in myself, and for the greatest healing to all it touches. 

Love,
Keri
]]><![CDATA[READY, SET, GROW! REGENERATIVE LIFE DESIGN PLAYBOOK CAMPAIGN AND SONG FOR YOU!]]>Fri, 04 Mar 2022 18:40:25 GMThttps://www.regenerativetraining.com/blog/ready-set-grow-regenerative-life-design-playbook-campaign-and-song-for-youPicture
Hi Earth dwellers! 

For the past 15 years, I have helped people achieve their holistic landscape and life design goals through the lens of Permaculture and holistic land design, embodiment practices and grassroots preventative herbal medicine healthcare. Through implementing common-sense, life-giving design and restoration tools, the visible work generates hope, resilience, and deep connection modeled by nature’s intelligent set of principles. 

As a child I went to nature for solitude, reflection, and kinship to navigate the chaos of the world. When I went into the forest, the water, the mountains, I could find peace, sensuality, wholeness, and an innocent wonder restored through wonderings in the woods.  Submerging my body in the water, finding worlds within worlds in a mushroom patch, and touching the flowers in the garden, Nature helped me stabilize and feel equanimity and belonging. This practice of self-observation and inquiry from a young age enabled me to receive queues from Nature to meet myself anew, embrace small and large changes, acceptance and witness reciprocity in motion. 

By emulating Nature, we re-discover our humanity and wholeness, our interdependence that serves our wellbeing on multiple functions. Life is a system of mutual nourishment, relational, forgiving, ever present, and a solutions-oriented teacher. We are empowered to leave behind disabling behaviors and practices we’ve taken on innocently or through society’s damaging and unnatural constructs and conditioning. We courageously shift our baseline from surviving to thriving through honing our capacity to observe our motivations, beliefs, blind spots, energy leaks, and degenerative patterns, and by leaning into how Nature does it. 

Inspired by Nature, the Regenerative Life Design program:
  • Identifies the sources of disconnect in your life
  • Accesses the sources for reconnection and regeneration
  • Provides the framework to create a comprehensive design for a healthy and reciprocal life

The program touches on 8 essential branches of life:  self, health and wellness, body, relationships, career, ecology, food, and lifestyle.  

At the heart of the program is a Playbook that includes 8 living ecology lessons, and over 15 songs and earth centered meditations, providing conceptual tools and best practices for plotting a vibrant, eco-centered life design. 

Next week, we will begin raising $15,000 on IFundWomen to support initial start-up costs of the Regenerative Life Design enterprise, and the publication of the flagship multimedia manual "The Regenerative Life Design Playbook" that is at the heart of all future courses and publications. 

The Playbook will be released at the end of April 2022. Please join us to raise vital funds and celebrate the journey with us!

Become our community partner and support our IFundWomen campaign, beginning on International Women’s Day, March 8, and ending on Earth Day, April 20, 2022.

We have some really fun and unique rewards for contributors to our fundraising campaign, including: a copy of the Regenerative Life Design Playbook, with guided meditations and original songs by yours truly, Samara Jade, Laurence Cole and others; a meditation surprise, for body, mind or soil; land design consultations; a singing telegram and more. 

We encourage you to contribute early and at any level ~ Every little bit helps grow this triple bottom line business! 

Thank you so much for your spirited support to join Regenerative Life Design’s movement of ecologically intelligent humans on a mission to love themselves, their lives and this gorgeous diverse world more fully. Please enjoy a song by Your's Truly called Gratitude, which is fitting for the season of expansion and appreciation.
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Indeed, with Body, Mind and Soil, we change the world. 

Bearing Deep Thanks and Seeds,
Keri & the RLD Team
]]><![CDATA[How to radically care for ourselves]]>Fri, 14 Jan 2022 18:28:03 GMThttps://www.regenerativetraining.com/blog/how-to-radically-care-for-ourselves
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One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others ... And I add, do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.
- bell hooks

In the world of human activity, 2020 and 2021 were years where stitches came undone, wounds were exposed, and the crises brought opportunities to observe more clearly behind the curtain of our poor performing and destructive global systems, heartless inequities and unchecked power structures. With current events in constant flux, we feel grief, heartache, instability and uncertainty in regular intervals. We have entered a bridge time for humanity, and it will get more messy before it gets cleared up. We each have a part to play. 

How do we cultivate wholeness and healing in ourselves when the ache is real?

On a personal level, we are processing grief, sorrow for things, people, places and experiences we’ve loved and lost. Some of us are also experiencing ambiguous loss, experiencing sorrow for people and experiences that have no closure, and it may lead us to search for answers ad nauseam. I know this in myself. Examples of this are abandonment of a family member or friend, structural racism that systemically ignores the experiences of people of color in society, immigration and adoption. This kind of grief can become unresolved grief as we search for answers that may never arrive and we continue to churn. While grief is a very normal process for humans, our family systems may not have given us tools to face our personal and collective challenges. How can we support ourselves through this evolutionary gate?

Observe and Interact and Radically Care for Ourselves

We are learning to drop out of the reactionary head and connect with the compassionate, deeply dialed and infinite heart to presence and acknowledge, face and tend to ourselves in this unprecedented time.

Some steps towards radical self-care:

  1. Take some time to name your feelings around something that triggers, insults, or causes you suffering. The thinking mind and its assumptions may be reactionary, angry, exhausted, blaming, bypassing, protective and unprocessed. It is all okay. Allow yourself to sit and digest what needs to come out.
  2. After, allow yourself to acknowledge your courage, and listen with your heart, the space of your center, to be with what’s painful instead of trying to fix it. In this way, you honor the wound, the pain, the betrayal, disappointment, grief, and you let the heart, in its infinite wisdom and empathy, cherish the pain internally. This pause can launch a huge resistance in oneself to fight and act now. Observe your mind, let it speak, then there will be an opening to see the hurt, and a softening. Can you slow down to be with the heart to tend to your feelings so that the wound doesn’t perpetually ache?     
  3. Sit with yourself until the feeling abates. Appreciate yourself for meeting yourself in this vulnerable and intimate way in service to your greater healing. 
  4. Move from a place of clarity after tending to your vulnerability and ask your heart what is the next, the most simple step.

Healing is a spiral. It will be messy and uncomfortable before it gets smoothed out and finds resolution.

Be forgiving and trusting of yourself to learn emotional tools to be with the parts of you that ache so you can be available to what gives you life.

With grounded empathy,
Keri



]]><![CDATA[Generous like the trees]]>Tue, 21 Dec 2021 17:46:25 GMThttps://www.regenerativetraining.com/blog/generous-like-the-trees
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What can trees tell us about community, sharing, timing, and dreams? Trees are living lakes, capable of holding tons of water in their trunks. They coordinate minerals and water in the soil miles around them as living sponges and transmitters. They make incredible mulch, vibrant colors that capture our inspiration, and provide shade, shelter, and habitat. They are strong, supple, resilient, patient and loyal to a place. Their seeds contain the next generation of forests.

The reciprocity of a forest is something to live by.

Germinating a seed in a forest takes time. Gotta wait for the space and sunlight streak in the canopy. Before it launches, it receives nourishment from the community, sometimes a long time gestating, putting sugars into its root system, stabilizing and establishing.

As a holistic landscape designer, educator, and teacher, I am into the relationship of soil as my teacher. Year to year, as I tend and watch the perennial vegetable bed, prune the peach tree, turn the compost, and install biodiverse landscapes, I observe a spectrum of strategies, patterns and energy flows in nature that are beautiful, interfunctional, and optimize resources. What if humans designed our lives like that? What a superpower. Ecopower, really.

What is Regenerative Life Design?

The Earth is deeply regenerative and reciprocal. She shares herself with us through the water we drink and the soil beneath our feet. She produces oxygen through her trees, forests, and plants. Regenerative Life Design is a program for anyone, stewards of the land at large, with or without land access, to experience an earth-based toolkit and decision making process that weaves health, ecology and transformational healing. The Regenerative Life Design framework utilizes techniques and strategies of Nature’s intelligence paired with meditations, songs and embodiment tools to nourish the path of creativity, interdependence and resilience modeling nature as teacher and guide.

Using small steps adopting strategies of natural intelligence, students first notice their disconnect from nature’s cycles in their emotional and physical bodies. By acknowledging they are nature articulating, it gives them permission to be as they are, to let what is a roadblock decompose. It empowers them to relax and feel, express a range of emotions, and shift the baseline from surviving to thriving through honing their capacity to observe their motivations, beliefs, and psychological conditioning and lean into how Nature does it.  
 
Regenerative Life Design is coming above ground!

After 7 years hibernating, in the dark under the soil, the roots are ready to hold an external expression. 2022 will be an abundant year harnessing Nature’s jam. 

“RLD provides a sound framework to bring your life back into a holistic, sustainable balance.  Keri’s amazing!!!!  She’s built this framework and lessons that are well thought out and thorough. But, apart from that creation, she just embodies the wise teacher.  She knows just the right questions to ask, and she pushes you in a comforting, loving way.” ~ SM 

Regenerative Life Design is offering a 31 day Regeneration Challenge in January to inspire and spark your genius to live a more regenerative life. Daily prompts will drop in your mailbox intersecting the themes of Ecology, Health and Wellness, Community and Relationships, Food, Lifestyle Choices, Self Embodiment and Career. Reserve 5-20 minutes for each prompt and seed your way to a renewable and regenerative you!   

January, 2022, Meditations! Curated by the Regenerative Life Design team, dive into your inner ecology and lean into outside wisdoms surrounding us in Nature. Each week a timely earth-centered meditation will arrive in your inbox to help you harness your purpose and sense of well being this January. 

Be generous like the trees 
In Spring of 2022, the Regenerative Life Design Playbook will be available for study and purchase, Additionally, look for news to thrive by, online courses, community, coaching and resources from our friends, regenerative practitioners, organizations, and businesses.

Thank you for this breath and tuning into Nature,
Keri
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