Living our Sovereign Nature is a week-long ceremonial journey exploring our paths to collective healing and redefining our roles as stewards of an emerging future.
Lineage carriers Kumu Ramsay Taum (Hawai’i) and Mona Polacca (Hopi / Havasupai) ) share Indigenous wisdom and spiritual technologies to help us remember our place within the web of life.
We will create an ecosystem to “reframe” current dominant culture, “refocus” on the importance of relating with the natural world, and “redefine” our roles as stewards of an emerging future. Rooted in collective evolution, we will calibrate our sovereignty and remember each other as a human family. We will explore our edges, listen deeply, and create opportunities to weave a new world that is in harmony with the intelligence of Nature.
Through ancestral teachings, embodiment practices, earth medicines, healing arts, and Indigenous ceremonies, we will tend to the co-creation of a new culture of care.
This journey will give you the opportunity to connect with the sacred human experience and the brilliance of your soul’s purpose within collective world-making. With conscious action focused on social change, we can shift from an ordinary life into an soulful existence.
ARC OF EXPERIENCE
SOMATIC WISDOM
Our bodies hold truth, wisdom and infinite potential. Our unique multi-dimensional blueprint carries our purpose and keys to growth & healing. Our work is to uncover this inherent wisdom and decode our purpose for our highest good. During this program we will spend time in deep self-reflection with the intention of meeting ourselves, again.
The human body is the greatest technology we will ever possess - together we will dive deep within ourselves to reconnect to our bodies, build resiliency and learn to navigate our internal landscape - mind, body and soul. By using framework to view our personal work through playful intelligence we rewire our social patterns and behaviors - we learn to shed layers of cultural and ancestral conditioning stored deep within our bones. We reprogram our minds to become fierce allies. Empowerment at its truest level - Integrity in its purist form.
Our practices are designed to help you cultivate energy- vitality, health, creativity and longevity- as you learn to uncover the internal wisdom you carry.
DAILY MOVEMENT
TRANSFORMATIONAL BREATHWORK
MEDITATION
GROUNDING & CENTERING PRACTICES
ORGANIC & NOURISHING FOOD
CEREMONY
Together we remember the ceremonial ways of life. It is time to refine our capacity to listen, to reconnect to community and to answer the call for awakened global consciousness.
Through ancient traditions and wisdom practices we open to the messages that are meant for us so that we may walk our path with confidence and with the support of Nature and community.
We will participate in communal Indigenous ceremonies guided by Grandmother Mona Polacca & Kumu Ramsay Taum.
WISDOM TEACHINGS
Together we center the role of Indigenous wisdom teachings in these critical times of transformation.
We are witnessing dominant systems encoded with harmful energies of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism and separation from Nature extracting crucial lifeforce from the Earth.
Through Indigenous teachings we realign ourselves into coherence with the living world.
INTEGRATION
Integration is the culmination and implementation of insights and learnings acquired during your journey.
We are co-creating a supportive container with onsite integration sessions during your journey, as well as tools and resources and a whatsapp community to support you upon landing.
We will offer one pre-journey Zoom session to orient us prior to arriving and two post-journey integration sessions via Zoom.
MEET YOUR GUIDES
GRANDMOTHER MONA POLACCA
Mona, a Hopi/Havasuai/Tewa elder has a Master of Social Work degree and has recently been chosen as a member of the World Council of Religious and Spiritual Leaders due to her international justice work. She has worked on issues of Indigenous Peoples especially related to the Right to Water, social and health issues, including the elderly native peoples. Mona serves on several United Nations committees on indigenous peoples issues and is a featured author, speaker and educator on indigenous people's human rights, aging, mental health, addiction and violence. She is also the President/CEO and faculty of the Turtle Island Project, a non profit program that promotes a vision of wellness by providing trans-cultural training to individuals, families and healthcare professionals.
KUMU RAMSAY TAUM
Kumu Ramsay Taum is founder and President of the Life Enhancement Institute of the Pacific, Cultural Sustainability Planner at PBR Hawaii & Associates, and serves as the Director and Program Coordinator of the Pacific Islands Leadership Institute (PILI) at Hawai’i Pacific University. Mentored and trained by respected Hawaiian elders, he is a practitioner of several Native Hawaiian practices including ho’oponopono, lomi haha, and Kaihewalu Lua. Kumu Ramsay is a sought-after keynote speaker, cultural resource, lecturer, trainer and facilitator.
KARINA
Karina is in service to collective liberation through earth medicine healing arts and is a bridgekeeper for indigenous wisdom teachers. She is a certified holistic health, transformation and integration guide with a focus on plant medicine, working with groups and one on one clients. She is a certified transformational breathwork facilitator and specializes in awakening somatic wisdom. She is the founder of the wellness platform Sovereign by Nature, non-profit The ARC, healing container for womxn The Sacred Session and The BridgeKeepers Council advocacy group. She was recently the Program Director at a non profit healing center in Costa Rica.
She has studied with wisdom keepers, elders and teachers from many different lineages. Her work centers ceremonial work, collective healing, systems change and culture shifts.
Karina holds space from a place of non-judgement, she creates a divine container where others can shed, remember, integrate and grow. She believes that through deep understanding, reverence and unconditional love for the self we fuel present awareness and sovereignty. Through conscious action we improve our lives and relationships. More
JULIAN
Julian DeVoe is a founding partner of Sovereign by Nature. He is n advocate for self-growth, thriving health and personal empowerment. Through the practices of ceremony, yoga, qigong, natural movement, conscious touch, shamanic meditation, mindful eating and practical spirituality he encourages personal discovery of truth. Julian’s unique movement and mindfulness (interdisciplinary) teaching approach is powerful and accessible.
Julian spent many years in Peru in service to Plant Medicine facilitation. He was most recently a Senior Program Director at a non profit healing center in Costa Rica. He is the author of Robust Vitality and a book of verse, Insights Out.
IN COLLABORATION WITH THE ALUNA ALLIANCE FOUNDATION
The Aluna Alliance Foundation is an international non-profit organization dedicated to Indigenous-led biodiversity conservation. We partner with individuals, communities and impact-driven associations worldwide with a shared vision of creating a regenerative & re-indigenized paradigm that protects our natural world for the benefit of the deeply interconnected web of all life.
The sacred teachings guiding us through these critical times of transition are culturally heralded by Indigenous peoples native to their ancestral lands. We believe that the most effective way to care for our shared planetary habitat is by listening to, learning from, respecting, uplifting, and following the wisdom of the Indigenous lineages who have lived closest to and longest with the intelligence of the Earth.
We achieve this by bridging the pragmatic principles and integrative healing processes of Indigenous leadership with the resources and support systems necessary to "mend the Hoop of Life”, aiming to redirect the current ecological trajectory towards a habitable and thriving Earth for all living beings.
For more info, please visit www.alunaalliance.org
TIERRA VALIENTE | BRAVE EARTH
Brave Earth is located between San Ramon and La Fortuna, nestled in between Arenal Volcano and the Children’s Eternal Rainforest, the largest reserve of protected wildlife in Costa Rica.
As a living lab, we have experimented with different building modalities using AirCrete and materials sourced on the land including bamboo and adobe. We have implemented biophilic design, closed-loop systems and permaculture design principles. Ornamental, food, and medicinal gardens surround the center as well as hiking trials to a nearby river, and a natural swimming pond.
CULTURES OF TRANSITION
The impulse for Tierra Valiente stems from an awareness of our civilizational trajectory within the dominant culture with its source code of extraction, domination, commodification, colonization, control, entitlement, and separation from the living world.
We are both informed by this critical lens and inspired to create outside of the old values and incentive landscapes to build a culture based on reciprocity, regeneration and resiliency.
In this collective transition - whether you call it the Anthropocene, the Kali Yuga, late-stage capitalism or capitalist modernity - our intention is to become more attuned to this cultural context in order to decolonize the conditioning of the dominant system and be in deeper service to our collective potential.
Our living lab is located on the northwestern Caribbean slope of Costa Rica, about 2.5 hours from San Jose. We have created an 80-acre commons nestled between the Children’s Eternal Rainforest, one of the largest protected regions of rainforest north of the Amazon and Volcano Arenal.
Juan Santamaria International located in San Jose is the nearest airport to Brave Earth. We are approximately a 2.5h drive from San Jose.
We are located 11 miles south from La Fortuna Arenal Area in a community called San Isidro de Peñas Blancas, La Fortuna, Alajuela.
GPS Coordinates:
10°23’16.2”N 84°35’50.8”W
Our address is:
Transportation:
Please reach out to maxine@braveearth.com with any transportation or logistic questions.
Private Taxis (1-5 people)
$150 each way / 2.5-3 hours
Private Van (6-9 people)
$175 each way / 2.5-3 hours
Public Buses
~$10 / Approx. 5 hours
Bus 1: San Jose bus terminal to San Ramon, Bus 2: San Ramon towards La Fortuna. Get off at San Isidro de Penas Blancas or Chachagua. Take short taxi ride to Finca Luna Nueva.