About

I’m a village-builder, systems thinker, organizer, participant-centered educator, and a skillful and playful facilitator. I am energized by growing our collective imaginations for liberation through body-based, earth-centered, equity offerings. With roots on the east coast, I now live at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, on unceded Osage land that is colonially known as St Louis MO.

I am deeply committed to naming my stake and responsibility as a white cisgender woman in ending oppressive systems. When I'm not working, I spend my time biking in parks near my home, scouting the next best ice cream place, and reading sci-fi fantasy novels next to my kitty.

Hello, I'm Kara,

Apprenticing Seed, Story, & Soma

Apprenticeship is the process of deep, continuous learning alongside an experienced instructor. I orient to life as an apprentice to "Seed", "Story", and "Soma". In other words, my teachers are the Earth; the elders and ancestors whose histories guide our movements; and our innately wise human bodies. I am forever learning, growing, integrating, and practicing in response to their teachings.

Seed:

“Go and sing to the mountain, go and sing to the moon, go and sing to just about everything, cuz everything is you.”

- Lyrics from Elephant Revival's song Sing to the Mountain

I grew up in the humid South with its ever shifting seasons, between the mountains and the ocean in Raleigh North Carolina. I loved to play in the big magnolia tree beside my house. My love of the natural world was sparked in part on family vacations during my parents’ occasional 3-month sabbaticals from their work as pastors as we pulled their pop-up camper across the country to as many National Parks as we could reach.

My connection with the wild world has deepened and grown over time and one meaningful way I have sustained this relationship is by integrating earth-based and animist rituals into my spiritual practices. Some seeds of that integration were planted during my 10 years with the Carnival de Resistance, a traveling environmental justice arts education initiative and eco-village demonstration project. The Carnival taught me the power of weaving intentional community, arts, and play in service to our Earth.

It was at the Carnival that I was also introduced to the Work that Reconnects, a body of teachings, meditations, and ritual practices curated to showcase the interconnectedness of all beings and to bring us as humans back into relationship with our more-than-human kin. The "Spiral" of the Work that Reconnects offers inroads for grounding in gratitude, metabolizing grief and trauma caused by supremacy cultures, connecting to ancestors, and setting commitments that support us in moving through our stuck places. Apprenticing under Lydia Violet Farshid-Harutoonian, I learned to facilitate in this lineage, which has profoundly shaped and guided all of my work since.

Image design by Dori Midnight, painted by Kara Bender

I owe my current understanding and practice of politicized animism to wisdom-keepers across many lineages. My background in permaculture design has influenced my imagination and philosophy around social systems—in particular emphasizing the importance of working at the edges. Courses with teachers such as Sophie Strand and Bayo Akomolafe taught me to view the world through a longer history—and to decenter the human experience as the sole perspective within that history. Wilderness vigils under the guidance of a Cherokee elder helped to bring these values more deeply into my body.

There is no clear endpoint to the work of undoing colonial values and returning to kinship with the wild world—but by learning from the wisdom of the seed, I find new ways for my own authentic aliveness to stretch out.

Story:

"All that can save you now is your confrontation with your own history . . . which is not your past, but your present. Your history has led you to this moment, and you can only begin to change yourself by looking at what you are doing in the name of your history.”

- James Baldwin speaking to white people in an interview with Esquire in July 1968

I learned I was white early on. In the 80’s, the Mennonite Church where my parents were pastors pushed for racial integration within their congregation. I attended many of the trainings and supper clubs the church held, which created a solid foundation of knowledge, but as my mentors often remark: you can't train racism away, you've got to organize for structural change.

I was intrigued with organizing and jumped in with both feet at Jane Addams Senior Caucus (JASC). For 8 years I learned from, marched with, and organized beside a mighty crew of feisty older adults who were fighting for affordable housing. As co-director of their legislative training program, I saw people step powerfully into leadership. I also served in the role of Lead Trainer and Racial Justice Organizer there, working closely with consultants from Crossroads Antiracism Organizing and Training to build internal capacity for racial equity audits and strategic planning processes that resulted in shifts at all levels of our organization. This role also included being part of the organizing team to build out the Crossroads regional partner CROAR: Chicago Regional Organizing for Anti-racism.

Upon leaving JASC, I transitioned to working as a National Organizer and Trainer with Crossroads Antiracism Organizing and Training for multiple years, allowing me to support organizations all across the country in equity-driven institutional change using their structural change model. I continue to use these same training frameworks as a contract facilitator for ERACCE, a sister organization to Crossroads that operates in Michigan.

As I started in my national role with Crossroads, I was also serving as one of my Dad’s primary caregivers through the last two and a half years of his life. With this experience, I directly encountered the ways white supremacy has robbed white people of our ancestral grief practices.

Over time, it became clear that the intellectual foundations I had needed the support of other modalities and I was invited by comrades of color to shift the ways I was unconsciously embodying white dominant culture.

These invitations led me to practices of identity-building alongside white comrades. Through grief-tending workshops, I learned rituals that helped me reconnect with my own voice and reclaim some of those lost threads. I also dived into studying my European ancestors, all of which transformed my relationship to organizing and training.

At Singing the Bones, a course from the School for the Great Turning, I learned the language and tools to explore ancestral mythology, music, and folk tales of my German ancestors — and I came across Grimoires chronicling folk magic and healing practices carried from Europe into Pennsylvania. In a ten-week book study of Healing Haunted Histories, I encountered stories of both trauma and resilience among migrant European settlers. I learned tools to conduct research into my family history that invited me to look at the push and pull factors that informed migration processes and asked me to document "Songlines, Bloodlines, and Landlines". This learning culminated with a trip to my ancestral homelands of Switzerland and Germany where I could finally lay my body down on land that welcomed me home.

I am dedicated to healing the wounds that keep white-racialized people from accessing our full aliveness and activating it for collective liberation. With over a decade of facilitating within cross-racial teams, I integrate that antiracist identity-building practice into efforts towards institutional equity and collective liberation.

Soma:

“Radical self-love summons us to be our most expansive selves, knowing that the more unflinchingly powerful we allow ourselves to be, the more unflinchingly powerful others feel capable of being. Our unapologetic embrace of our bodies gives others permission to unapologetically embrace theirs.”
― Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love

Coming home to my body has been one of the hardest and most rewarding parts of my story. Early on, I internalized Christian teachings in ways that led to a separation of mind, body, and spirit. Coupled with ancestral patriarchal trauma that was passed down culturally and cellularly, I wasn't sure how to listen to my body's innate wisdom and know how to trust my intuition.

This disconnect from my own body impacted my organizing work. Despite my deep commitment, and despite the many skills and tools I had developed over years of practice, unresolved somatic patterns sometimes took over under pressure. Anxiety spirals and panic attacks interrupted my organizing and created barriers to authentic, accountable relationships across lines of difference. I had a deep longing not just to show up, but to show up differently—to become more trustworthy, more steady, and more able to bring my full self into the work.

I have come to understand that learning to trust, honor, and listen to our own bodies—and one another’s—is essential to our work for liberation. That is the growth edge I am living within now, and it is what I invite others into through my work at Seed & Spiral.

Following this edge has led me to many teachers, lineages, and modalities that have offered pathways back to my body. A year-long practice group studying Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands created a strong foundation for politicized embodiment. Participating in Thrive East Bay’s nine-month Beloved Community program expanded my imagination around the creation of holistic, creative, and transformative community spaces. Acupuncture and herbal medicine brought skillful attention to the blocks and stuck places in my body, and introduced me to holistic, whole-body approaches to healing not often offered by Western medicine.

Over the last few years I have put my focus on being trained in politicized somatics within the lineages of generative somatics and the Strozzi Institute, through teachers like Ream and Dara Silverman. I continue to deepen this learning through ongoing somatic practice groups and organizing trainings here in the midwest. I also deeply value studying under Kelly Feder through the Feldenkrais Method® which teaches me a systems approach to the body, where building awareness of habits and sensations opens new choices and new ways of moving through the world.

My body is a teacher whose lessons never stop spiraling forward. I am dedicated to unraveling the barriers, to hearing those lessons, and following the spiral towards personal and collective healing.