I welcome you to this web site. If you are just browsing around, fine. If on the other hand, something deeper is stirring in you, I want to talk more directly about who we are.

I have written a story of an eternal circle that tells how we humans got to be here. More specifically, how you came to take this earthwork. I won't recount the entire story, but it is enough to tell you that each of us, souls that we are, left the eternal circle to become humans, or rocks, or birds, or mosquitoes. If you are reading these meditations, I take it you are a human.

Then, maybe not. Rocks, trees, and oceans have their ways of perceiving.

Back to my guess that you are human: you came to this planet for the purpose of expanding your awareness. It takes awhile because we are so dominated most of the time by various aspects of ourselves that so fiercely work for our survival that they block out our souls.

You know those aspects (sub personalities we call them) that I refer to: the inner critic, the judge, the perfectionist, the victim, and so on. They make up the operating ego. Even so, I don't see the operating ego as our enemy. Our first task is to separate from this operating ego enough to see that its main purpose is to support the soul in its earthwork.

This is an exciting and difficult task. If you want easy and quick, try another web site. If you desire tribal connection and the eventual end of estrangement from your soul's contract, continue.

We started about twenty years ago. Drawn to each other through our sense that there was something more. We are psychotherapists, physicians, carpenters, teachers, and so on who saw that psychotherapy was helpful for the sorting through the operating ego but not so useful when it came to exploring the deeper soul. Many of us have had extensive psychotherapy and/or are practitioners of psychotherapy. I personally continue both of those while at the same time recognizing the limitations of that process.

Along the way we have discovered that the world's religions offer important arrows pointing us on the way. They are cairns on the rocky upslopes of the great mountain. None of them have all the truth. All of them have some important truth. All stem from Mysterious, unnamable contours of Sacred Energy. This root system underneath the great religions and their wonderful stories refer to the Sacred Mystery.

Now, I say, is the time to build a tapestry that has pieces of all of the revelations. We cannot afford in this crucial time to limit ourselves to any one spiritual epiphany.

We value a vision that embraces the broad thrust of the world's mytho/poetic visions. We invite our sojourners to move beyond their religions of origin to embrace the greater Whole while at the same time returning when it seems right to their religion and family of origin to find the unique reason they left the eternal circle as a soul to journey into that particular energy system.

In this web site you will find references to facilitators of our journey. We drum, receive spirit songs from the ancestral world, enter earth based sweat lodges, vision quest, and retreat into perhaps the richest example on the planet of prehistoric rock art.

We conduct healing ceremonies for our illnesses(and yours) with the aid of world class physicians, nutritionists, herbalists, and body workers.

We work with businesses and corporations to expand our Nature-based process into the workplace.

We facilitate churches, congregations, ashrams and sanghas in the Nature-based pathways.

We have ongoing training groups for people around the planet and tailor them to the situation.

We have Earthtribe lodges in the Rocky Mountain Area, the Pacific Northwest, the Adirondacks, Boston, Maryland, Florida, and Texas. Each has its own identity, its unique vision. We are too maverick to adhere to an orthodoxy. As soon as one emerges, its opposite asks for attention.

Each year we dance an Earthdance in honor of the Earth. It is on the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of the October full moon.

We emphasize the knife's edge between coherence and chaos. Our gatherings include our wrestling with the shadow and embracing the Light.

If you have begun to address basic issues like addiction, depression, anxiety, relationship conflicts, shame, and various other wounds of the operating ego and if you are now poised to move along the path, then share with us what you discover.

Or come walk some of the way with us.

Oh, yes. The soul's contract. The reason we left the eternal circle. I said it was for awareness. Yes, but awareness opens the door to something far larger, an energy contour which we might call love or compassion. Yet, those words are incomplete. Perhaps, you can help us experience and describe what we know deeply when we are related to all and All.

Dr. Will Taegel