Meet the people of The Nectary

We are friends who see friendship as a powerful vehicle for waking up and growing up. Many of us have spent the last decade or more pursuing things like monastic training, deep relational practice, art-making, social movement work, regenerative economics, and the cultivation of spiritual community. We also love dancing together, making each other dinner, and hanging out.

“Sufficiently advanced facilitation is indistinguishable from hanging out.” — Richard Bartlett

  • is the founder of the Nectary. She is a musician, writer, Circling facilitator, and psychotherapist living in Washington, D.C. For more than two decades, she has been devoted to nurturing collectives who strive to embody the more beautiful world we long for: from string quartets and folk bands to Extinction Rebellion. She lived for two years at the Monastic Academy, where she trained with Soryu Forall and directly experienced the power of a community that wakes up and grows up together. Dechen now practices spiritual friendship in a flourishing network of practitioners making ‘the relational turn’ into greater compassion, clarity, and interdependence.

  • is a transversal designer, braiding living root bridges of wholeness and intimacy in the time between worlds. (see: Imaginal Transitions, Thinking Transversally)

    Cheryl is a soul-maker of the Imaginal, transmuting desire (eros) into art. (see: Alchemical Soul-making, imaginal (w)holes)

    Cheryl is an intersubjective space-holder and gap-diver for collective creativity from Source. (see: Sourcekeeping, Collective Presencing)

    Cheryl is a spiritual activist, devoted to the democratization of mystical participation and the renewal of the sacred. (see: Church of the Intimate Web)

    Cheryl is an anthropologist-cartographer of consciousness mutation, experimenting with post-dual research methods and intersubjective ethnography to study numinous coherence. (see: Participation Mystique)

    Cheryl is a speculative philosopher of toroidal cosmologies, the uncanny becomings that play in the intimate membranes between bodies in space. (see: Toroidal Bodies)

  • is a carpenter, woodworker, and a homing pigeon for a livable future. As a settler builder he challenges industry norms and strives to participate in the building of truly life affirming human dwellings. He believes that homes can be the material expression of a network of loving relationships between humans, forest ecosystems, and the more than human world. He lives in a communal home on the unceded territories of the  xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ nations know as Vancouver BC, where he is learning to love evermore fully.

  • is a transmasculine karma yogi living and working in Washington, D.C. They have deep interests in the topics of gender, ancient Chinese medicine, spirituality, music/the Arts, the concept of chosen family/community, and the insufficiency of language in all of these realms. They have a tendency to move and be in service behind the scenes, appreciate details, and love a good plan and working with their hands. Their day job is as the Associate Librarian of the National Symphony Orchestra.

  • is a cook, coach, ceremonialist and community weaver. She is serving as the Hearth Holder at the Nectary, tending to the meals, the daily rhythms and the internal relational field of the Nectary fellows. She takes great joy in creating a flow of nourishment and beauty, cultivating a foundation of deep resource and coherence in a group field.

  • is a deeply practical, deeply spiritual guide who focuses on building authentic community. He studied world religions and holds a Master’s in Comparative Philosophy. He trained for seven years at the Monastic Academy, eventually serving as Executive Director and primary teaching staff.

    After leaving monastic life, he moved to Asheville and helped establish a dharma house community. He now contributes to Madrona Meditation (an app created by therapists) , facilitates with Relateful, a relational training school, teaches retreats with Boundless Refuge, and supports individuals in 1-on-1 emotional healing work.

  • is a collaborative design facilitator and community tender devoted to regenerating culture and systems. Tyler dances within and between a variety of intellectual, spiritual, and professional spaces across the regenerative, bioregional, metamodern, liminal, and systems transformation fields, where he tests horizon 2 & 3 attempts at life-affirming economic and coordination systems for their beauty and pragmatic evolutionary potential in this time of sociocultural metamorphosis. He is a co-steward of the BioFi Project, a dedicated student-practitioner in the Nonviolent Global Liberation Community, a Praxis Fellow of the Nectary, and he is attempting to be a good partner, son, brother, and citizen of the cosmos.

  • is a writer, men’s group facilitator, and recovering academic living on the land of the Lək̓ʷəŋən speaking people (Victoria, BC.) He has an MA in English, for which he studied and collaborated with acclaimed poet-philosophers — Tim Lilburn and Jan Zwicky — who are attempting to address the spiritual poverty of North American culture. Tyler’s efforts to erode the colonial imaginary also include his work with the men and teenage boys of the Xʷsepsəm community, where he facilitates talking circles and opportunities for cultural activities such as carving, drum-making, and storytelling. He writes about culture, myth, interiority and technocracy at The Land of Nod.

  • is a Tiohtià:ke / Montreal-based artist whose sculpture and field coherence work explores silent-level sensing through touch. Their focus on the subtle, kinesthetic and intersubjective is informed by over fifteen years of hands-on work with horses. With roots in visual and contemplative arts and a strong somatic focus, they are devoted to shared listening as process and path – sympoiesis, symmathesy and play. Founded by Tara in 2020, The Institute of Sensual Awareness, Language and Touch (SALT) is a multidisciplinary research vessel for collaborative practice centered on empathic attunement. Through this frame, SALT Sympoiesis is a co-sensing-through-drawing invitation that unfolds—and thus makes visible—the connections emerging between perspectives and practices. Lyrical is an expression of love.

  • Xavier Snelgrove is a computer scientist, researcher, and editor based in Toronto, Canada. His work orbits around a deep sense that the scientific and poetic imaginations can nourish and support one another. Throughout his career he has worked to re-connect these artificially separated domains of culture and nature, first in himself, and then in the world. As the founding editor at Orbital Studies Magazine he is now supporting the cultivation of a public and an attractor for those writers, artists and thinkers who see the sublime potential for science and mathematics to reveal and connect us to the world more deeply, and how the aesthetic and internal dimensions are crucial elements of this deepening.

  • is a regenerative economist, futurist, bioregionalist, and animist. She is the Director of the think-and-do tank BioFi Project, which she co-stewards alongside her partner Tyler. Samantha is a co-author of the book Bioregional Financing Facilities: Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet.

    For more than a decade, she has been guided by a central question: “How do we change where money is flowing so that it supports, rather than destroys, life?” This inquiry has taken her into many places and communities around the world. Along the way, she has engaged in systems change work from the top down, the bottom up, and the inside out.

    Together, Samantha and Tyler support place-based teams working to design and launch financial institutions that channel capital to biocultural regeneration. Samantha strives to live her life in devotion to Gaia and to the flourishing and evolution of life on this sacred garden planet. 

  • is a therapist, poet, and scholar whose work sits at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and group practice. He created Communal Reverie, a collective modality of imaginal practice, as a way of helping groups access subtle forms of collective wisdom. He's been facilitating imaginal work for years across individual, dyadic, and group settings.