Meet the people of The Nectary

We are friends who see friendship as a powerful vehicle for waking up and growing up. We’re part of a network of spiritual and cultural change practitioners from across North America. 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 heart-sourced regenerative culture facilitator and community tender devoted to restoring trust, joyful coordination, and resource flow in service to life. Guided by erotic curiosity and a call to weave biocultural coherence across human communities and the more-than-human life community, Tyler dances within and between a variety of intellectual, spiritual, and professional cults within the regenerative, bioregional, metamodern, liminal, and systems transformation fields. Through rigorous experimentation in evolutionary learning ecosystems and visionary practice collectives, he tests radical attempts at life-affirming economic and coordination systems for their beauty and pragmatic potentials in this time of sociocultural metamorphosis. In this season of life, he is a co-steward of the BioFi Project, a dedicated student-practitioner in the Nonviolent Global Liberation Community, a Praxis Fellow of the Yin Monastery, co-conspirator of a Dharma House, and he is attempting to be a good son, brother, and friend to all beings.

  • 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; leading through listening. Drawing from both visual and contemplative arts backgrounds, with a strong somatic focus, they are devoted to non-linear pathways into subtle body awareness; as well as improvisatory, playful and emergent processes. Founded by Tara in 2020, The Institute of Sensual Awareness, Language and Touch (SALT) is a multidisciplinary research vessel for collaborative practice centering empathic attunement. Attending to form through clay and emergent choreographies through direct encounter, their focus on the kinesthetic and interstitial is informed by fifteen years of somatic work with horses. 

    taradougans.com

    s-salt.org