Ancient Wisdom—Living Earth: The Rebirth of Nature Spirituality
Reawakening Our Relationship with the Living Web
Author – Laura Lee Robear ©2025
Over the last decade and a half, in our role as directors of this Institute, Paul and I rejoice in a growing call for connection—to land, to spirit, to ancestors. To something far older and more grounded than modern life. The accompanying shift in how many are speaking about our home planet assures us this call is being answered. Through all the current chaos and upheaval, we sense something ancient is stirring again. Not a nostalgic return to the past, but a remembering. A return to belonging. The living web of Earth seems to be staging a homecoming.
Humanity was long “homesteaded” through direct experience. Our home planet and her self-regulating rhythms and seasons. The glittering cosmos beckoning nightly. How easily and naturally we journeyed to the Alternate Reality and back, along a path well-worn, well utilized, well honored. Held sacred by the entire community.
We are thankful Nature in her infinite wisdom lovingly laid the path to ensure our species finds our way home, no matter how lost, how far afield we may wander. We celebrate those inner doorways built-into our blueprint, our DNA, awaiting activation. We honor our ancestors for preserving the access codes, hidden in plain sight, in their art, artifacts, and rituals. So find many ways to travel beyond ordinary awareness, to open our senses to insight, healing, guidance, in the grand journey of become who we truly are. And we bless that quiet ache, that uneasy sense that something essential has been lost by our culture, of displacement, that set so many of us seeking. Let it serve as our inner GPS. If we dare follow, it can lead us home, to something far greater than ourselves. Only with this has my soul truly found solace.
We are grateful that so many ancient practices are finding new life. Find one, and go exploring — because life is best lived as an adventure! So why not take Ritual Postures for a test drive, and join our free, open-to-all sessions online. Find what is hidden in ancient art, that may come alive in exciting new ways. Preserved in ancient art are depictions of easy sitting and standing postures. These are far more than symbolic gestures, they are embodied ritual instructions, refined over generations, that activate altered states of consciousness. In these states, we enter that enchanted state, where Nature is no longer something “out there,” but embraced as a living presence within and around us. The practice of Ritual Postures restores that direct, experiential relationship with the living world. Reacquainting ourselves with our home planet once again, we rediscover a wisdom that never truly left us. It was awaiting our response, our return, our redemption.
“Perhaps the rebirth of ancient nature spirituality is not about learning something new, but about remembering something deeply familiar.” Paul Robear
The name “CUYA” carries with it both history and vision. Rooted in our origins as the Cuyamungue Institute, it now also serves as an acronym — C.U.Y.A. — a guiding symbol that unites our mission:
C — Consciousness: The field of shared awareness that arises in Collective Presence, where the “We” awakens beyond the “I” – moving from the “Me to the We.”
U — Unity: Our alignment with the Cycles of Nature and the rhythms of the cosmos, reminding us that we are woven into a greater fabric of reality. This sense of unity reminds us that our awareness is the shared consciousness that connects all living beings.
Y — Your Awakening: The inner journey of Embodiment and Wisdom, where through direct experience the body remembers. At the CUYA Institute, this awakening is nurtured through Ritual Body Postures and ecstatic trance, where the body itself becomes the doorway to wisdom, presence, and transformation.
A — Ancestral Wisdom: Roots. Our connection to Sacred Lineage, honoring those who walked before us and rooting us in belonging and continuity. Our founder, anthropologist Felicitas D. Goodman looked to some of the oldest, most authentic ancestral records we have — the world’s collection of early and indigenous art — and decoded selected artifacts as embodied “ritual instructions.”
Together, the Four Pathways of C.U.Y.A. — Consciousness, Unity, Your Awakening, and Ancestral Wisdom — form a single tapestry of practice. They remind us that awakening is not an abstract idea but something we live: through the body in Your Awakening, through nature’s cycles in Unity, through community in shared Consciousness, and through the guidance of Ancestral Wisdom.
- …. CONTINUE