The Curriculum | a deliberate design

Arkitekt reflects fifteen years of academic and experiential research on how to create a culture of transformative listening, tracing patterns of how humans come home to themselves and synthesizing all of this into monthly Curriculum Blueprints.

Although by no means exhaustive, the Arkitekt Curriculum draws from many wisdom and belief traditions, in addition to the contributions of Arkitekt kindred over the years, in the hopes of offering clarity and sustenance for people in all stages of self-discovery.

The Curriculum is a lantern illuminating the path—-a reminder there is precedent for this journey, and many pilgrims who have already walked the path.

We begin our lives with an original blueprint inside each of us, a dynamic design connecting us to optimum wellbeing, health, and purpose on this earth. If we build according to our blueprint, we will get a life where our insides match our outsides.

But we become disconnected from our blueprint as we experience pain and the lack of fulfillment of our three inherent needs: safety, belonging, and dignity. We learn how to pick and choose which identities we show up with, what shapes we need to take on to survive—over time, these adaptations become our default personality; we end up disconnected from our True Selves and living lives that feel like dimmed and flattened versions of what we long for.

With space and time and kindreds to help, you can reconnect with your original blueprint and live according to your fullest design.

There are 3 doorways into the Arkitekt work:

  1. Source—are you here to explore your spirituality and a connection to a higher power of some kind?

  2. Self—are you here to discover more about your True Self?

  3. Kindred—are you here to find a sense of belonging and connection to a like-minded community?

Any door can be the entry point and all doors lead to the others.

There are 3 semesters in the Curriculum:

  1. Semester 1: Deconstruction

  2. Semester 2: Reconstruction

  3. Semester 3: Integration

Each semester breaks down into monthly Curriculum + Coursework, describing the process of aligning with your True Self as a journey through stages of building, tearing down, and rebuilding, over and over again.


A bit more background on the writing of the Curriculum:

When I began writing the Curriculum in 2011, I wrote from a predominately Christian perspective because that was how I was raised and the lens through which I viewed the world.

My work from 2014-2018 allowed the discomfort of radical proximity to all kinds of people to expand my worldview and perspective of the Divine, decentering the Judeo-Christian worldview. I wrote and rewrote the Curriculum, looking for commonalities in wisdom traditions, the ways we all tap into Source and drink from the river below the river: “Rio Abajo Rio” (Clarissa Pinkola Estes).

In 2018, I began working with a mentor/elder and the Director of the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research at CSU to decenter whiteness in the Curriculum. I started auditing classes at CSU and again studying and reading and having my mind blown by all the BIPOC activists charting the path home to True Self. It was my time to reckon with my privilege and the accompanying blind spots.

From 2018 to present, my work with the Curriculum has taken me on a journey into the connection between mind and body through Mindfulness, Nervous System Regulation, Trauma-Informed Practices, and Neuroscience. I have received a certification in Mind/Body Coaching through The Embody Lab, and training in energy work through SourcePoint. The current Curriculum reflects a decentering of intellect and analysis, a return to the wisdom held in our bodies, a greater understanding of the nervous system and trauma-informed practices, and the profound work of pleasure as a form of activism (thank you adrienne maree brown).

Everything in the Curriculum comes out of the quiet and unsung work of sitting with the discomfort of having to embody this journey before I can talk about it, humbling myself to learn, mining my personal history and the collective history of my culture and upbringing, and making meaning in community by listening to so many other humans on the journey.: